Part 2. Choreograph Your Sales Activities

Make your sales process look effortless and feel frictionless.

In Part 2 of their deep dive into the "Create, Choreograph, Contract" framework, Mark and John explore the importance of deliberate and structured interactions with buyers, like how mirroring and reflecting can establish trust, and how seeking permission at each step ensures both parties are aligned. In this conversation, you'll learn:

• The four essential stages of the sales process: qualification, discovery, recommendations, and negotiation, each with tailored strategies for success.
• The power of mirroring and reflecting through body language, words, and posture to create a comfortable rapport.
• How to use tactical empathy tools to foster open and vulnerable dialogue.
• The importance of synchronous conversations for avoiding misinterpretation and ensuring clarity.
• Techniques for managing negotiations through conversation, addressing red lines and understanding the reasons behind edits.

References:

• Understanding the Trust Equation, Charles H. Green
• Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss
• Permission Marketing, Seth Godin

Share your feedback in our listener survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8V9T6Z7

Transcript

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John Tyreman 0:19

Welcome business developers to another episode of breaking biz dev. My name is John Tyerman. And as always, I'm joined by my trusty cohost, Mark Wainwright, and we are delivering a series of episodes for you. This is part two of a three part framework that Mark put together on how to develop new business for your firm. Last episode, we had an episode around creating the kind of firm that you want, not necessarily chasing after RFPs and getting caught on that RFP hamster wheel. So I'm excited to dive into this episode today. Mark, how are you feeling?

Mark Wainwright 0:54

I'm well, this choreograph conversation is one that's near and dear to my heart. It follows on the create conversation we had previously. I think that is a fascinating topic about how, how experts can really flip the script. And start embracing the idea that they can create their own, their own futures, create their own new business opportunities, rather than, like you said, waiting for that RFP to drop into their inbox, getting caught up in the RFP pursuit hamster wheel that we all dislike. So, choreograph follows. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And our next episode is going to focus on contract, which is going to bring it at all to a successful close. So today choreograph.

John Tyreman 1:46

choreograph, when you, when you say that, I imagine a, Like a ballet or some sort of a dance routine where people are all in sync, everything's flowing, everything moving. Is moving and it seems effortless. Is that kind of what you had in mind

Mark Wainwright 2:01

it is. And, and actually it, it brings back wonderful memories of my daughter when she was in ballet. it was really fun to go, watch her practice and perform. it ballet is a perfect example because it is an extremely complex. dance. You know, there's, it's for obviously for decades, centuries, centuries, probably it's, it's, it's, it has existed and it is the, the, the moves are, are, are very scripted and very complex and often very, very difficult, but the final product, particularly at the, at the, the higher levels of, of ballet and frankly, any other dance. The final product is always so beautiful, right? So seamless, so graceful, so almost effortless. but it's not, you know, that there's so much that goes into it. There's so much practice, there's so much rehearsal. and there's this, this choreography that's going on. And the use of that term is absolutely intentional. I think a lot of people look at if they, if they consider the world of. Sales and selling your services in the, in the word dance or choreography that they automatically kind of connected to saying, Oh yeah, it's takes, it takes two to tango, right? It's, there's two people involved in this, two parties involved in this, or everyone's got to kind of, kind of move through this thing, together. Sometimes it's a little tricky. Sometimes it really works well, but I really love sort of the spin on it. that additional spin that we just talked about, that choreography makes complex things. Look effortless. And that's really what I want to kind of hit home is with sufficient planning and practice. We can all make complex things look effortless. And when you introduce that idea in the world of sales, it hopefully there's kind of a light bulb moment. It's like, Oh, there's actually a way to do this. There's a 1 2 3 A B C, some steps through this. And there's a way that we can plan and practice and guide. You know, perspective, clients, perspective, customers, and if through a sales process and come out the other end, and everyone's really happy with the way it went and it was successful, and then off we go to really start, you know, in the professional services world, off we go to, you know, deliver our services and provide our expertise and that sort of thing. So that's what I love about, that whole term choreograph.

John Tyreman 4:41

I'm reminded of one of our earliest episodes, good and bad selling and buying in professional services. Mark, where you laid out this kind of two by two of good and bad buyers and sellers in the different combinations that can happen. And one thing that you mentioned is, and I think we'll we'll get into this a little bit is how from the seller's point of view, you have a lot more reps or at bats at the The sales process So, it behooves the seller to, to lead that process. so on this episode, you know, we're going to talk about, the dance, like you talked about, I love that analogy and why. Experts, you know, they need that process. So we'll get into why that's so critical. we'll get into what that process looks like, the different conversations that you'll have with your buying counterpart and then how to stitch it all together. So, let's start with why this is so important, Mark. I love that analogy, but let's, let's dig into the why a little bit.

