Tom Searcy is a nationally recognized author, speaker, and the foremost expert in large account sales.
On this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Tom explains why you need to leapfrog forward via distinct competitive advantages rather than trying to grind your way to sales success.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- HuntBigSales.com
- Tom on Linkedin
- @tomsearcy
- Book: RFPs Suck! How to Master the RFP System Once and for All to Win Big Business
- Book: How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett: Lessons from the World’s Greatest Dealmaker
Transcript
Will Barron:
Do you want to know how you can get a crazy amount of leverage and advantage in a competitive sales situation? Then this episode is for you.
Will Barron:
Hello, [inaudible 00:00:13] I am Will Barron and welcome to today’s episode of The Salesman Podcast. On today’s show, we have the legend that is Tom Searcy. Second time round for him. He is the founder of Hunt Big Sales, which you find over at huntbigsales.com. That’s exactly what we’re talking about in today’s show so let’s jump right in. Tom, welcome back to The Salesman Podcast.
Tom Searcy:
Glad to be here. Good to see you.
Why Being First Isn’t Always Best · [00:40]
Will Barron:
And good to see you, mate. I’m glad to have you back on. I’m going to pose you a question here and we’ll see where we go from this, because it could… I don’t know the answer to it.,We could go many directions. Why is being in first place your worst enemy when you are aiming for explosives success within sales and business?
Tom Searcy:
It’s interesting, I spent a lot of time with some of our customers this last year and they were looking at how they were doing and they were measuring themselves as market share against customers. Or I’m sorry, against their competitors. And they were, say, 2% better or 1% better, 5% better. And the issue was all of their thinking and all of their strategy was about, “How do I keep myself ahead of the other people that are in the marketplace?” instead of saying, “How do I blow the marketplace away?” Because someone else, somewhere behind them, is not asking themselves, “How do I get better by 1%?” they’re saying, “How do I leapfrog those guys that are up ahead of me and then blow them away?” So no one’s trying to just win at the finish line, they’re trying to come back from 50% behind and jump over you. So if all you’re trying to do is incrementally move forward, there isn’t anybody behind you that’s trying to incrementally move ahead, they’re all trying to kill you.
Are You Truly a Market Leader In Your Space? · [01:50]
Will Barron:
So I’ve got just cliche examples of this, of why didn’t the Hilton Hotel chain create Airbnb? Why didn’t taxi companies… and they did here in the UK. Well, I’ll use this as an example of Uber clearly exploded, took over the world, it happened in San Francisco in the States before it moved over to the UK. I think there’s regulatory rules that slowed it down in its domination. And now I just use Uber, I don’t bother with local taxis. But local taxi companies tried to create apps, they’re all terrible, they all kind of did what Uber did, but really poorly, so no one bothers with them.
Will Barron:
So we get it on the corporate scale. Let’s scale this down, I guess, for the B2B salesperson listening, and can this translate to, for me, medical device sales, I’ve got Yorkshire as my target market. I’ve got a kind of group of 20 surgeons, say, that I’ve got an influence, be in front of, add value to, and win business from. In the companies I’ve worked for, it’s typically 50/50, the market share between the company I’ve worked at and the… in specific areas, the market leader. But it’s pretty much 50/50. And you could guess either way, depending on the location within the UK. Does this work the same way, in that we need to not suss out how to get 1% so we can claim that we’re the market leaders, we need to suss out ways to get 90%, is that what we should be aiming for of all of this?
Tom Searcy:
Absolutely. All right. And I don’t know exactly, but I’m going to try and apply, and you’ll have to sort out the application for your marketplace, but let’s just take medical devices. When you are at one device versus another device, you are at a quality of performance comparison. My device is better than another device, I go to a surgeon and I say, “Let me show you how my device is better than the other device.” And at some point, it becomes a horse race of, “Let me tell my story and show the other… my competitors not being as good and at cetera.” What if I go in and I go into the finance door and I say to the finance side, “These devices are almost exactly the same. Surgeons shouldn’t be making the decision on this, this should be made by the finance department.” And so this is a completely financial choice, not a surgeon’s choice. Why would 50% of the surgeons in the UK choose this device, and 49% choose this device? It’s only because the surgeons in your area have all agreed that they are good devices.
Tom Searcy:
However, financially, they’re not the same devices. And it’s not just the installation of the device or the longevity in what it takes in installing the device, but it’s the recurrent maintenance and the amount of time it takes for the people for the ongoing care, and all of the different elements of doing this, the financing of the device, all of those kinds of complaints. So let me show you why my device is a better choice for you, as a hospital system, rather than as a surgeon. Because the surgeon element, that right there is a preference, not an issue of true quality. So take it out of the hand of the surgeons.
Tom Searcy:
Now that’s a leapfrogging strategy. And all of a sudden the decision making has been taken away from the surgeon and put into the CFO. Now, most sales people are afraid talking to the CFO. So you go to the CFO and you’ve changed your buyer, you’ve changed the criteria of choice, and you’re having a conversation that is completely a different conversation.
