With a decade of experience as an author, speaker, coach, and trainer, Carole Mahoney helps entrepreneurs, founders, and salespeople grow their businesses with a collaborative and science-based sales formula.
In this episode, Carole shares how to make an engaging and collaborative sales conversation that makes your potential buyers feel valued and heard. In doing so, you transform your sales conversations into positive and fruitful interactions.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Learn about this exercise called ‘Questions and Periods Game’, how to go about it and how it works with your clients
- Discover the step-by-step process of doing the ‘Questions and Periods Game’ through a role play demonstration of Carole and Mark
- Find out the essential principles you need to know about the art of selling
“Selling isn’t something we do to other people. It’s something we do with them. And I think that’s a fundamental shift that we need to start making in sales.”
– Carole Mahoney
Topics Covered:
01:17 – Synopsis of her book ‘Buyer First‘
03:34 – The best way to look at sales
06:03 – Carole coaching Mark on sales
11:57 – A sales conversation role play between Mark and Carole
16:05 -What is the ‘Question and Periods Game’ that she used to throw phenomenal questions at Mark?
20:30 – How to do the sales call without having to ‘sell you’ but to ‘help you’
22:55 – Carole’s valuable thoughts on Mark’s sales technique
26:18 – How to handle a reply to a client’s question at the end of the sales call, ‘What do you think the next step should be’?
27:15 – What you should not fail to ask towards the end of the sales conversation
Key Takeaways:
“Selling isn’t something we do to other people. It’s something we do with them. And I think that’s a fundamental shift that we need to start making in sales.” – Carole Mahoney
“The more you drill down into a specific answer, the more you make them think and the more they start to wonder, maybe I don’t know the answer to that. And then you find the opportunity to be able to offer an insight to them when you find out what insight matters most to them.” – Carole Mahoney
“When we talk about what we think, dopamine gets released in our brain. And so dopamine is that pleasure center. Like, we want more of that. That’s why so many of us tend to get into talking about what we know instead of asking more questions. If we can get our buyers to talk more than we do, they’re getting the dopamine released in their brains and they feel good about the conversation.” – Carole Mahoney
“Knowing who else can say no or who else can say yes and who else is going to be impacted by this [decision] is a critical question to ask towards the end of a call for your next step.” – Carole Mahoney
Resources/People Mentioned:
- Buyer First: Grow Your Business with Collaborative Selling by Carole Mahoney: https://carolemahoney.com/books/buyerfirstbook/
Connect with Carole Mahoney:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolemahoney/
- Website: https://www.unboundgrowth.com/
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: [email protected]
Full Interview Transcript
(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)
Carole Mahoney
Selling isn’t something we do to other people. It’s something we do with them. And I think that’s a fundamental shift that we need to start making in sales.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing value and the uncomfortable relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving. Our guest today is Carole Mahoney, again. Here are three things you want to know about Carole before we start. She’s been running Unbound Growth since 2014. She’s a sales coach at Harvard, the business school, and I used to say she has a new book coming, but I’m looking at a poster of her new book that is out now. It’s called Buyer First: Grow Your Business with Collaborative Selling. Welcome, Carol.
Carole Mahoney
Thank you so much for having me, again, Mark.
Mark Stiving
It’s good to have fun. And, I’m not even going to ask how you got into pricing because you were on in June, and so if someone wants to know, they can go back and listen to that. But before we get into why, I really wanted to talk to you again. Okay. Tell me about the new book.
Carole Mahoney
So, the new book came out last Tuesday. We launched it, in Inbound in Boston, which is a big sales and marketing conference, one that I’ve been speaking at for eight years. And it was written for business owners and entrepreneurs and founders who have to sell as well as salespeople and companies, but especially for the business owner and the entrepreneur, because a lot of times we didn’t get into business for ourselves thinking we were going to be a salesperson. And as a result, we find ourselves in that role. And we try every trick, every alphabet soup of sales methodologies that are out there that would promise us results. And we get frustrated when it doesn’t work for us the way that it works for other people. And the reason we get frustrated is because we don’t realize that it’s our mindsets and beliefs towards sales that is actually getting in the way of us being able to collaborate with our buyers to actively listen to them, which is what they demand of us. So, my hope is that people will read the book and they’ll see it as their own personal sales coach to help them identify what are the hidden roadblocks in their mindsets that are getting in their way, how do you change them? And then what are the behaviors that you need to learn, the skill sets that buyers are demanding of salespeople today? So it combines the psychological science of how we change as human beings, also with the decision science of how buyers make decisions today. And I kind of marry the two worlds together.