Mark Wainwright 5:40

the big why, is that, sales has always seemed rather, ambiguous, and confusing, and without any shape or form, to most, Professionals. And again, you know, John, this, this, this podcast is all about breaking down the complex, you know, taking business development out and roughing it up a little bit and really, you know, shaking things loose and most practitioners, most people who are, that were doer sellers in their firms have no, no formal training, no idea, no concept that there is the same thing. Yes, Sort of process one, two, three within sales as there is anything else they would do. I mean, you know, even when they're, they're delivering their services. So that's, that's really, that's really important here because these are oftentimes individuals, left brain individuals, architects, engineers, consultants, analysts, other individuals like that who, you know, really need some, some forum and framework and structure, and, and process in order to understand something and then be successful.

John Tyreman 6:50

let's dig into the sales process that you have outlined here. there's, it looks like there's four different kinds of conversations that can happen during this process. There's qualifying, there's discovery, there's proposal and there's negotiation. So let's, I guess let's start with qualifying. Can you, let's talk about qualifying conversations.

Mark Wainwright 7:10

Sure. You know, there's even before we get into those, John, there's just so many, if you just bust open our friend, Google and just Google, you know, the sales stages or sales process, you're going to come up with a ton of, of, of, you know, kind of Responses to that a ton of information and you may see some common themes, but you may not, you know, and then if your firm, has a CRM system, we've talked about CRM systems in the, in the past, the good and the bad, you've opened up your CRM system and it comes sort of out of the box with these things called sales stages. Right. And there was a con bond

John Tyreman 7:47

across the top.

Mark Wainwright 7:48

Yeah, right. The con bond across the top. And there's sometimes there's way too many sales stages. Sometimes there's way too few people don't really know what they mean. So there's a lot of people out there who have been exposed to the idea of sales stages, but they really just don't know what they mean. So what I'm going to talk through, I'll be as specific as I can, but I would tell you this, these are probably more general in, in sort of practice. And, what people really need to do is they need to understand how their business functions, what their typical sort of sales process is, how they, how they work with prospective clients from the very beginning to the contract, and then create and fit a, a sales sales process with sales stages in it and various conversations to that, right? Your CRM system should not be telling you how to sell your services. Exactly. You should have business processes in place that dictate whatever these, these steps are, but some of the ones that we'll talk about here are the ones that are most, most common, right? So, like you said, the very 1st 1 is qualification and qualification that it goes by a lot of different words. Some people, if they sort of tilt their head and squint their eyes a little bit, they'll look at this and they'll think this is a go no go step where they are going to, you know, pursue something or not pursue something. And I would say yes, but it's also a little bit. Difference. So qualification is that very, very initial step. And in this case, John, we're going to be talking about conversations. It's that very initial step that takes a lead and a lead is a, a maybe that has yet to be qualified and moves it into your sales pipeline from a, you know, from a nothing. To a, a, Oh, this, this, there's a, there's a there, there, right? So the whole goal of qualification is to determine fit. Can we be mutually successful together? Can we help them achieve what they want to achieve? The prospective client and is the prospective client ready to work with us to compensate us, to contract with us and kind of walk through this process together, So qualification, you know, simply put is just to make sure that we are compatible to make sure that, that we are, we are, you know, ready to, to work together and roll up our sleeves, and, and take whatever this, this need or this challenges. on together. the other point that I will hit throughout this entire thing Is that all of these are conversations, right? And we will hit again and again on this. John is that synchronous conversations are critical. And this very first conversation needs to be a conversation, particularly in the complex sale. That is, you know, what the professional services world is all about, right? The complex sale demands that each one of these steps is a synchronous communication. You cannot qualify or disqualify a prospective client through some emails unless You're not even in the same world, you know, if, if, you know, I tell people that I'm a fractional sales manager for professional services firms, and I get, you know, an email from an auto parts store that says, Hey, you know, we need a, you know, sales manager. I say,

John Tyreman 11:12

Hmm,

Mark Wainwright 11:12

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not the one for you, but I likely have someone who, who is, you know, those are easy. But typically if people have come to understand sort of the world I play in. We need to have a conversation in order to make sure that we're all aligned and moving in the right direction.

John Tyreman 11:30

Okay, qualification. Are we in the right ballpark? Are we in the same ballpark? And then, um, which leads us to your next stage around discovery. And I'm assuming that that is learning more. You know, there's there's some signals that they may be a good fit. If you go through those qualification conversations, Tell me more about discovery and what are, what's some of the kind of information that you should be seeking when you're digging deep?

