Episode 94: Dan King – Placing Guardrails for Better Sales Decisions

Dan King  00:00

So in this digital age where we’re in front of computers all the time, we sometimes forget, especially when we’re selling — and I do this too — we forget that we’re talking to a human being. We do all the time, right? And so there is actually a greater requirement, I think, as salespeople, we have a greater obligation to remember our humanity and the humanity that people that we speak with, and they’re going to recognize it. If you do this well, if you do this powerfully, you will earn more money. And so it’s, but it’s so easy in this age of Zoom and social to forget about the humanity underlying all sales.

Bob Woods  00:33

Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast! Featuring the top voices in sales and marketing. Join hosts Brynne Tillman and Bill McCormick as they discuss the best tips and strategies they are teaching their clients. So you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Here are your hosts Brynne Tillman and Bill McCormick.

Bill McCormick  01:11

Welcome to Making Sales Social! I’m Bill McCormick.

Brynne Tillman  01:14

I’m Brynne Tillman.

Bill McCormick  01:15

Brynne, who’s joining us today?

Brynne Tillman  01:16

I am so excited to have my new friend Dan King, who is brilliant at helping creators, CEOs, the CEOs with all the great ideas, actually identify the right ones and execute them really for dramatic growth and I’m gonna let him continue the introduction of how he helps, but I’m so excited for our listeners because they are going to be blown away by Dan. Hi, Dan.

Dan King  01:43

Hello Brynne and Bill. And yes, let’s bring the excitement today. Let’s have a lot of fun. So, I’m a co-founder of a company called Fireside Strategic and we have a video podcast of our own. We’ve interviewed over 100 CEOs and we were reflecting on what was the experience of, what could we learn from interviewing 100 CEOs. And we realized that there was a, we noticed like two categories. Most CEOs were either what we would call engineers or creators. 

The engineers are like the professional CEO who comes in after the founder gets a company going. They’re very good at building systems and making the trains run on time and optimizing everything, right? They move the levers, but then there’s the creator CEOs, these are our clients. These are people that are less motivated by dials and numbers and more motivated by ideas and people and mission. They’re the people that change the world. That’s why we’re excited to work with them. But every gift has a shadow. 

So every creative CEO and every creator CEO has a billion ideas and possibilities. Some of them are good, some of them not so good, right, and they get lost in those possibilities. I know this because this has been my journey in business as well. And so the key to truly dramatically growing your company, we’ll get into how this matters in a sales context in a bit. But the key to dramatically growing your company is determining what’s the whitespace for your company? What is the place where you can serve at the highest possible level at the highest possible price point, impacting people in the most powerful way. And when you find that, that one possibility, everything changes. You will earn more, life will be easier, and your sales team will be less stressed, by the way, because you’re not going to be chasing the wrong prospects for too low a price point, everything is going to change. And so we help creator CEOs find that whitespace and grow into it.

Brynne Tillman  03:29

That’s fantastic. Bill, what’s our first question?

Bill McCormick  03:33

I can’t wait to dive into those two. (Brynne: Yeah, I love it.) Our listeners are thinking okay, what about those two? But before we get to that, Dan, we ask every guest the same first question, what does making sales social mean to you?

Dan King  03:46

To me, it is so easy to lose track of empathy. So in this digital age, where we’re in front of computers all the time, we sometimes forget, especially when we’re selling and I do this too, we forget that we’re talking to a human being. We do all the time, right? And so there is actually a greater requirement, I think, as salespeople, we have a greater obligation to remember our humanity and the humanity that people that we speak with, and they’re going to recognize it. If you do this well, if you do this powerfully, you will earn more money. And so it’s, but it’s so easy in this age of Zoom and social to forget about the humanity underlying all sales.