Mark Stiving
Oh my gosh, I’m just laughing at myself, in the sense that you probably wrote that for me and I appreciate that.
Carole Mahoney
I actually wrote it for myself 20 years ago when I started the first version of my business as a marketing agency. And I got into marketing because I hated sales. I wanted to make them obsolete and quickly learned that we still need salespeople to help us to make decisions today.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, that’s pretty fascinating. So when I first started this new business, which I started, what, four years ago or something. I hired a sales coach and she was listening to my sales calls and she’s like, Mark, you’re horrible. Oh, Mark, you can’t sell. Right. God, she’s absolutely right. I’m horrible. I can’t sell. And I’m going to tell you what my sales methodology is? I’m going to coach you for 50 minutes and then I’m going to spend 10 minutes and tell you if you want more of that, here’s how you get it. And so I’m a horrible salesperson. By the way, I close a lot of deals that way just because I like helping people. Right. It’s easy. Yeah.
Carole Mahoney
Yeah. Okay. And that’s essentially the research that I found in the book as I was going about how do people want to engage today? And I came across a study from Harvard, called the IKEA effect. And what I learned was that we actually placed more value on things that we’ve had a say in creating. And if you look at other studies and research about buyers today, they want people who will actually collaborate with them, help them look at their problems and solutions in a different way that they hadn’t thought of before. So yes, helping and servicing and coaching and all of those things, but that’s not really what we talk about in sales. We talk about how to influence and motivate and persuade. Selling isn’t something we do to other people. It’s something we do with them. And I think that’s a fundamental shift that we need to start making in sales.
Mark Stiving
God, I love the attitude. I love everything you’ve said. Okay. Now, here’s the reason that I invited you back. Last time you were on, um, rarely do I think about the podcast in such depth afterwards and say, oh my gosh, I can’t do that. Or I don’t know that. Right. It’s like, oh, and when you and I finished the last podcast, you were talking about the fact that when we don’t emphasize the problem enough. So when I’m selling and someone says, hey, I’ve got this problem, I’m there to solve it. Right? This is what I get paid for, this is what I live for. Watch me go solve your problem for you. And I don’t emphasize the problem. So I wanted you to coach me while everybody else in the world could listen to how it is that someone says, here’s my problem, or here’s what I want. And not jumping into what the solution is. And just to make this really real, about an hour ago I had a sales call.
Carole Mahoney
Okay, this is my jam.
Mark Stiving
Oh my God. And I hadn’t even thought about this until I was getting ready for you and I to talk again. And so they get on and we do introductions and, here’s who you are and here’s who I am. And then they said, yeah. And we’re looking at changing the way we price for this type of product. And I jumped into, oh, well here’s how you think about that. Now I’m sure Carole Mahoney thinks I totally blew that, so please help me.
Carole Mahoney
Well, before I tell you that you totally blew it. What happened at the end of the call?
Mark Stiving
It ended well. I’m a very unique person in that I don’t do consulting. And so when I get to the end of the call and I’d say, here’s how you can continue working with me. I always say, if you want to hire a consultant, these are people who are going to come in and do the work and do your analytics and give you suggestions and recommendations. And, I can give you names of those people. I don’t do that. What I do is I will hold your hand and help you think through and work through these things yourself. And so I’m so unique that I think they’re deciding do I want to do it or do I want to have someone else do it? And so I think that’s really the deciding factor for me.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So in this particular call, is there a next step or did they say, yes, let us go think about it? Or what happened at the end of it? Did they say yes? Did they say no? Or did they say, maybe, let me think about it? Or do we need to talk again?
