Entrepreneurs' Sales Secrets Revealed

By Don Lazzari

You'll benefit from the insight that comes from seeing the challenges, mistakes, and successes that a wide variety of companies in a range of markets experienced in B2B sales over nearly three decades. It will not make you an expert in all areas. But it will better prepare you for what it takes to be successful selling – from the early days through when your company is thriving.

Part one will focus on what to do when you're the ONLY sales person. Part two will show you how to build and scale a sales team that delivers to plan. Part three introduces you to Sales Vital Signs (TM) and the secrets of sales performance management. Includes exercises and on-line access to templates and examples.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350946697

Don Lazzari

Don Lazzari is President of Delivering Value, a sales performance consulting company that focuses on helping entrepreneurs and their companies sell more effectively and build high performing sales teams that drive company growth. Since 2010, he has worked closely with a wide variety of organizations in software and technology, advanced analytics, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, and healthcare. Don's expertise spans sales, sales leadership, go-to-market strategy, and marketing. During his 30+ year career he has sold new and complex technologies across North America and Europe while working for companies ranging in size from emerging start-ups to global corporations. Don holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh.

Book preview

Let’s Get Started!

Lao Tzu famously said, The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Our journey will be divided into three parts.

Part 1: How to Be Successful When YOU Are the Only Salesperson concentrates on what you need to know when YOU are the only salesperson. It shares fundamentals, enduring truths, and time-tested techniques to help you sell more before you have a dedicated sales team. You’ll learn how to master the fundamentals of value-based messaging and selling by working through a series of practical exercises that you can apply directly to your business.

Part 2: How to Best Build, Motivate, and Scale a Sales Engine that Performs focuses on how to hire, compensate, on-board, and structure a sales and marketing organization so you put the right players and incentive structures in place to realize consistent performance to plan.

Part 3: How to Harness the Power of Sales Vital Signs™ to Drive Growth starts with how Sales Vital Signs™ can be applied to make sure your sales team is performing at its best and delivering the fuel your business needs to grow. Then it discusses what it takes to be a leader who manages and motivates a sales team that performs to plan year after year.

Part 1

How to Be Successful When YOU Are the

Only Salesperson

Our journey will start where most entrepreneurs do. You have a sales team with one person on it and it’s you.

All entrepreneurs start out selling on their own. Phil Knight of Nike sold running shoes out of the trunk of his car. Colonel Sanders sold his now-famous Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) in the service station he ran in Corbin, Kentucky.

If you are launching your first venture or your next one, at the beginning, the only salesperson you have is YOU. So, this section of the book will focus on how to make you more effective as a salesperson in lieu of sitting in sales training classes for days.

Chapter 1

Converting Telling

to Selling

Are you telling or selling? When I ask this question at the beginning of a client engagement, most entrepreneurs believe they are selling versus telling. It’s an important distinction that you need to fully understand. Telling means you are relaying information. Selling means you are relaying information that is meant to persuade and motivate your listeners to act. As we dig a little deeper into what the real difference is, most entrepreneurs acknowledge they are doing more telling than selling. Let’s look at why. It starts with how you are communicating.

Company-centric versus client-centric communication

Take a moment and pull up the last email you sent to a prospect. From whose perspective are you communicating? Is it a company perspective? At Bluebeard Industries, we have focused on the best in high tech manufacturing since 1980. We have three divisions that deliver blah, blah, blah. Or is it a product perspective? Our kitchen-bot steams your bao buns to perfection and gets the dishes cleaner than thought possible. That’s because our AI technology leverages blah, blah, blah. It may even be both. Bluebeard Industries is the worldwide leader in providing advanced products that leverage the latest in cloud technology and use AI to blah, blah, blah.

If you are doing this—and chances are that you may be—you sound like the thousands of other companies out there focused on their company, their technology, and their innovative ideas. This is not the best path to the top of the mountain, yet it is a mistake so many entrepreneurs make.

Paul Wiefels in his spectacular book The Chasm Companion puts it best: Don’t confuse your compelling reason to sell with the customers’ compelling reason to buy. You should keep these words of wisdom on your office wall or on your screensaver, so it is always in your face because it is a fundamental truth.

Let’s look at what Paul means because he’s talking about communicating (and ultimately selling) from the customer’s perspective. If you subscribe to the theories regarding market dynamics faced by innovative new products that Paul Wiefels’s mentor, Geoffrey Moore, details in his legendary book, Crossing the Chasm, then B2B buyers purchase products—especially technology products—to solve a business problem. Sure, we’ll acknowledge that there is a very small group of buyers who buy tech for tech’s sake, but to get you to a healthy, profitable, sustainable business, you need to cross Moore’s chasm that exists between Early Adopters and the Early Majority. The Early Majority wants to hear how they can solve business problems.