Mark Wainwright 11:57

Yeah, so the, the right off the bat, the important point to make is that I do see these as separate conversations. I do see qualification and discovery as separate conversations. I think sometimes a qualification conversation, Is really important to have separate, have, have, you know, discreetly and separately, you know, 20 or 30 minutes of everyone's time, because you need to sometimes really assess whether or not this is a fit. Sometimes it's not immediately obvious. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer. To process and the discovery conversation is a more complex, more in depth conversation that actually needs some preparation. So by separating out those two conversations at the end of your qualification conversation, you can think about whether or not this is going to be a fit, particularly if it's. Something that isn't, like I said, screamingly obvious. And then the second conversation, discovery if you have it as a separate conversation, it gives you time to prepare, right? So that's, that's an important point to make. So the discovery conversation is about digging way deeper. This is about coming in, you know, with a, with a, a really strong sense of curiosity, coming in, prioritizing, Asking questions and learning and understanding, it's often a longer conversation. And if you are a single individual in your firm, and that conversation would benefit from other individuals in your firm, as well as other individuals from the client's firm, you can kind of bring Those folks to bear because inevitably these, these, these decisions are made by more than just two individuals. So this is an opportunity to bring them in. This is a great opportunity for everybody to start learning more and more about each other. And, And I'll, I'll touch on this a bit later, but in discovery, discovery is not the time for you to come in and show your slide deck to kind of list all your thousand services. It's really a time to be curious about someone else. And the interesting thing is, is that the questions that you ask in discovery can do a really good job of inferring your expertise. So you don't have to be boastful or explicit about your expertise. You know, we do this, we've done this for this long. Here's our, Here's our portfolio. Here's our resumes, none of that, but your, the questions that you, that you ask and your level of inquiry do a fantastic job of, of kind of just, just tipping your hat and showing your, showing your expertise. So that's, that's discovery. And the goal of discovery, you know, the goal of qualification was to determine fit. The goal of discovery is to get all of your questions answered to the point where you are now ready. to put forward some recommendations, right? And that again is a subsequent conversation. So nothing that we've talked about so far in these one, two, three steps, are the goal here is to close the deal, right? The goal of the first one is of qualification is fit. The goal of this, this next conversation is understanding. It's like we need to develop a deep understanding so that we are not guessing, assuming. You know, just running at this thing blind so that we need to ask the questions so that we are prepared to put forward some recommendations. So that's.

John Tyreman 15:14

That's discovery. One thing that I found in my experience when I have those initial conversations with prospective clients is the challenge that they think they're faced with sometimes isn't the challenge that they are actually faced with. Sometimes they, they'll come, with symptoms of the problem and think that that's the problem. But really, after peeling back the layers, you really find out that there is a root cause of those issues that needs to be addressed first. And so I think that's that's just kind of like one example of how that can play out to where, you know, if you build a solution around the symptoms, you're not going to solve the problem. Good. Yeah, well said.

Mark Wainwright 15:54

Well

John Tyreman 15:54

said. So your next step in this your next Series of conversations in this process, I should say, are recommendations. So let's unpack recommendations or I call this solution development. But, you know, tomato tomato, right?