Mark Stiving
They said, maybe, let me think about it. We’ll probably talk again. And can I tell you, I hate talking to sales coaches because you guys always ask those questions, what’s the next step? You’re like, I don’t know, they’re either going to call me or they’re not. That’s the next step.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. And so what I typically would do in this kind of a situation is we would role play it. So what happens when I go and I coach someone, there’s different styles of coaching. I like to take a proactive approach. So before you even get into that conversation, we’re going to have a conversation about the conversation and actually practice it, debrief it, strategize it, take it from every angle that we can, and then whatever new approach that you’re going to need to do, I want you to have a number of reps in it before you go and do it in front of your buyer. Because we shouldn’t be practicing on the people that we’re trying to help.
Mark Stiving
Okay.
Carole Mahoney
So let’s pretend you haven’t had this conversation yet. Okay. And we start off the conversation, and I won’t ask any too many personal details of your buyer. But when you started off the conversation and you did introductions, how do you know what it is that they expect to do by the end?
Mark Stiving
I simply listen for the problems that they’re expressing at the moment.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. And in this case, they said, we want to change the way we price this particular product.
Mark Stiving
Yes. So, and it’s the way we price. It’s not how much we charge, but yes.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So the way that they decide what to charge.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Think of it as a pricing model, right? Okay. They want to go to a subscription model or something like that.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. And so in order for you to be able to know how to help them, what do you need to understand about them and their problem?
Mark Stiving
So what’s interesting is almost everybody who comes to me with a pricing problem doesn’t really have a pricing problem. They really have a value problem and that they don’t understand the value of their product to their customers. Okay. And so, almost without exception, the solution to anybody’s pricing problem when I work with them is first helping them understand how their customers perceive the value of their products.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So how do your customers perceive the value of your services?
Mark Stiving
Oh my God, I hate that question, too.
Carole Mahoney
Which means it’s the best one to ask. Doctor heal thyself.
Mark Stiving
I know, exactly. It’s like the cobbler’s kids’ shoes.
Carole Mahoney
Yes.
Mark Stiving
And so I have all these great techniques that I teach people that I don’t use myself, but let me explain why I don’t do it. And then help me with this, right? And I think this is true for all pricing people. So all my pricing listeners here stick with me. Would you please, let’s pretend that you’re a company and you do $10 million in revenue.
Carole Mahoney
Okay.
Mark Stiving
Right. Without hesitation, I can guarantee you that we’ll move the needle at least 1%. It’s likely 5% or 10%, but we’ll move the needle 1%. So that’s a hundred thousand dollars in profit I just put in your pocket. Right now, it might take a little bit of time to do that, but I could easily do that. Now, how do I say to someone that, um, the numbers that we’re going to get to are millions of dollars in additional profits, and then I turn around and charge as little as I do, given the amount of return I deliver. And so that’s why I rarely go through that exercise with clients is because I feel like it’s so obvious to everybody, but maybe it’s not,
Carole Mahoney
Probably not. And that’s part of the potter’s shoes is that, and we either get so used to saying these things and it becomes a part of our knowledge that we assume everyone knows the things that we do or doesn’t know the things that we don’t. And that’s the bias that we have to counteract by asking more questions. So if you’re starting off a conversation and they say, we think we need to change our pricing or model of pricing for this particular product, a series of diagnostic questions to understand what’s really going on. And it’s not so much for you to understand. If you’ve had this conversation a million times and you know what the issues are, the questions are really more about how do I get them to understand it, right? Because they have to give the answers to your questions and make them think differently about that particular problem. Actually, let’s practice it. I’m going to be you and you be the buyer. How’s that?
Mark Stiving
Oh, that’s exciting.
Carole Mahoney
Now a little hint for you, whatever objections that you throw at me, that means that those are the ones that you struggle with the most and you want to see how I’m going to react, just so you know, I know that.
Mark Stiving
Okay. But I didn’t know I was going to send any at you, but go ahead. We’ll see what happens.