So take a moment and get inside the clients’ head. Are they sitting there thinking, Boy, I’d really like to find a company that leverages the latest in cloud technology and uses AI to blah, blah, blah? Nope. Or are they thinking, How can I find a better way to provide customer support? Or, How can I find efficiencies that add 10% to my gross margin?

Do you see the challenge? Most companies are speaking company and product and almost all customers are thinking about solving business problems. If you focus on features and technology, what you are likely to be saying doesn’t often translate, you are speaking another language and it’s the wrong one.

And one more thing before we talk about how to fix it. Customers are especially interested to hear about how other companies like theirs have been solving similar business problems. They don’t want to hear about you, your mission, your technology, or your product until you have established credibility and persuaded them that they can be confident that you can help them solve their business problem.

Okay, here’s how you fix it. Make sure your communication is grounded in the language that the customer speaks: We’ve helped other companies like yours add 10% to their gross margin by streamlining customer support so they benefitted in these three main ways. A good example is Waverly industries where they realized these three benefits. Any mention of Bluebeard Industries? Any mention of a product or technology? No, just three main business benefits.

Which brings us to our solution: The Magic of 3.

The Magic of 3

Schoolhouse Rock says that 3 is the magic number, and in B2B sales communication—oh yes, it is. You may be sitting there thinking why only three? We can offer so much more. While that may be true, your customers are making buying decisions based on just a few things. You need to recognize this and refine, distill, refine, and distill the things you say to clients into three main benefits. Going forward, we’ll refer to them as the Big 3. The Big 3 are ideally something you offer that no one else can match.

Another good reason to reduce your main benefit set to three is that it is just about all most people can remember. When you couple this with the fact that studies have shown that immediately after a ten-minute presentation, listeners only remembered 50% of what was said. By the next day, that had dropped to 25%, and a week later, it was 10%. After one week, they only remember headlines.

So three is all you need if you expect your benefits to stick.

A great example from past experience is when I led the team that sold a healthcare documentation solution into senior care homes. The name of the product was AccuNurse. It was an impressive product offering cutting-edge speech recognition technology, industry-leading wearable devices, advanced software, and more. We were very successful with AccuNurse taking sales from $250,000 to $22 million in a little more than three years. Here were the Big 3 for AccuNurse:

Better documentation

Better reimbursement

Better care

Exercise 1 – Finding your Big 3

Here’s your first exercise. Distilling your benefits down to your Big 3. Remember, you need to focus on business benefits for the client, not features, functionality, and technology. Here’s a quick thought process you can use:

List the stakeholders who could benefit from your solution.

Think about the salient business problems each role encounters (or have already expressed to you) and list them under each role. You should be able to come up with four to six items for each stakeholder.

Compare your results side by side. Are there overlaps? Are there parallels? Looking at your stakeholders as a single group, are there a few items that most would agree are their biggest challenges? This subset is the genesis of your Big 3.

Map how your solution can help your stakeholders address this subset of salient business problems.

Convert your solution mapping into customer-centric content emphasizing business benefits, NOT features.

Distill this customer-centric content repeatedly until you reduce it to three key benefits that use as few words as possible.

Use the QR Code in the Epilogue to see an example.

The Who cares? test

To help make your Big 3 as strong as possible, you need to apply some additional magic to your Big 3. It is the magic of Who cares? As you go through each iteration of refine, distill, refine, distill, read your Big 3 out loud and add Who cares? to the end. If you can’t readily arrive at a response that would compel your prospect to say Oh really? Tell me more! then you need to refine and distill more.

How to make your Big 3 stick

Now that you have established your Big 3, how do you make them stick in the minds of your prospects? In client engagements, we employ the mnemonic SAVER: Stories, Analogies, Visuals, Examples, and Repetition.

Stories: Humans have passed on stories for millennia, so it’s a familiar form of communication. Just make sure that if you are telling a customer story, you highlight your Big 3.

Analogies: Familiar things are more easily remembered, and analogies make things familiar. Look for opportunities to add analogies to paint a picture of your Big 3.

Visuals: Most of us are visual learners; pictures stay in our minds far more than abstract concepts and words. If possible, use a picture to reinforce your Big 3.

Examples: We’ve already talked about how B2B buyers are looking to solve business problems and they prefer to hear how others like them have solved similar problems. Don’t forget it. Talk about how your customers benefit, not about features or technology.

Repetition: Repeating and reinforcing your Big 3 is absolutely critical. Winston Churchill, one of the greatest persuaders of modern times, said, If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack. This is how you should think about your Big 3. It should be front and center in all of your materials and in how you are communicating. Everything you say verbally and in writing needs to revolve around them.

Elevator stories are dead! You need a head-turning sentence

As I progressed through my career, a concept that seemed to endure was the elevator story. Its approach was grounded in what you would say to a big client if you got on an elevator together. It had form and structure because you only had a