Mark Wainwright 16:10

Well, the recommendations again, it goes by a lot of names. Sure. Like you said, you know, solution development, presenting solutions, proposals, all those all those types of things. So I sometimes I will use them interchangeably. I kind of like the word recommendations. Recommendations has kind of a drafty nature to it. and it also comes in with this sort of multiple, right? So proposal often sort of in the word proposal off often infers, this is final. There's one choice that take it or leave it. Right. So, so, you know, use those, use those words kind of inner interchangeably. But, but at this point, we have learned enough. We've determined fit. We've learned enough in discovery. And again, discovery. Is can be multiple conversations because you might need to talk with different people at the client organization. You might need to go back to them and say, Hey, thank you for that conversation. We had, we got a ton of stuff answered. We asked you a lot of questions. We appreciate your patience, but there were these three other things that we really need to. To resolve, for, for this, for these recommendations that we'd like to make, can you give us some clarifying information on, on these, these few things? So I think discovery can be. Multiple conversations, but suffice to say, you can get to a point through discovery where you're now making these these recommendations. And one little funny thing I like to do is any time I'm writing a proposal, writing recommendations, presenting things, and I find myself saying. We would assume this. We would assume this. We would assume this. I go back and I say, no, no, no, I can't do that. I need to turn that into a question and then pose that to my prospective client. I can't. We can't make any assumptions, right? There's no assumption. So we make sure that we've got all of our questions. Answered proposal recommendations, whatever you want to call them. This is continued conversations. This is not a PDF attachment to an email. We will get to that point where that's an important, important components of this. But right now we're still talking about conversations very early on. We want to present our understanding and just make sure everybody's heads are nodding. Right. Did we understand all of this correctly? Right. Cause this is the foundation. This understanding that we've created is the foundation of what we're going to recommend and everything has to be, you know, focused on, on the client. Again, John, we're not talking about presenting your 10 slides with your resume and your bullet points and everything else I have. And I don't think I'm an outlier in this and I will tell you this is kind of an anecdote. I have made it through a complete successful sales process. These sales conversations with. Clients that are current clients of mine or previous clients of mine, never having done the pitch. Never. I've never pitched. Right. It's just, I've never gone through the bullet points and everything else. It just didn't happen. It never came up. Just the conversations and the ease of, of how we moved through this whole process, reassured them. you know, kind of buoyed their confidence, in, in me. And, and I never had to, you know, go through all of the, you know, bullet points and resume stuff and experience and everything else. And frankly, the second you do that there, I start to roll back in their heads and they're like, Oh boy. And they just disengage, which is terrible. You don't want anybody to disengage. And it's not a good use of time either. No. So we're tightly focused on the client. We're going to, we're going to. Make sure that understanding is correct. And always at the very end of that, in that conversation, we say, did we get all that? Right. Right. Hopefully they're, you know, yes, no, or there's one little thing. Great. Okay. And then we present some, some recommendations to them. Typically, as we've talked about in the past, three options, we want to put forward three options. We want to make sure that these options align with the things that are most important to them. And if we sent, if we set some sort of initial pricing, you know, that, that range, that ballpark that we set. Upfront, we want to make sure that we respect that. Or if they have given us some, you know, like you said, budgets, we want to make sure we respect that as well in our, in our options, you know, what that sounds like to me is if someone says we have a dollar amount in our, in our mind, and it's this, we say, you know, in our, in our options, we'll always say, well, this is the dollar amount that you, that you provided. And these are the things that can be done within that dollar amount, right. For some additional. effort and, and, and, and dollars, you know, we can do this much, this much more. So there's another option, right? So we start working through these, these options. The goal of a proposal conversation is an acknowledgement or a verbal agreement that says, This looks good so far. Let's move to the next step. Again, this is not a close the deal. This is the point of the proposal conversation is to get everyone saying, okay, let's continue to move ahead because we're, we're not done yet. Right? Once, even if someone has verbally agreed to the proposal, we've, maybe we've presented our three options and they're, they've picked one or they're leaning towards one or two or whatever it is. The goal here is to get them to, okay, let's continue. Let's continue moving.

John Tyreman 21:30

And if folks want to dig deeper onto those topics, we do have a couple of episodes recorded, differentiate your proposals with a statement of understanding and pricing and choice architecture, help buyers make good decisions. So if folks listening, resonated with what you're saying, Mark, I would recommend go and check out those two episodes.

Mark Wainwright 21:48

Yeah,

John Tyreman 21:49

good.

Mark Wainwright 21:50

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman 21:52

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright 22:07

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman 22:16

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright 22:22

and now back to the show. so that's, that's our proposal conversation. And the, the, the last one, John is negotiation. And I think any, any well formed Well sorted proposal needs to be negotiated. If you find yourself in a situation where it's not, maybe you left money on the table or maybe you guys were just completely out of sync and they said no, or they said yes immediately. So I think negotiation always is an important part of it. And negotiation really, talks through any issues that they see, anything they're concerned about. And again, the goal of negotiation is to get the deal done, right? Is to get the contract signed. But in order to get that contract signed, you have to make sure that the, the legalese is, is aligned with whatever everybody wants. I mean, I have, you know, I have a fairly standard sort of agreement or contract that I use. And it's funny how different clients, and typically it's their sort of legal representative, whether it's someone inside the firm or outside the firm. It's funny that certain, you know, Lawyers or their legal folks, they, they love to kind of just pick on different parts of, of different contracts. So people get obsessed with certain clauses or the fact that there's stuff in there or not stuff in there or whatever it is. So it's kind of funny and you have to walk that through. And again, this is really important. You know, as a conversation, what I have found is that a lot of people start firing back these documents that have red lines and corrections and additions and, you know, deletions and everything. And all of a sudden things get really confused. So you have to say timeout, timeout, let's just talk. Because with all of those red lines and those edits and everything, you know, there's some level of detail behind that. You know that there is, there's a reason why they're doing it. Right. And a lot of times that's tied to risk is that, well, this presents way too much risk for our firm or, you know, this doesn't clarify enough, this particular point. So great. We can, we can do that. And when you are coming in and negotiations, there are, there are opportunities to mitigate risk. You know, there are, and for as crazy as it sounds for high dollar complex professional services, you can offer money back guarantees. You know, I do this frequently when I talk to prospective clients and I can tell they're really close, but there's still some reservations. You know, because when I work with firms, I do it pretty intensely and, you know, there's, it's not just risk that they're not going to achieve what they want to achieve, but they're, they're, they're letting loose this sales manager guy on their firm and they're, you know, they're a little bit nervous about it. So, You know, a lot of times I will mention that, look, we're at the very end of this conversation here. I can sense that, you know, we're all moving together. We're, we're, we're in agreement. Here's, here's the last little thing that I'll, that I want to make sure I mentioned, because you know, I stand behind what I do. If in the first 90 days, we're after that 90 day mark, if we have a conversation and things are just, have just not, You know, gone well, we haven't synced up, things aren't moving in the right direction. People are not kind of processing and understanding this. I'll just write you a check and give you everything that you've paid me to date and we'll, we'll call it, we'll call it done. So that's one of the tools that, that I use. And I think that that lets people just, right, their back is kind of tense. They're a little bit nervous and they just relax and they exhale a little bit and they say, okay. So again, the goal of negotiation here is to get that, get that contract, get it across the line. And sometimes it just drags on negotiation, get it across the line and get it contracted.