Carole Mahoney
Alright. Okay. So, Mark, I know that you and I got together because you had shared that you were thinking about changing the way that you’re pricing for this particular product. I know that we’ve got what, 30 minutes scheduled. What are you hoping to learn or what are you hoping to get done by the time we’re done here today?
Mark Stiving
I would like to know your approach on how you solve my problems and how I’m going to be able to change this pricing model.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. And then if we do that, what would the next step in this process be for you as far as making your decision?
Mark Stiving
Yeah, I have to make a decision. I’ve got a half dozen different pricing people I’m talking to right now. They all happen to be my friends’ LinkedIn connections, so I’ve got this list of people that we’re talking to.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So if when we get to the end of this conversation, if you feel confident that we’ve been able to answer that question of how our approach works and can help you, then the next sound step is to have another conversation after you’ve talked with everyone else?
Mark Stiving
I need to compare the different approaches and decide which one’s best for us.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. How will you decide that?
Mark Stiving
I don’t know the answer to that question.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So then maybe that’s another thing that we should talk about during this conversation is, how you would make this decision and what are the factors involved in that? Sounds good?
Mark Stiving
Okay.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So you had mentioned you wanted to change your pricing model for this particular product. Can you tell me why you’ve chosen this particular product that you need to change it?
Mark Stiving
We’ve been changing the model for some of our other products so far, and it’s gone well. Okay. But this one tends to be unique and it’s a little complicated for our customers. So, we think we might need some help with this one.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So all of the other products you’ve already changed the model for because they’re a little bit more streamlined, not as difficult, and then this one’s more complicated. When you’ve done those other pricing model changes, how did you do that? Was that something that you did internally or did you also bring in outside people?
Mark Stiving
We did have a consultant for a couple of them and then we’ve done a few ourselves.
Carole Mahoney
And versus the ones that you did yourselves versus the consultant, was there a difference in the results?
Mark Stiving
I’m actually trying to be my client from today, by the way? And I don’t know the answer to that question.
Carole Mahoney
Well then that might be one to write down. Yeah. So, it sounds like you’ve tried doing it internally for the more streamlined products. What made you decide to go external for the other ones and not just continue to do it in-house?
Mark Stiving
We were new at this and we wanted to see what was going to happen and how to go do this, and we’ve been able to take that process to apply it to some other ones. But this one is just, it’s different.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. And the consultants that you’ve used before for the other ones, are you talking with them for this one as well?
Mark Stiving
We think they are. They were very expensive. I know who they were. They were very expensive and they were good, but we don’t think we need to spend that much to get this one solved.
Carole Mahoney
Even though it’s more complicated.
Mark Stiving
So we have the basics down. We think we know a lot of what we’re doing at this point.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. And when you say expensive or too expensive, how much is expensive?
Mark Stiving
Although I don’t know the answer according to the client, I know this vendor, so let’s call it a million dollars.
Carole Mahoney
So a million dollars is a little over the top for you, for this particular product that you want to do a new model for. Is this a lower value product or a lower price point or margins for you? And or is there some other factor at play here that makes how you’ve done it before not tenable now?
Mark Stiving
Man, I’m going to tell you, I’m stepping out of my role for a second. You are amazing.
Carole Mahoney
Go ahead, keep talking. I love it. Go for it.
Mark Stiving
Oh my God. So, can we talk about what you did instead of continue the conversation, right? So, where do you get these questions? I mean, these are phenomenal questions.
Carole Mahoney
And I don’t even know anything about what you have going on. I don’t know how to do the pricing model or any of these things. And so these are questions that I actually learned from a game that my first sales coach taught me, which was the questions and periods game. And the way that this exercise works, and the way that I do it with my clients is that when someone asks you a question, you follow up that question with a clarification of their question. So someone says, oh, that’s expensive. Well, how much is expensive? Because we don’t have clear specifics on their answer. So anytime I hear something that’s vague or very generalized, non-specific, I want to get as specific an answer as I possibly can on that particular thread. So if they say, well, how soon do you want this?
