Josh: What is up everybody, Josh Tapp here again and welcome back to the lucky Titan and today we're here with Lynn Whitbeck and I am so stoked to have her here because she is the CEO and founder of Petite2Queenand and honestly, I'm just excited to have her here because she really knows her stuff when it comes to sales, pivoting and scaling a business so when say what's up to everybody, and we'll hop right in.
Lynn: Hey, hi, everybody
Josh: Super excited to have you here. So my first question for you, as it is, with most of my guests, is, if you had to start over from scratch and build a business, which isn't unfamiliar to you, it sounds like good to start over from scratch and rebuild a business. What would you do from day one to day 90 to be able to scale your business to provide a livable income for your family?
Lynn: Well, the first thing I would do was look internally so what is it that I know? You know? What's my experience? What's my education? What's my career have been, what I have done in my personal life and so really starting with that as your basis, and then, you know, from that what just gets you excited? What fills you with passion and enthusiasm? You know, so that's your next step, right so because if you do what you love, you're never going to work a day in your life and so then you take that, and you want to start building your framework and it's like, okay, so for me, it's sales, I love sales, I love everything about sales. I've met some of my best friends in sales so what I would do is I would take that, and I would say, Okay, so how can I serve others and what is the outcome and the deliverable going to be and then once you've done that, now you can, you've actually got a framework for your product or service and this works both ways, both in things like I provide a service for sales, but up for if you're building a product, and you've made designed today, a new mask and a really cool mask, and you love to tinker and manufacturer and do those types of things, and solve those types of logistic issues, whatever it happens to be, that's another way that you can now help the world and so now you've got your product or service in line, you've built that framework out, now who do you know? Who are your champions? Who are the other Titans? Who are the people that are going to come to you, you know, with open up a chat really super simple so that you can tell them what you're up to what you're doing, you find out what's going on in their world and you might have an opportunity right there to say, you know, let's just sort of brainstorm and map this out right now what you're doing and it may be a way for them to jump right in and say, You know what, I'd love to work with you again, or I'd love to work with you for the first time we've known each other for years but either way, you're going to bring them in, so that they can then help you find your customers and it's really important that you've really thought through who you know who you're going to serve, you know, and how you're going to serve them but then take that other step that's really important, think like the customer? What's their Why? Why do they want need or lack your product or service right? How is it going to benefit them and then how will that make them do what so they can do something else? So they can so they can What? Okay, so with sales, I am using myself as an example, I'm going to help you capitalize on your leads, I'm going to help you shorten your sales cycle, close more sales, right so that's one of the things you have to look at what's their why? And what's that outcome because it's ultimately so they can what, for me, it's so they can grow their business right, so they can have a sustainable revenue, those are such important things for a business, right. So that's where you go to that point so now you've formulated that you've got your champions on board, the next thing you want to do is as you're building this out, and you're starting to have people come in, you really want to have thought through that whole communication process with your potential customers, now part of that is you've talked about their customer, why right? Well, what are their top 10 questions going to be about your product or service and what are their top 10 objections going to be, I want you to answer those in a variety of formats. You need to do this ahead of time, you know, so you can write a 40 page e-book, you can create a little three part video series, you can put a workbook together, you can create an infographic there are just so many different ways that you can answer these and remember everyone, people are different, they're all unique, and they're going to respond to different types of outreach and different types of content so Josh, you know better than anyone with what you do in your field. So you want to take that and then repurpose it and I myriad a different way so you know, you start with 10 pieces, a 10 questions, and then you serve that back to them in a number of different ways. So the same thing with their top 10 objections, and then you plan out this, your cadence, and your outreach and once again, you want to do that in a myriad of formats, it's not just an email drip campaign people, you really want to think through that and when you invest that time, and this through this process, when you get to that 90 days, you're gonna discover you've closed sales, that you're, you're doing the business and I'll tell you, when I created our sales program, I sold it first and then we built it on the fly, so you know, that's the thing, it gives you that, okay, now I got to do it, right but it's a, it's how you sell, you can sell your product or service before it's built okay, don't let that be a hang up and I know that that was something that I struggled with, like, I gotta have this all figured out ahead of time, until I was talking to the champion, and I saw, I broke my hand out there I was I had to build it and so it's a great way to do that and it really putting that time in, to think this through, and put it all together and build that framework that's gonna make you a success and get you to those 90 days having revenue.