John Tyreman 26:06

So to recap the four stages, qualification and the goal of qualification is to see if you're a good fit. Are we in the same ballpark? The second conversation is around discovery and that the goal of discovery is to understand Your counterpart, your buying counterpart. The third series of conversations are recommendations. You might call it proposal. And the goal of that is to develop a solution that is mutually agreeable, that addresses all of their concerns. And then finally, the fourth sales conversation or series of conversations is around negotiation. And the goal there is to close the contract, is to come to a solution that everyone can agree upon.

Mark Wainwright 26:46

Yeah, it's, you know, and, and again, people will, will, we'll search for various types of sales processes and they'll come up with a bunch of different answers. But, but I think, if you, if you look closely enough, there's some common themes that I've that we've talked about here today that You'll see in just about anything you come across out there. So, so that's the conversations, but this next thing, John, and I know this is a whole, this is a whole other, this is a whole other chunk. This is a whole other part of this conversation is, how we actually, how we move this through, how we make those things look graceful. Right.

John Tyreman 27:23

So those are the stages on paper, but it's not a two dimensional process. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of things that you as a salesperson can do to help move, move buyers through this process. So let's unpack that a little bit. So you've got a, you've got a list here of some things, that business developers can use to So Buyers through this process.

Mark Wainwright 27:49

Yeah. And there's eight of them. And I know that we're coming up on time here, John, but, but we're just going to, we're just going to put our heads down and we're just going to go through this. So with the power of editing, we can make it, we can make it seamless. Yeah, right, right. I think it's entirely possible that we will unpack some of these things in the future. So, just kind of stay tuned for that. So I'll list the eight real quick here. first is curiosity and inquiry. Second is low self orientation. Third is focusing on results. Fourth is synchronous. Conversation five is seeking and building understanding. Six is mirroring and reflecting seven is seeking and gaining permission, and then eight is guiding, confirming, advancing, and connecting that one's kind of like the, that's the kitchen sink one that I just kind of threw everything into. So that's the eight. And I think we can just kind of breeze through these. Sure. Fairly quickly at this point. Good, good. All right. So, so curiosity and inquiry. We've talked about this. This is again, these points, these eight points that I'm making are things that will stitch all of this together. And meaning that all of these should be present throughout the entire. Throughout this entire process, right? That's a good point. There's, there's just not, these, these eight things don't find themselves just in different, different stages. They are, they are the thing that, that, that, what is the, the word just, it just came to me, this thing. What is it a, is there a waft and weck? Is that, is that new for you? Yeah. That's Oh, you know what that is? That's, you know, when they're weaving cloth, when you're weaving cloth, they have caught, they have the, they have the strings that are intention. And then they're moving the little thing back to moving that little thing back and forth together, a little yarn back and forth. So they're creating this, creating this, this cloth here. And that's what we're doing. John, we're creating the cloth. Our sales conversations are the strings intention, and then we're weaving it all together. So there you go. I just. Brought in another crazy mind blown. Boom. That's that's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So curiosity inquiry, right? It lets us put aside our expertise just set it aside for a minute and just be super curious and super focused on on Them on what's going on in their world. It presents this great posture of openness lack of ego, you know, a desire to really learn, which is great. and that's really wonderful for a prospective client to perceive. They want to know that we're curious and really focused on them. I mentioned this before that being super curious. infers and asking great questions, infers our expertise through really good questions rather than that, rather than us just feeling like we have to be explicit about it, about, you know, showing them our resumes and years of experience and all of that. So curiosity and inquiry get, get woven through all of this, every single stage, right? I mean, even in, even in negotiation, right? You need to be curious. You know, you need to understand