Brynne Tillman  04:25

We love that and you know, authenticity, the integrity is critical. And in social selling, we talk a lot about it’s really important to treat the person on the other side of the message the same way you would if they were on the other side of the table. You know, so just because it’s on a social media platform doesn’t mean they’re all leads. You wouldn’t walk into a conference and say, “Everyone in this room is a lead,” right. So I love that you said that they are people.

I am excited to dive deep into the creator CEO, and that’s who you’re primarily working with. I’m going to… I think that’s where I fall. I’ve got a bajillion ideas. We have an operations manager who brings me down to reality often but how do you wrangle, you know, a CEO or business owner, even if it’s, you know, a small business owner of a small company that’s got all these ideas, a little bit of shiny object syndrome, right? How do you wrangle that? Initially?

Dan King  05:35

It’s a great question. And I’m going to say that it’s a three-step process. It begins with the sales process. And it begins with building their awareness, a little bit of education, although people that have been running a company for a while they kind of get this about themselves, ultimately, that they are a little confused, they’ve yet to step into the place of highest power for their business. So it begins in that sales process and helping people — if that’s the truth, if it’s not the truth, cool, right. But if it is the truth, helping them realize that so that’s step one. 

Step two is finding the whitespace through phenomenal strategic market research. So I’m fortunate that on our team, we have a world-class, my business partner is a world-class strategy consultant. She worked in that domain at the highest level, in her previous life, and she brings that expertise to doing phenomenal research to understand what is your competition doing at the moment? What is the space? What’s the gap that your competition isn’t finding that you can carve out, that is highly profitable and that will actually save you time? Because you know, most of our clients are services businesses and they have too many clients at too low a price points. Not that they don’t have enough clients, they actually in many cases have too many and the CEO is running in a gazillion directions exhausted all the time. And when I’m in sales conversations, they’ll say, “Oh, I don’t have… this sounds great. And I don’t have time for this.” I’m like, the fact that you don’t have time for this is why you need this, right? That’s step two. 

And then step three, once we really found that whitespace, it’s, and this is where I come in, I’ve trained as both the salesperson and as an executive coach, we carve out within the broader whitespace, a place where there’s actually variety. And you may be saying to yourself, “Well, I thought you were just talking about focus, Dan.” You create an umbrella under which there is actually room for variety. There is one organizing theme and usually language that resonates with the target audience. But within that, there’s all kinds of possibilities. One way to think of it is underneath singularity there’s multiplicity. 

So as an example, our tagline is we help creator CEOs direct their time team, and energy toward dramatic growth. That’s a singular focus. When I meet a creator CEO, they know exactly what I’m talking about. But we have clients that range all the way from one of the world’s largest financial institutions to a friend in Staten Island who has a 10-person company. They’re all creator CEOs. And so there’s a ton of variety. How we work with one of the world’s largest financial institutions is very different than my friend in Staten Island, right. But there’s a singular focus. So we’ve embedded variety within the singular focus. And one of the keys with creators CEOs, you can’t tell them you must focus, you must suddenly change from your entire life of running around after billion possibilities to you must do one thing that’s not going to work. They may claim that it’ll work even like it won’t. But what you need to do is embed within that focus, variety, then step three. 

Bill McCormick  08:45

So it seems to me like what you really, what you’re really talking about is simplifying the sales process. You’re giving them options, but you’ve given them focused options in order to better control that creative mind that you’re dealing with.

Dan King  09:02

Guardrails, exactly. Guardrails are a really powerful way to think about it, right? And it takes some discipline because, “Hey, this person called me up, they’re a prospect. They’re kind of interesting, but oh, I’m doing my due diligence, and I realized their budget is only 10,000.” You committed to a minimum deal size of 30,000. Are you really gonna go after that $10,000 claim? it’s going to be a lot of angst, it’s going to destroy the feeling of spaciousness that you want, it’s going to lead to you running around like a chicken with your head cut off, right? And so guardrails are really important for creator CEOs.