Josh: I love that. Thank you for walking through that process, I hope people took notes on there, if not go back and listen to it take notes, because the strategy she's talking about, I want to highlight a couple points here, number one was the framework, I mean, that's that is one of the most important parts of this process and we've been listening to 150 different people tell us their different methods and and how they would sell but the reality is what what Lynn's talking about is what really sums it all up, it's, it's the framework, how are you actually going to deliver this, this amazing this to the who, right and a lot of people get so caught up on, we're gonna make the product amazing but if you just have a simple framework, it's easy to sell and the second thing you talk about is the beta launch, right? You sold long before you built the product and that's I recommend to everybody, like why would you build it, if you don't know they're gonna buy it was a waste of time so I hope you will go back and take notes and I thank you Lynn for delving into that for us so let's talk a little bit about your methodology when it comes to sales and I wanted I wanted to dovetail into this with the framework concept in mind, what is your framework to helping people to shorten their sales cycle and close more deals?
Lynn: Yeah, so the first thing is to make sure that you are bringing in leads that fit your ideal customer avatar, okay because otherwise, you may as well just throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. So you're wasting a lot of time and energy and resources and money. So the first thing you want to do is you want to have I have a five question format, what are the five things that your customer needs to have or be or do for them to be a fit, okay? And so when you go through those five things, and they can be tangible, or intangibles, because one of the things on my list is that they have high professional ethics so that's really important to me, I'm not going to do business with somebody who doesn't have that one, one of that that point, right, but they've got those five things so then from there, it's like, Okay, well, what market segue segments does my product or service fit and I gave, I use this example a lot, where you can sell your product or service into a number of different silos within an organization or industries so often, we have products or service, certainly sales, I can sell to every industry and I could go through a number of different silos. So I could be selling in through HR because they want a training program, I could be selling directly to the sales executives, usually that's, you know, vice presidents who are running their sales teams, I could sell it directly to the C suite because they want to grow their business, they see this as an avenue certainly for smaller businesses, it's really common that I sell that directly to the founder, the President, the CEO so but those different silos, so I just mentioned three, have three different why's they want your product or service, right so HR is looking for some kind of training program, to supplement so that they're just constantly helping their employees achieve their potential, right and of course, with a sales manager, they're looking to close more sales, you know, to to to really boost their numbers and from a CEO they're looking for they're, they're really also looking at their whole company direction and, you know, I want to call it your brand, but it's your sort of your essence of who you are as an organization who you serve, and then how you can grow your business. So those are slightly different perspective so when you're addressing them, you have to, to, you know, refine your content to fit them and so I sort of was taking that through so that's that customer, why exercise you know, what do they want need or lack you know, how is this going to help them, so it benefits them by so they can, so they can what, and that's really what you want to sell, it's the outcome so they can write and so once you have that, now, you can start doing your outreach, because now you know, who you need to contact and you also need to know what that messaging needs to be and then you develop that strategy around that so then that that gets into a whole another level of creating that strategy so that you're not doing these types of just cold calls that your sell, sell, sell. Instead, you're delivering value, it's got to be about really demonstrating your worthy intent and what I mean by that is that you have genuine curiosity about what's going on in their world and you want to provide them with something that will help them and you're not asking for anything in return, it is that spirit of generosity, and delivering value and then when you develop that into your cadence, and that's when I talked earlier about those 10 questions and the 10 objections, you're actually nurturing that relationship and that relationship arc is so important, as you move them from that awareness, to cultivation, to decision making, and then to nurture them, so they become your new champions.