As soon as possible? So like, tomorrow morning at 9: 00 AM or next week or next month, this is really expensive. How much is expensive? Well, anything over a million dollars, okay, like $2 million is too expensive, or a million in one is too inexpensive. So it’s a sense of curiosity, but it’s also a sense of getting clear clarifications on their answers to something. Because the more you drill down into a specific answer, the more you make them think and the more they start to wonder, maybe I don’t know the answer to that. And then you find the opportunity to be able to offer an insight to them when you find out what insight matters most to them.
So it took a lot of practice. My poor husband, I would practice with him every night after work. He would come home and I’m a management consultant and coach, right? So when my husband comes home and tells me about work, what do I do? Just like you did with your client, I would tell him all of the things that he should do, you should say this and you should do that, and then you should do this. And he would get mad at me. You don’t know what it’s like there that would never work with this guy. You have no idea what this kind of environment is. It’s not like your typical corporate job. He works in the government. And so he would get into these arguments at the end of the day and I’m like, why are we fighting about your day?
I’m the one that’s the management consultant and you don’t want to listen to me. Why? Because I’m your wife. Like, we would get into this whole thing. And then I started getting some coaching and started developing how I think about sales in the exchange. And instead of telling him what to do, I started asking him questions such as, well, why do you think he responded that way? Or If you were to say this thing, how do you think that they would react? Has it always been this way? Or is this something that’s a new development? And all of a sudden he’s like, oh, I never thought of it that way. You know what, I’m going to try that. And he didn’t know what I was doing by asking the questions until about a month or two later, he started to pick up on it. And he would say, I would ask him, well, what do you want for dinner?
He’s like, well, I don’t know. What do you feel like having for dinner? And he would answer my questions with another question. So I knew he was starting to pick up on it. Then he started doing it with his coworkers. And it was interesting because when he started doing it with his coworkers, all of a sudden the tensions that he was having, the miscommunications, the assumptions that everybody was making about them, they seemed to like kind of lower because they were actually communicating and getting to understand each other versus just telling them, like what they should do. So it started to kind of carry through in his conversations. He said to me one day, he’s like, you know what? It is really easy to get people to talk about themselves and what they think. And the reason is because when we talk about what we think dopamine gets released in our brain. And so dopamine is that pleasure center, right? Like, we want more of that. That’s why so many of us tend to get into talking about what we know instead of asking more questions. If we can get our buyers to talk more than we do, they’re getting the dopamine released in their brains and they feel good about the conversation.
Mark Stiving
Okay. I almost believe you. Almost.
Carole Mahoney
What part don’t you quite believe?
Mark Stiving
There’s another one of those questions.
Carole Mahoney
I can’t stop. I’m sorry.
Mark Stiving
While we were doing the role play it felt to me like you were selling, right? Okay. I mean, it’s like sometimes imagining that you go into a car dealership and there’s a sales guy there, and he is like, well, what are you looking for in a car? Right? How often are you going to drive it? Yep. What color is your favorite color? And you’re like, I know exactly what he’s doing and it’s annoying the hell out of me. And so it feels salesy and I’d love to find a way to do that so it feels like I’m actually trying to help you. I’m not trying to sell you, I’m trying to help you.
Carole Mahoney
Yeah. So you’re right, you don’t want to have it be a litany of questions, there needs to be like pauses and breaks, which we didn’t really get a lot to do, but summarizing what you heard and then offering some kind of an insight. So, I totally understand that a million dollars seems like a lot of money for you to be spending on a pricing model, especially for a product that’s much more complicated. And maybe your margins are smaller. And a lot of the clients that I work with when they get faced with this kind of a decision, are struggling with X, Y, Z and then asking them some type of a question after that. So periodically, throughout the conversation, you’re summarizing what you’ve heard at a certain point and then offering an insight or a data point in your experience or in your work or in your research, something that’s going to help inform them of a better understanding of what’s going on with them and then asking them a diagnostic question after that. So yes, you’re right. A lot of salespeople they’ll go through the questions and it’s one question after another and you don’t feel like you’re getting anything back from it for the most part, which is why you want to intersperse that summarization and insight offering into those kinds of questions. We didn’t get a chance to do that, but that’s typically how I coach people to do it.