John Tyreman 30:44

why those lawyers are redlining everything,

Mark Wainwright 30:46

right? What's your concern here? You know, break it down for me, right? What's, what's the concern. All right. So the second one is low, low self orientation and this, this pulls a little bit from the, the, the trust equation that was, comes from the book, the trusted advisor was written by David Meister and Charlie green. And the trust equation, you guys can look it up. it's, it's, I think a really nice, articulation, particularly for, you know, the technically minded professional services people out there. The trust equation is great, right? So it talks about the components, you know, all the things that contribute to trustworthiness, right? So we're not talking about trust. We're talking about trustworthiness. Those are different things. Okay. So the, the, this is how the equation plays out in the numerator above the line. We have credibility. We have reliability and we have intimacy. So the numerator, the components are credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, right? And we're hopefully scoring along here. So credibility are, you know, I can trust what, what, what they say, you know, that they are, they are, they have the resume, they have the experience, all that sort of stuff. Plus reliability, reliability means that you have their back. that you, that they can, they can believe you at your word, you know, that sort of stuff plus intimacy, which is a kind of funny word to use in a professional sense. But intimacy is professional intimacy. It's professional closeness. It's that, you know, I can be open and honest with this person. I can be transparent with my challenges, my problems, all that sort of stuff. so score all of those. over the denominator self orientation, right? So high score in the numerator, low, low number in the denominator creates a high sense of, or a high trust, high level of trustworthiness. But you know, low numbers in the numerator with a high number in the denominator, self orientation, which means that we're just going to talk about ourselves this whole time. That's the sleazy car salesman sleazy car salesman gives us a low score when it comes to trustworthiness. So there you go. There's the, there's the quick, the quick trust equation. People can dig into it, but I think that's critical. Just staying focused on that. Self orientation is one of those things that when we, without even knowing it, without intending to, when we get in uncomfortable situations and when we are unclear about things, our default setting is to talk about ourselves because we just don't know anything else. So that, that kind of works against us with this whole trustworthiness thing, even if, even if we don't intend to, even if we're not needing to be boastful or, you know, oriented on ourselves, it just happens because that's our default setting. So something to consider.

John Tyreman 33:43

And so maybe some of these other tools can help you in those situations where you don't know what to say, pausing, mirroring, curiosity, so forth.

Mark Wainwright 33:51

Totally. All right. Next one. is where are we? 1, 2, 4, focusing on results, focusing on results, right? So focusing on results gets everyone really staring at what's most important here, not focusing on deliverables, not focusing on hours, not focusing on days, not focusing on 1, 2, 3, focusing on what's the big thing we're all chasing after together. And keeping that kind of in clear focus, because if you are not focused on results, the alternative will be your prospective clients will start to micromanage and focus on the wrong things. They'll focus on, Oh, we were a day late with this deliverable. Oh, this was, this happened, this happened, whatever. Where's that little thing? What's going on here? So they're, they're focused on the wrong things. Everyone, if everyone's focused on the big picture results and there's different things that happen on the pathway to achieving those results, then everybody can flex with it and say, look, we are still moving towards those results. We're, we're, we're on, on pace, we are on schedule, everything is fine. So we're, we're good. Plus it, you know, if we're focused on results, it lets us measure how, how we're doing, that's how we're going to achieving those results is how we're going to measure this. It's not these little incremental things. So that's important.

John Tyreman 35:05

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. and now the fourth one that you have on this list and you've hammered it a few times synchronous. Conversations. Let's talk about the importance of synchronous conversations in a time where you can have so many asynchronous conversations. Yeah. When is

Mark Wainwright 35:21

the last time, John, that you were able to resolve a really complex issue through a series of text messages?

John Tyreman 35:30

Not on text. Text is one of the worst. Never. Yeah. Email, text, no.

Mark Wainwright 35:34

Yeah. So, so, you know, even texts are, are even almost synchronous, but they're still not, right? No. Oh. Plenty of room for interpretation. And, Oh, I sent that text and they're not getting back to me. So, you know, it's just, it's just so hard. Right. And particularly in this, this complex world of, of selling professional services, which is hard, it's hard to buy. It's hard to sell. Why add a level of complexity and confusion to it with asynchronous communication? So all this needs to be synchronous, right? We need to have a series of conversations from the very beginning to the very end. So we're able to avoid misinterpretation. We're able to, bring in greater clarity. You know, cause I think most buyers, you know, are operating a little bit of the fog and we can start to clear away that fog and help kind of guide them through this whole thing through these, Synchronous conversations. The other, the other thing that, that, that there's a few other components of this, just making sure that we're having conversations elevates this whole process beyond just a series of, you know, kind of half, you know, half baked emails, right? So it elevates this to, this is important. This is important to me. This is important to you. Let's have a conversation. The other great thing, you know, there's, there's so many, but Synchronous conversations let you show that, let you see that body language, you know, back and forth. If people are agreeing, if there's nodding heads, if there's concerns, if there's furrowed brows, all those things. And then if you are in conversation with someone, you know, throughout this whole, whole process, you are constantly getting really valuable pre contract early leading indicators of what it's going to be like to work together. Right? So that's, that's important. That's a really good point. Super important. Right? So you're, you're understanding how they like to communicate, how they, how, what the back and forth is like, how you're, you know, just, just how sort of, simpatico or aligned you are, you know, together. And that's really important. You can't, you can't really tease that out of a bunch of emails. That's, that's really difficult. So that's, that's important. And if things aren't going the right way, you need to. So look at those signs and say, Hmm, this is not going to be a good fit. So that's the importance of synchronous communications.