Josh: I love that and I mean, we call them Titans, champions, whatever it is, right there, the people who are advocating for you promoting you and being those, those partners so I love that because, you know, then we talked about this previously to the interview, but we talked about how we're both all about the relationship selling, right, because when I finally stopped trying to do the cold outreach, and all these types of things for selling, it became so much simpler because when people came, I didn't have to try and sell them on me, they already knew who I was, they liked me, they wanted to talk with me and it was just a genuine conversation about what are your needs like how can I help you fill that need, you know, maybe it's not through my product, maybe through it's somebody through somebody else's? So I I really appreciate your methodology with that. So I want to ask you a question that maybe doesn't completely follow the flow but what's your follow up process because in a relationship type business, that's the hardest part is following up with people
Lynn: Yeah, no. Follow up, following up is actually so important, I mean, if you look at the stats around that, of how many sales people follow up once, or never, or they, they give up after a few tries, first of all, too many people do that, Oh, I'm checking in, I'm just following up, you know, wanted to find out how things are going stop that, please stop that, you want to lead with value? What can I do for you today and so it's like, we just developed this new process map and I wanted to provide you with the link this will do this, this and this for you and it's an if you're leaving a phone message, you say, oh, gosh, I'm so excited, we just created this new process map, it will take you through how to build this and we provide this, this and this to keep it to three, good, better best three things that it's going to do for them, what's those outcomes, so they can and then oh, by the way, this is Lynn, Lynn Withbeck at future forward sales, Petite2Queen. So when you do that you don't put your name up front, you put it all the way at the end here, your enthusiasm, your excitement and the same thing when you're doing other forms of outreach, whether you're using a little video message, whether you're using LinkedIn, a great thing on LinkedIn is leave a voicemail, you can do that on the app, you know, same thing. It's just people are blown away. They didn't even know that functionality existed, right? It's so cool. There's a lot of different ways that you can do your outreach and I want to remind you, snail mail works to, you know, send them a cool package, you know, and once again, you're not having to invest tons of money in these things, but have that figured out. That's about the strategic development and figuring out your plan so that you have these resources that and then you're going to use certain ones that were going to be more important to certain people based on their where they're at in which silo, you know which industry what's their job role?
Josh: love that. And I love it because it's it's be human, you know, reach out to people and be willing to do it. I know for us and it's funny that you say this because it's just kind of become a reality for us is recently I've been doing some of the following up myself and just saying, instead of even following up, all I do is say, Hey, can I get you on this podcast? I find them a podcast to get on and when we booked the meeting and everything like oh, by the way, we need to talk about what you and I talked about, right? I don't even have to bring it up. They bring it back up and it's been, so it working really well and I was what you're saying, I'm like, yep, that resonates with me because that's, that's what you're talking about providing that value, bring them something worthwhile at every step of the process, you become the logical choice to buy.
Lynn: Yeah, and I have a really funny story about how I was following up with a big corporate account, they had indicated interest and I kept doing that serving that value every time I followed up, and it was in my cadence, it was number 12. I do a baker's dozen and even then I still never really give up but and my number step 12, was I actually sent them a meeting invite for a lunch and they accepted and I flew in to where I needed to fly in to have this meeting. We had a three hour lunch and he told me right up front, and he said, I have been meaning to get back to you, I've been meaning to answer. I mean, every time you've given me something I can use, but I've been so swamped. You're just so busy but when you sent me that invite, I looked on my calendar, I was open and I said, we're doing this, we're doing this today and then we had a three hour lunch and we actually worked through a bunch of things and I was able to push that sales forward to the next level right. And eventually it became a multi-million dollar deal but that's the thing, people won't respond at these different things but if your cadences right, and you're delivering value in that generosity, it's going to come back to reward you and if they never buy from you, they are going to tell somebody else, oh, my gosh, I know who you should be talking to and you're going to get a warm introduction.
Josh: I love that. Wow. Yeah. Well, just so you know, I've taken a full page of notes so we're good over here but I want to ask you this, because everybody else I'm sure has had that same thing, we have covered a lot of different topics today and I want to kind of wrap this up in a beautiful bow, which for you, I want to know how can people connect with you initially, and get into your world because you do provide so much value people like how can I get those resources right? Where do they go for that?
Lynn: Yeah, so they can go to future forward sales and if they go slash sales tips, we've got a few different sales tips and one of them is on how to be a guest on the podcast so I have a little process map, I've gotten a number of resources on that page, right there so if it's something that you're thinking about for your business, because this is a tremendous way for you to both deliver an asset sales asset to your team, but also to spread the word about your product or service, that's pretty amazing.
Josh: Yeah, I love that. Thank you for for plugging podcasts because I believe it's the best sales tool out there personally, because you meet amazing people so make sure you go check that out futureforwardsales.com/salestips, is that correct?
Lynn: Yes, it is.
Josh: Make sure I don't mess that up. So make sure you go check that out everybody and before we sign off, though Lynn, what would you give as your final parting piece of guidance to our audience?
Lynn: Ah, you have the power to choose. I want everyone to remember that so whatever direction you're going, you have the right and responsibility to make a new decision, that's the power of choice, if something's not working for you, you can adapt pivot change okay, you can make a new decision. We live in an ever changing world with new things emerging new facts, new opportunities, so recognize that you have the power to choose a new direction and then just continue on your amazing journey.