Mark Stiving
Ah, okay. Why do I feel stressed? I don’t get it.
Carole Mahoney
I don’t know. You tell me.
Mark Stiving
There’s another one of those questions.
Carole Mahoney
I know it’s, you know.
Mark Stiving
I’m just going to call you out when you do it.
Carole Mahoney
For every question I ask.
Mark Stiving
It’s so natural for you.
Carole Mahoney
And sometimes I do it to my family and they’re like, so mom’s in question mode again, because I want to understand and I don’t want to make assumptions about things. And so I do tend to ask a lot of questions. I was at one point in my life going to be an investigative journalist. So maybe that’s coming through a little.
Mark Stiving
Got it. Something else you said that resonated painfully with me was when we talk about what we know, we get this hit of dopamine and we like it, and so I’m wondering if my sales technique, which is please allow me to coach you for an hour, is really me getting the dopamine hit I want, as opposed to this is what the client really needs.
Carole Mahoney
Right?
Mark Stiving
Oh, no, no. You’re supposed to say, Mark, no, that’s not right. You’re supposed to say, Mark, you really should be doing it this way.
Carole Mahoney
No, Mark, you really shouldn’t be doing it that way. And it’s so easy to do. Like we can go into these monologues and diatribes about what we think because we feel comfortable there, but, and we think that somehow this is going to portray the passion that we have for something, but people, it has to be a back and forth and at the same time moving towards some type of an objective or a goal that you’re trying to accomplish. I mean, ultimately all sales is selling change. That’s what it is. And so by asking questions, it’s to understand what’s their capacity and willingness to make a change in a decision. It’s, yes, you can dig into the problem, but are they willing to make a decision and move forward on it, is the other part of this?
Mark Stiving
Okay, I’m going to push back for a couple reasons. Not that I think you’re wrong, but I think that when I do the coaching, it does a couple things. One thing it does is, they end up having aha moments because I’m teaching them things they really truly didn’t know before. And I’m applying it to their situation and they’re realizing my personality, which is relatively easy to get along with when I’m coaching, and so it feels like it’s an important part, but maybe I overplay it or is it really and truly not important and I shouldn’t do it at all.
Carole Mahoney
You should do it. So I’m taking the assumption at this point that when you’re saying that you’re coaching, that’s when you are asking questions and offering insights, yes?
Mark Stiving
About their specific problem.
Carole Mahoney
About their specific problem.
Mark Stiving
Not about how are you going to make a decision and are you going to hire me? It’s all about, I’m helping you solve your problem right now.
Carole Mahoney
Yeah. So also, let me clarify one thing. When I say, leveraging the conversation to be able to understand someone’s willingness to change and to make a decision that comes through. Like those are the things that I would want you to be able to understand through the coaching part that you’re doing. Because if you’re getting to the end of a conversation and you’ve been coaching them the whole way, and at the end of it they’re like, well, I need to go and think about it. What we’ve done is we’ve given them a whole bunch of great information, but what we haven’t done is help them to get to the point where they can actually make a decision. And that’s the whole point of the conversation, is for them to be able to make a decision about their next steps in the change that they need to make.
Now, sometimes people will come to you with a problem, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily feel the impact or the urgency of that problem. It just means that, hey, I’ve got this problem, I should probably talk to someone about it. But if they aren’t willing to take the steps to do something about it, then you’re kind of wasting your time. So that’s what I mean by that is their ability to want to make the change happen. Not just that they have a problem, we all have problems. That doesn’t mean we actually want to solve them or do something about them. Sometimes people just want to complain and not do anything.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Okay. And then you just said a word that reminded me of how the call actually ended, of which I am totally embarrassed and I want to hear your answer to this. Okay. The client actually asked me, what do you think the next step should be? And I did not have a good answer to that question.
Carole Mahoney
Well, if you were to answer that, what would you say?
Mark Stiving
Send me a check and we’ll start working.
Carole Mahoney
And hopefully they have a sense of humor so that when you said that they laugh too, hopefully. Well, when you do work with clients and they’re at this stage, what is the next step that they need to go through?