Brynne Tillman  09:40

So I love this. Now, you know, as someone who relates deeply to this, right. We test things, we decide, “Do we like this? Was this the right price point? Was it not the right price point?” And then we go to the whole team and you know, we discuss this and then I go to like seven friends and say, “What do you think of this?” And so everyone then comes back with a different thought, a different perspective. 

How important is it, number one, to get clear? And how do you — I’m gonna go back to the word — wrangle, right? So now we have this idea that we’re gonna go ahead with. And now there are 17 different opinions on what that idea looks like. So how do you then bring that in again, to make sure that what you’re launching is what the market wants?

Dan King  10:31

The most important thing is if the research is sound, the market will want a version of it, you kind of know that going in. That’s why we do the research. Exactly how it all looks. Yeah, I can’t pretend though that the research is going to tell you everything about how the journey will be because it’s a rich, complex journey. And it could evolve in all kinds of different ways. And so once you, if the direction is strong enough, things sort of lock into place where all right now you experiment and you actually can let the creative mind run wild a little bit within the predefined guardrails. So in other words, you may find, oh, it’s actually gardeners in Staten Island who are the best fit, you didn’t know that but gardeners within Staten Island were one of the groups underneath the broader umbrella. Do you follow me?

Brynne Tillman  11:20

So it’s about really niching in and making sure that you’re going after the… so the research is, it comes down to the research, so without giving away your secret sauce, because I’m certainly (unintelligible), what are some things that CEOs can do for research? So these business owners are like, “Okay, I bought in what Dan is saying makes tons of sense. But I don’t know where to begin.”

Dan King  11:45

I’m going to give you one big thought on that. And that’s how we have been taught to do market research, I’m not going to say it’s wrong, it’s somewhat wrong. So if you go to every single business 101 services, business 101 class, or course out there, they’ll say you must find your target market, pick an industry, pick an avatar, it’s not totally wrong, that is usually what happens is it produces very analytical thinking. And we try to force ourselves into a category that sometimes works, but it often doesn’t. And it often doesn’t for creator CEOs who must find meaning. 

So for them, it’s not just the analytical thing an engineer CEO can, it’s more likely to work for but for a creator CEO, what’s so important is that you find the category you pick meaningful, you need to feel joy and energy, when you announce to the world, this is who we serve. And so instead of thinking along the lines of these predefined categories, create your own category, or even better look at humanity. Okay, look at this sort of human experience of being with various potential clients and spot patterns. So no one was running around the world serving creator CEOs, there may be a few other companies that do it, haven’t found another company that uses that category, we created our own category, rather than looking at some list of industries and saying it must be gardeners and Staten Island. If you follow me.

Brynne Tillman  13:16

Yeah. So when you’re doing this research, and you’re looking at what competitors are doing, or the gaps, what they’re not doing, where the whitespace is, how much of the whitespace is influencing go to market, and how much of it is, hey, this, you know, the CEO in their company is just really, really good at certain areas that are underserved, like when you’re choosing that?

Dan King  13:40

All of it. So what we have found is with every single client, the whitespace is — and I didn’t do a great job defining it, so your question’s great. With every single client we’ve ever had, there is a, the whitespace is like the promised land, it’s where your company serves at the highest possible level. It’s where you’re, you, you’ve uniquely understood enough about yourself as a CEO and your team to really understand the gifts, and you’re juxtaposing that with market need, market demand, right? So this promised plan, if you’ve never felt it, it may seem a little aspirational. It may be like, “Well, we’re not that different.” Yes, you are, you just haven’t done the work to find out yet. So market research is its introspection and it’s exploring the world. It’s, but it’s marrying all of it.

Brynne Tillman  14:25

I love that. I think that that’s amazing. So I want to move this just quickly into the marketing side of that. So now we’ve found our niche. This is what we’re really good at. This is where the whitespace is, we’re going to go to market, how do you market that without alienating the other clients that you’ve had or getting in the way of attracting some clients that may not 100% fit that but would be a good client?