John Tyreman 37:49

Excellent. And so the next one we've talked about a bit, earlier on in the discovery and qualification conversation, seeking and building understanding

Mark Wainwright 37:58

right throughout the entire process from the very beginning, from the very first qualification to negotiation, you know, in qualification, it's, have you worked with organizations like ours in the past and how did it go? There's an understanding question that happens really early on. I asked that in my qualification conversations in negotiation conversations Understanding can be I understand that you have concerns about this particular thing Can you tell me more about that? So all throughout the entire process It's you're you're gathering information and then you're constantly sort of Trying to achieve understanding so that everybody's all, all together. the other really important thing about understanding, we've hit on this in the past, is that if you come into any one of these conversations with a really healthy, you know, posture of just wanting to understand and wanting to explore that it helps others feel heard. Yes. Right. So, so, so people experience those conversations and leave those conversations thinking, wow, they just really, they were just really curious. Mark was really curious. John was really curious about us and, he wanted us to articulate the things that are going on in our world. And he felt those were important, right? He felt that us kind of uncovering these, you know, root causes like you mentioned, or you know, whatever else is going on, he, he, he brought more sort of weight and credibility to those things that we're kind of sensing might be a problem. So we feel heard. So this is, this is super, super helpful. So that's, that's understanding.

John Tyreman 39:42

And you can do that and you can help folks feel more comfortable and vulnerable and elicit more understanding with some of these, more tactical empathy tools. I read a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, and he mentioned some of the ones that are coming up on your list here, mirroring and reflecting. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Mark Wainwright 40:01

Yeah, that's the, that's the next one. Mirroring and reflecting, there's a bunch of different components and definitions of this. Mirroring, mirroring and reflecting can be Anything from mirroring your posture again, this ties into the synchronous communications, you know, either if you are, you can do this anyway, you can do it on a telephone too. you can do it in person in a, in a, a video call in a synchronous communication. You can mirror their body language, you know, if they have a particular expression or if there's words they use, or if there's just a kind of a body language posture they take, you can mirror that, which means that you are understanding that you are processing that and you're reflecting back to them, you're letting them know that their, their posture, their approach, their demeanor, is, is, is a good one. It's okay. And it, and you can create a sense of familiarity and comfort there. So that's kind of mirroring. So the whole reflecting is constantly taking an information, reflecting back to them and say, did I hear that correctly? Right? Can you, can you further clarify this? The other last component of this that I want to touch on is ties into this whole understanding thing is that when you do your followup in any step in this entire process, you reflect back to them everything that you heard, and you can do that in an email. So it's just this, maybe bullet points. Maybe it's a brief narrative that you reflect back to them. And I understand you said this, you mentioned this, it's worth noting that. You know, this thing is, is going on, there's these other points. And then your final little sort of question you put in that email is, did I get all of that right? Right? So that's that, that's that whole mirroring and reflecting thing in person. It can be done. And then in your followup, it can be done as well.

John Tyreman 41:46

Those are great points. So mirroring, mirroring and reflecting, mirroring their body language, some of the words they use. What I like to do is pick up on keywords and turn that into a question and, and then use, use a pause. it gets them to think. And so the seventh, Bullet point that you have here is seeking and gaining permission. So why is permission important? Well, this is important

Mark Wainwright 42:10

enough, John, that somebody wrote an entire book about it called permission based selling. and I'm, I'm, I'm spacing on the author right now. We'll, we'll, we'll link to that, link to that in the show notes in, in the, in the notes, but yeah, this is an, this is an important thing. And, and permission is always presenting the opportunity for someone to opt in. Thank you. Meaning that, you know, before you ask any questions throughout any of these stages, you know, if you don't mind, I've got, I'm just really curious about you and your organization. I have a number of questions to ask. Is that okay? Question mark, right? And people are generally agreeable. So they'll say, yeah, and then you can move on right before sending them something. Maybe they've, maybe they've said, Hey, that particular thing that link to that, sounded, that link to that podcast or that article you wrote, that sounded like something that we'd like to read. You can say, great, I've got, I've got the link. Can I, can I send it to you? Get them to kind of opt in to it, right? Setting next step, something that's always difficult in the series of conversations because we want to tie them all together. Hey, can we set a next date and time for our next conversation? Is that, is, is that okay?