Mark Stiving
So usually I would end up sending them a proposal. And then they would turn around and, I think part of it was I didn’t know the product I wanted to sell them at the moment.
Carole Mahoney
And you weren’t sure which capability to tie to the issues that they presented during the coaching?
Mark Stiving
Yeah, it’s probably because I’m changing my own product portfolio at the moment and they needed a product that I didn’t want to sell, essentially. But I still could have sold it to them. It would’ve been okay,
Carole Mahoney
Would it have solved the problem for them?
Mark Stiving
Yeah.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So there’s a couple of ways that you can handle that question. What do you think the next step should be? You can handle it in the way of, I have a couple of ideas of some offerings that might help you solve the problem, but there’s still a few unanswered questions that I have in order to know which one’s going to be the right fit for you. Do you have another five or 10 minutes to go through those or should we schedule another time and, and have that thought out? Another question might be, typically when I work with clients on this type of things, it also impacts other parts and other stakeholders in the company. Who else is going to be impacted by this that we should include in the next conversation? Like, I don’t know if you were talking to the person who’s the, did you say it was the CEO that you were talking to?
Mark Stiving
Not in this case. I was not.
Carole Mahoney
Okay. So then you know who ultimately is going to be the one that makes this decision and what do they need to know in order to do that and how do we get them involved in our next conversation? And honestly, if you’re not talking with the ultimate economic decision maker and the one who’s going to be impacted the most by this, I wouldn’t have wanted you to give them some kind of a product or a capability because it may not be the right one if we haven’t taken everybody else’s into account as to what the right one might be there. For example, I do sales training for companies on how to hire salespeople. And one aspect of that is using an assessment and then training their team on the hiring process. I made the mistake once of not asking the question of who else needs to be involved with this? And it turns out that the HR person was someone who was very upset that they didn’t get involved with this and they put a big old roadblock as soon as we were about to close it. So knowing who else can say no or who else can say yes and who else is going to be impacted by this is a critical question to ask towards the end of a call for your next step.
Mark Stiving
Alright, Carol, what I have to say is that you have convinced me that I am truly a horrible salesperson. Thank you very much. You are brilliant.
Carole Mahoney
It’s just, honestly it’s practice. And like I said earlier, we shouldn’t be practicing on our buyers. That’s why I do what I do, because we all need to get the reps in. Like, believe me, I used to be one of the worst salespeople that I knew and it was because I wanted to do the practice. And literally you can practice on anyone around you, everyone around you, you can practice on your waitress or waiter at the restaurant, the Uber driver. These are communication techniques that we use in our everyday life, but we somehow forget that when we get into a sales conversation, it’s still a conversation. So practice on everyone around you. Just practice asking more questions till it becomes second nature.
Mark Stiving
Okay? And how much of what we talked about today is in your book?
Carole Mahoney
All of it.
Mark Stiving
Okay. I’m ordering one now.
Carole Mahoney
Thank you. And one of the things that I’m saying too is, everyone who orders a book, now until the end of this year, I’m doing a monthly group coaching call so that they can get more reps in, come and practice with me and you know, I’ll put you through the ringer if you want me to, and we’ll test it out and how it goes. And you know, we’ll have a bunch of people that are on the call and you can hear everybody else go through the same things and you’ll realize, maybe I’m not the worst in the world.
Mark Stiving
There’s somebody worse. Wow!
Carole Mahoney
I’m sure there is. There’s somebody worse, there’s somebody better. That’s always the case.
Mark Stiving
Alright, Carol, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Carole Mahoney
You can find me on carolemahoney.com or unboundgrowth.com. And if you want to be social with me, the place where you’re going to find me in most of the time is either on LinkedIn or on Instagram.
Mark Stiving
Excellent. And, one last time, what’s the name of the book so that everybody can find it on Amazon.
Carole Mahoney
It is Buyer First: Grow Your Business with Collaborative Selling.
Mark Stiving
Excellent. And to our listeners, thank you so much for your time. If you enjoyed this, which I didn’t, sadly, but Carol was amazing. If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating and a review. You can get instructions by going to ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or pricing in general, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
