Episode 313: Detach from What the Prospect is Worth to You and Attach to What You are Worth to the Prospect
In this episode, host Brynne Tillman presents a transformative approach to sales by emphasizing the importance of focusing on what you are worth to the prospect rather than what the prospect is worth to you. This insightful discussion challenges traditional sales tactics and introduces a more client-centric strategy.
Brynne explores the concept of detaching from personal sales goals and instead prioritizing the needs and value for the prospect. By adopting this mindset, sales professionals can enhance their social selling, email campaigns, and overall outreach effectiveness. The episode highlights the “ask offer ratio” and offers practical advice on creating compelling content that resonates with buyers.
Listeners will discover five essential elements for successful social selling content and learn how to build genuine relationships with prospects through valuable and engaging communication.
View Transcript
Intro:
0:00:13 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing and business. Join Brynne Tillman, Stan Robinson Junior and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the making sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI.
0:00:54 – (Bob Woods): Start your journey for free by joining our resource library.
0:01:07 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome to the show. We’re going to talk about how to detach from what the prospect is worth to you and attach to what you are worth to the prospect, especially when we’re social selling. But I think this should absolutely be in every area of your professional life. So what does this actually mean? It means that we are attached to doing the right thing by the client. When we care about the solution more than the sale, we are going to make the right decisions all the time.
0:01:47 – (Brynne Tillman): So here’s the thing. As a salesperson, we’ve got these KPI’s. Or if you are a coach or an entrepreneur, you know, you’ve got your own professional goals. But when we focus on that, when we focus on what that prospect might be worth to us as a client, before we even know what it is that they need or want, we’re doing them a disservice. And we’re creating a bad reputation for ourselves. You know, it’s like walking into a car dealership, not asking one question and saying, hey, I wanna put you into this Corvette. And then when what they really need was a minivan. Cause they’ve got three kids at home, right? I mean, I know that sounds like a very simple story, but when we show up to a client meeting and we have what we wanna sell them in mind, we’re gonna absolutely do a disservice. So let’s talk for a moment about how do we do this? How do we show up as value?
0:02:54 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, number one, when we’re on LinkedIn or social selling, or your email campaigns, or any outreach, you want to make sure that the agenda is going to land in their lap with them saying, boy, this is interesting. This is something I’m interested in. So when you send an email or a message that says, we’ve helped 55 million customers do X, Y and Z, let’s set up a time. There’s nothing in it for them.
0:03:28 – (Brynne Tillman): You think there may be, but they get 20 of those a day when you send a connection request, and when they connect, you immediately say, hey, let’s jump on a call and see if I can help you the way we’ve helped other people. It’s just screaming that you want to make a sale. But if we kind of turn this upside down, really think about this from another angle, that our sole objective is to bring them value, even if they don’t buy from us.
0:04:04 – (Brynne Tillman): So I want that to sit with you for a minute, that their exchange with you, whether it’s a conversation or a Zoom call or even just a message on LinkedIn that you’ve mastered the ask offer ratio. So what is that? So I don’t know if you have read gap selling by Keenan. It’s an excellent book and it really helps you to sell better. But he talks about this concept of the ask offer ratio, and I’ve kind of adopted this for social.
0:04:41 – (Brynne Tillman): But ultimately, the ask offer ratio is this. I am asking you to invest your time in exchange for my offer. My offer might be to read my email. My offer might be to watch a video. My offer might be to connect with me on LinkedIn. But whatever my offer is comes with a price. And the price is their time. And time is the one resource we can never get back. So it’s important after they’ve consumed your content that they don’t feel like a, it was a bait and switch that you try. You wanted to look like you were networking, but really you wanted to sell them b, which is neutral, meaning you didn’t make an impact, didn’t create a conversation, and it’s just another connection notch on your LinkedIn belt.
0:05:43 – (Brynne Tillman): Or three compelling. And compelling means that we’ve got them to move from lurker to engager. They liked, they reacted, they responded. Ultimately sharing that they’re there, they are coming out of the woodwork and there’s a tiny raised hand. Right. I am interested. When you have created this compelling moment, you’ve earned the right. They have said that this was worthy of my time. So what does it take? Well, when it comes to social selling content.
0:06:26 – (Brynne Tillman): Content going to go through the five elements that it takes. But I’m going to say that generally there are two ways we earn the right to get the conversation. One is through a referral, and the other is through content that converts content that’s meaningful. You can still mess it up. You can provide valuable content or get a recommendation or referral, or an introduction into someone and then you can still pitch too soon.
0:07:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So that’s why put a posting note on your, on your computer screen that says, detach from what the prospect is worth to me and attach to what I am worth to the prospect. When we can do that, we earn the right to get the conversation. We earn the right to get the business. So let’s go back to the five things social selling content needs to do. And by the way, this isn’t all content. You can have events, that’s content. You can create a poll, you can talk about a one on one meeting that you had with someone that you’ve been connected to for years. Right? There’s so much content that you could put out there that isn’t social selling content. But what I’m talking about right now is social selling content. Five elements.
0:07:55 – (Brynne Tillman): Number one, you have to resonate with the buyer. There is so much content out there, it is absolutely crazy noisy. So when they’re scrolling, they immediately have to say, yes, this is for me, that is the first thing that it needs to do. Resonate with them. For technology CFO’s, that’s who you’re selling to. The next thing it has to do in the same line is create curiosity. So five mistakes technology CFO’s make when doing X, Y and Z.
0:08:35 – (Brynne Tillman): Five techniques CFO tech of technology need to do when doing XYZ. Right? So we’ve created curiosity and resonated with them, right in the first sentence. This could be also an email. It doesn’t have to be content. Right? So we’ve done that. Number three, remember this is for social selling content. Number three is we have to teach them something new. If we are talking about something they already know, they’re gone.
0:09:04 – (Brynne Tillman): There needs to be this. I haven’t thought of that before. That’s number three. Number four is what you just got them to think about. What the thing that you just taught them needs to get them thinking differently about their current solution. This is moving them closer to your solution. Instead of leading with, hey, we help people do this, we’re leading to our solution by resonating, creating curiosity, teaching something new that gets them thinking a little bit differently about their current situation.
0:09:46 – (Brynne Tillman): And then number five is creating that compelling moment. That’s when you’ve mastered the ask offer ratio. We can’t start a conversation with someone that we don’t know that they’re there or that has not responded to an email or a message. So here’s the bottom line. I mean, it’s really this simple. Even though I’ve made it kind of long, is that we need to again detach from what the prospect is worth to us and attach to what we are worth to the prospect.
0:10:23 – (Brynne Tillman): And when we do that, we earn the right to get the conversation. And if we continue that through the whole sales process, we earn the right to get the business. Thanks so much for showing up today. I am Brynne Tillman with Social Sales Link. You are on the Making Sales Social podcast. If you have not subscribed yet and you found value in it, please subscribe to our podcast. We share insights every week, short insights on how to grow your business.
0:10:56 – (Brynne Tillman): And we have an interview series where we bring in some of the best minds in sales and marketing. And if you have questions, things that you would like us to talk about on our podcast, answer your questions. Feel free to reach out to [email protected] with your question, and we will be sure to acknowledge that either one on one or on our podcast. Thanks so much for showing up today. If you are here live, this was a whole lot of fun. If you’re in replay, just drop us a little note. And by the way, we have https://socialsaleslink.com/resources library where all our podcasts live, as well as ebooks and an enormous amount of other valuable resources.
Outro:
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