If you’re having trouble closing new prospects, it might just be because you’re selling what YOU want not what the client WANTS.
I fell into this trap a long time ago, so I know how it feels.
I recently just had a client that was dealing with this very issue.
In today’s episode, I’ll share how he was falling in love with his solution and not the problem and what he could do to turn things around.
Transcript / MP3
Hey, what’s going on guys. Greg Hickman here from all agency@allagency.com. And in this video, I want to break down what you might have to do with your service offering. If you’re having sales conversations and clients don’t really want what you have. You ever been trying to sell your services and say, you’ve had 15 sales … conversations and you still haven’t had a close. You probably are in a situation like our client that we were just chatting with, who felt like the people he was speaking with just didn’t want what he had. Now. I hopped on a call with him to kind of diagnose what he was offering, what was happening in these sales conversations. And I want to break down what we tweaked with his offering to readdress the market based on what his prospects actually wanted. So if there’s something that you want to deliver, but your prospects seem like they don’t want it before, just scrapping everything. We need to look at a few things. And that’s what we did with, with our client. And this is what I want to share with you today. Now, before we hop into that, if you’re new to this channel, uh, we share how to grow and systematize your agency so that you can live the life that you want and have your business run without you. But it’s not just about selling time and selling your labor. One of the key things that we help clients do is expand their revenue streams by adding offerings that allow them to sell and get paid for their thinking, not just their hands to keyboard. So if you are new here and you haven’t yet subscribed click that subscribe button and that notification bell, because we release a new video every Thursday. So context speaking with a client was kind of down, trying to sell his new offering. And it wasn’t really going very well. So we have clients that had a problem here on the left and they want to get to the solution. And this was his solution. He has kind of two pieces to his offer. He has the piece that shows companies how to keep their clients. Um, he focuses on SAS businesses. And so a lot of times SAS companies will acquire new customers and they’ll churn out and churn is a big factor in growth.He has an amazing solution that helps identify where those churn out points are and implement systems and strategies to keep clients around longer. And then he goes into helping them get more clients. Now here’s the thing. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. And he’s really passionate about this because he sees a lot of prospects spending all their time and money on leads. When really there is a situation that they’re filling leads into a leaky bucket and they’d spend the money on acquisition, but the bucket was leaking. If this makes, if you like my little drawing. So as a service provider, you can really fall in love with the fact that, you know, you’re going to come in here and save the day and say, Hey, look, before we go and start filling this bucket with more leads, let’s go fix the cracks, right?Let’s fix these cracks up. Let’s seal them so that the water stops flowing out of them. And it’s our money well spent when we go to acquisition now, to me as a service provider, and maybe you watching as a service provider, that probably makes a lot of sense. But when you go out into the sales, uh, into the marketplace and you’re trying to get clients and your offer is, Hey, I’m going to help you fix a few things so that you keep more clients yet the client, the prospect cares all about, like about the getting clients. Let me grab my different color marker. Like this is their biggest pain in their eyes. Like if we solve that, they would be happy, but we’re saying, no, no, no, no, no. This needs to go first. And this needs to go second. That’s what he was running into. And so they loved what he had to say, but they felt like the need was really around getting more clients. And he was saying, yes, I understand that, but we need to focus over here first. And that was preventing him from actually getting clients in the door. So what we talked about was, well, look, there’s two things you can actually do here that could potentially turn this thing around that try before completely scrappiness. And really the reality is you shouldn’t scrap it anyway because he’s had clients that have he’s already helped with. But when we talked about it, what was interesting the way in which he helped previous clients was actually flipping them around. So he actually went like this and flipped somewhere around. Now, I know for the sake of this example, that’s going to be confusing because now the words are upside down, but we’re going to rewrite it. And he went from, okay, well, let’s look at how those clients worked last time. Well, first he showed them how to get clients. And then he said, Hey, now that you’re getting them, let’s keep them. So he really flipped the order in which he was selling based on the problem that they had. He really believes. And still to this day believes that this is more important because you want to fortify, you know, the, the, the home base before you start flooding it, you want to patch all the holes in the bucket before you start filling it with water. But here’s the thing. If the prospect is okay with the leaky