Dan King  14:57

Can I challenge the premise of the question a little bit? (Brynne: Yes.) So, I’m not sure we don’t want to alienate some people, even some existing clients. This is the thing, most creator CEOs, and I count us amongst that crew, sometimes I’ve had the wrong clients. So when you’re not in your whitespace, you’re probably serving people to lower price point, who are not really a fit for you who may even, I mean, we’ve all probably had this experience, both as salespeople and as CEOs, we look at the calendar one day and we think, ooh, this client’s there, ooh at some level, we deep down, no, this isn’t it, right. And so your whitespace is this every client that’s in your whitespace, you should look at the calendar, and you should be excited to speak to them. 

When I saw this conversation on my calendar this morning, I was excited, right? This is how, intuitively, I kind of get this is a space where I’m supposed to be. So we should, in my opinion, actually be alienating some people because it’s in their interest to be served by others, not us, if they’re not in our whitespace. So that’s one thing I’ll throw out there. 

I think a second though, is what’s interesting about picking an unusual category, in your whites, the whitespace gets us to not a predefined category, it gets us to a new category, and very often people aren’t used to being spoken to like that before. So when I meet a creator CEO, no one’s called them that before. It resonates with them on a different level. And so it’s actually more powerful for bringing in the right people and more powerful for excluding the wrong people.

Brynne Tillman  16:33

I love that. And when I think about this, I’m going to just bring it back to us because that’s where my head is but when I think about this, we have some clients that want a magic button, they don’t want to do the work. And then there are some clients that are so excited to do the work, that they’re taking it to different levels. So, you know, for me, I just had sort of this mic drop aha moment that we have to talk to people that are willing to put in the work because we don’t sell, you know, magic pixie dust. (Bill: No, no (cross talk).)

Dan King 17:05

What, you don’t? I already bought it from your sales page.

Brynne Tillman  17:09

Well, that’s what they’re hoping. Now, but that’s interesting. And I love all of our clients. I mean, I have connections with a lot of them but there are a lot of folks that will say, you know, this LinkedIn thing isn’t working, I reached out to five people and I didn’t get anything, right? And so you’re like, okay, I need, you know, we need to attract salespeople that are willing to do the work because then you’re gonna be blown away at how successful it is. So that was a good lightbulb moment just for us. So thank you, (Dan: You’re welcome.) 

So I’m sure a lot of our listeners, whether they’re entrepreneurs, or they’re CEOs of, you know, with a 10-person company, or maybe you’re in a C-suite, or even a sales leadership role in a company that is feeling slightly misaligned. If you’re CEO, or you are this creator person, you might have had some amazing aha moments too in this, I think so. (Dan King: I appreciate that.) Yeah, that was really kind of cool. Like, I have little, like goosebumps right now. And like I want to get, I want to finish this up so I can get started on fixing…

Bill McCormick  18:18

We are coming to the end of our time. And Dan, so we really appreciate all you shared with us and taught our listeners and us. How can folks connect with you and stay in contact with you?

Dan King  18:32

So what I recommend is you take a look at our homepage, it’s firesidestrategic.com. Take a look. You can learn a little bit more about what we do and if it looks interesting to you, there is, a couple of buttons there to apply for a conversation with us if you want to explore what this could look like at your company. So pretty simple, firesidestrategic.com is the place to go. 

Bill McCormick 18:51

Right, and folks can find you on LinkedIn?

Dan King 18:52

They can. Yes, I may or may not check it. But no, no. So, someone will check the LinkedIn account. You can find me there too.

Bill McCormick  18:59

We can help you with that. So Dan King, thanks so much for being with us on Making Sales Social and thanks, everyone for watching and listening and we’ll see you next time. Just remember this week as you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social. Bye-bye, everyone.

Bob Woods  19:16

Thanks for watching and join us again for more special guest instructors bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategy that will set you apart. Hit the Subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social podcast. 

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