John Tyreman 43:30

While we're on the call. Hey, while we've got five minutes left on our call, let's, is it okay if we set date, a date for our next conversation?

Mark Wainwright 43:38

Right. Can we, can we do that right now? Can we look at calendars and this and yeah, you know, but hopefully they, they agree to it because they understand that keeping, keeping this thing moving is important. So. Is that okay? So very simply put, right, we're constantly seeking and gaining permission. We're presenting opportunities for people to say yes, you know, to kind of, kind of opt in. And it's not a trick, it's just kind of, that's super important for people to be constantly opting in and they're displaying to you in a very explicit way. That they want to keep moving forward. So that's great.

John Tyreman 44:08

Excellent. And then this last bullet point here, and I I'm, I'm feeling the flow here, the choreography guiding, confirming, advancing, and connecting. It seems like this, this last one is it's your job as a sales professional. Just keep things moving.

Mark Wainwright 44:22

Yeah, totally. Totally. So, so guiding, with the whole word of, of choreography, right? There's often someone leading this buying complex professional services for all of you business development folks out there, whether you're a do or seller or someone else buying your services is hard. It's complex. So you need to be a guide. You're not a guide. Pushing. You're not forcing. You're not demanding or done it. You're not doing any of that. You're just being a really, really helpful, helpful guide because it's hard. Because you've likely done this. You've sold your services more than your prospective client has bought them. Chances are pretty good. So it's important for you to be the lead and a good lead lays out a rational, reasonable process that you can walk through together. Confirming is clarifying how far we've gone so far together. Every time you're interacting, the first part of your conversation was, Hey, we had that last conversation last time. That was really great. I appreciated that. I reflected back to you. I shared my notes. I shared my understanding with you. Did we get that right? Now let's move forward. And we do that again and again and again. So we're always kind of backstopping our progress so that we don't slide backwards at all. And sometimes you'll find yourself in a situation where new, new decision makers or new individuals join the conversation. So if you talk with one person and now there's three on the next call, you know, I'll make sure that everyone has read the summary that I provided ahead of time. And I'll check right at the beginning of the conversation. Okay. I provided that understanding. Did everyone read it? Was it all clear? If you haven't read it, let's read it right now. Right. So then they'll go and they'll search in their emails and they'll open it up and they'll read it. It, that time is worth it. Right. It seems silly, but that time is worth it. So make sure we're all in lockstep together. And then, and then the next thing is advancing, right? Making sure that we're always setting these nice incremental steps and these incremental goals, right? If you. Kind of understood when I talked about the sales conversations, this series of steps, we're always moving forwards,

John Tyreman 46:34

but

Mark Wainwright 46:34

we're, we're not always like the, the goal of qualification, like I said, is not the contract,

John Tyreman 46:38

right? Right.

Mark Wainwright 46:39

We're always just want to make these nice incremental steps forwards. The goal of qualification is fit. The goal of discovery is understanding. So we're always setting and achieving these kinds of incremental moves forward. So everything is just. Flowing, which is great. The nice thing about new business opportunities that, that continue to advance and continue to move is that they just have this nice energy and momentum, right? They just keep moving. And the ones that stall were like, Oh man, now there's. Ghosting and all kinds of other stuff going on. So what a drag and the way that we do that is we make sure that we are connecting each one of these, each one of these conversations, each one of these activities with one another. So we're always setting next steps. We're always sort of chaining like links in a chain, each one of these conversations, one to the other. Right in referencing back to past conversations to referencing back to past conversations. We're not just assuming that everybody on the call kind of gets it. We're confirming that. we're making sure that we're all aligned and moving forward together, but we're always connected. We're always connecting everything because the broken chain. The broken communications, the broken links in this whole whole process here creates confusion and the fog starts to settle in and all of a sudden you think, I don't really know where we are right now.

John Tyreman 48:01

Mark. I think that these are all really great pieces to the puzzle and I think it was worth going a little long on this episode so that we could cover all of this because we're taking bits and pieces of different. topics that we've covered on this show in the past, and we're putting it together in, in a format where I think this is where a lot of folks will get stuck is how do we implement, how do we do, how do we execute? And so I think you laid it out very well, talking about the different conversations, talking about how they're sequential, they need to be synchronous, and there are a bevy of tools at your disposal to help you move those conversations forward. So, this has been a great chat and folks that are listening to this. Thank you so much. and stay tuned for the next episode to come out, which we'll talk about contracting and finalizing that contract. We will, John, I know this was a lot to,

Mark Wainwright 48:56

to, to dig through, but I think we, I think we did a pretty good job until next time, until next time.