bucket and their immediate need is filling more water and you can help them with both, you could flip the, so what our clients doing is Offering them His solution to start getting more clients while pre-selling them into the secondary effort, which is to keep them. Now, he’s going to test a couple of different things to play it out. But for the sake of this example, I’m going to say, Hey, you can do five grand for this and 5k for this. And if you buy both, it’s a K and we get clients. This process takes 30 days. And then this process is going to take 30 to 90 to set up the systems for retention. So now he has a couple of different ways he can go in when he’s marketing himself, his marketing, his outbound content can talk about both acquisition and the how that ties to retention, and really start to have a diagnosis conversation with his prospects to say which one of these is more important to you right now, because if he has a conversation with a SAS company and they’re really good at acquisition, they might not be interested in his acquisition offer. And he can then go and say, Hey, look, well, let’s look at your churn. We can keep more of these customers since you’re invested so heavily in acquisition, then his content might attract to the person who, uh, you know, he, they hear and they value both of these things, but their immediate need that immediate band-aid is, Hey, can we just get some more customers in the door? That’s going to allow us to, you know, go get funding or, you know, a piece of the CEO or a PS, our investors, what have you to see that number going up? We can fix churn later. It is our goal. We’d rather start with acquisition. He has the ability to just flip his offer and solve the immediate need first. So what this really led to the, the real conversation and the real takeaway that I want for you is something that I learned a lesson a long time ago is that at some point you have to realize that you are solving a problem for your prospects. And what I Found is that I was falling in love and my client was falling in love with their solution. He was so in love with the fact that you need to focus on retention first, that I’m not going to sell you my acquisition offering until we fix your retention, which led to friction in the sales process. And it was a lot like me when I was selling mobile marketing back in the day to independent retail, probably way earlier than they cared about it. I thought it was going to help all their problems because they couldn’t get in touch with prospects and all that stuff. They couldn’t get people opening your emails to drive sales, and they should start building a mobile database, but they didn’t care about that. They thought it was cool. They thought it was flashy. They knew it was going to be important someday. It just wasn’t an immediate need for them. They were still figuring out email marketing when I was trying to sell them mobile marketing. So I fell in love with the concept of mobile so much that I didn’t fall in love with the problem that they actually had. So in this case, my client he’s like, you need to focus on retention. And they’re saying, we need clients. He can do both. He just wouldn’t do acquisition before retention. And so by having the flexibility to flip his offer upside down and help them with acquisition, but also educating them saying, Hey, once we finish this, we need to focus on retention. He has a new way to have a conversation with prospects that care more about that right now. And so what we end up doing is you actually now fall in love with the problem and make your solution actually solve that problem. So my question to you is this in your service offering, are you so in love with the technical tactical logistical solution that you offer, that it’s actually, you give more time and attention to that than actually falling in love with the problem that your ideal prospect has. If that’s the case, you’re probably going to be running into the same friction and resistance that our client was running into. And before scrapping the whole thing, especially if you’ve been able to sell it before and get your clients results, it might just have to flip it upside down and make it a little bit more flexible so that you can actually solve the problem that your prospects have. So if you’ve been running into the situation where clients don’t really want, what you got, even though that you have pieces that they need, give them the pieces that they need, and then show them the next step. And it gives you an opportunity for an upsell, for a resell, for a cross sell, uh, increasing the average order value. If you do it this way. So before you give up before you, before you close the doors and think that nobody wants what you have, look at the real situation, have you just fallen in love with the solution and not the problem, just get realigned with the problem that they have. And if you actually can help them solve that problem, you might have to flip your offer upside down. Now, if you found this helpful and you are looking to transform your agency by expanding revenue streams, and possibly packaging up your offering in a better and more effective way so that it’s easier to sell, easier to deliver, uh, in the description below, I put a link to a 27 minute training breaking down our three steps to really start to systematize and expand your agency by adding a new revenue stream. That is you getting paid for your thinking, not just your labor. So hope you guys found this useful and comment below with your biggest takeaway and we’ll chat. Yeah.
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