Will Barron:
Did we talk about this on the last episode we recorded? If you can remember off the top of your head?
Tom Searcy:
It’s possible that we did. There have been a few drinks since then for both of us.
Framework For Using Leverage to Get a Competitive Advantage · [06:00]
Will Barron:
Because the reason I ask is, because I don’t think we did, but what you just described is what we were doing. Like, as in uncannily, it was exactly the same as what we were doing. We were offering a managed service across the whole of gynaecology, urology, general surgery, rather than just dealing with individual surgeons or individual business units in hospital, we were going to a CFO, offering them a managed service. There’s multiple elements to this, so the monthly fee rather than capital expenditure. Here in the NHS, in the UK, it seemed to work out and they preferred that model.
Will Barron:
Kind of even going deeper into what you’re saying then, Tom, we were offering, within that managed service as a financial sale, benefits in that any equipment that got broke, we would replace within that budget. And it totally aligned up more so and did what you were describing. And it just seems crazy that you… I kind of used an example of my past, you laid on top of it, just off the top of your head, it shows how skilled you are at this, a practical way of implementing something. And then that’s what we were doing and having great success with it. So is there a framework for this? Because you came up with that very easily, and I’m sure I don’t want to stroke your ego too much here, Tom, but is there a framework that we can all use as opposed to being a genius like yourself?
Tom Searcy:
Thank you for the compliment. So yes, there is a framework. First you start out with who has the real problem? All right. Once you’ve established the difference between those things that are commoditized and those things that are actually problematic, once things have been commoditized and it becomes a “mine is better than yours, no yours is better than mine,” and it falls into some sort of a spreadsheet of evaluation, you know you’ve been commoditized. And so the story, just because mine is better than yours and how many are there, then you’re never going to talk to somebody who has a bigger power position.
Tom Searcy:
So when we talk about price and quality and service as being the lowest level of decision making, and that the higher level of that is time and risk, right? And the whole idea of a different level of organisational power, all right? Of performance, okay? So then you’re going to talk to those people that have those issues about time differently. So down here, time is how do I get it in my hand? Up here, the issue of time is, how does it impact my overall revenue or cost structures to have this something done?
Tom Searcy:
Let me give you an example. So what if the time is that I have all of the pieces that I need to have on the shelf, all right? And they’re all there, everything I need, but I don’t order it and I don’t pay for it until I use. It’s consignment based utility. So not order on as I go, but order as I use it. Well, a surgeon can’t make that decision. A CFO makes that decision. It’s a time-based decision, right? But it’s a surgeon doesn’t care, and understandably so, walks into the rooms they’re assigned for, for that day, and just says, “Hand me the device.” And if they can’t have the surgery on Friday, they say, “We can’t get you scheduled until Monday.” All right? Which means that room is now held up and it’s not generating income or it is costing the system additional money and all the rest of those kinds of things for no value, when someone else could be in that particular room, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the surgeon doesn’t care and doesn’t have the power to do that. So you’ve changed the dynamic of time.
Tom Searcy:
If you go down here on performance level, right? This person doesn’t care. Organizationally, we care. So you have to change the nature of what is, what we would call, the lens of who the person is going to do. It’s a wire frame conversation. And we’re always looking for what is the problem of the highest level person, that whole, “How do I get there” is what we refer to as laddering up. How do I get to the person at the highest level on… Well, I can’t get to them referring to the same problem at the same ladder level as I’ve been talking to. Mine is better than yours, they’re not going to… CFO or even the head of surgery is going to say, “I don’t make those decisions. I don’t care. I’ve got bigger issues to deal with.” So it’s a wire frame issue. There are other wire frame issues that go to that.
“In one way or another, you are selling money. But money and culture, money and quality, money and value, are not mutually exclusive. They have to align. And it’s your responsibility as a professional salesperson to figure those things out.” – Tom Searcy · [11:35]
Tom Searcy:
People say to me, “Well, this is surgery,” or, “This is…” some other kind of business, and they say, “Because it’s that kind of business, you can’t get it to money. It’s something more important than that. It’s something to the heart. It’s something to the culture. It’s something that…” Look, it comes down to this, in one way or another, you are selling money, all right? And money and culture, and money and quality, and money and value, are not mutually exclusive. They have to align. And it’s your responsibility as a professional salesperson to figure those things out.
Tom Searcy:
Consignment is an issue of value to the surgeon. The surgeon wants to walk in on Friday and wants to perform that because it’s better for the patient to have the surgery on Friday than to sit in the hospital on Saturday and Sunday for no benefit to them, other than the device wasn’t ready for them. It hadn’t been ordered, it wasn’t available because we didn’t have it on the shelf, because we didn’t have con consignment inventory.
Tom Searcy:
You can tell I’m passionate about it because my company is Hunt Big Sales, we only want to talk to the senior executive person and we always look for what are the kinds of problems that those people can recognise. And when they recognise it, they never lose their concern about their end customers or about culture. They’re not bad people or bad operators, but they have responsibility to translate those things to money.
How to Identify the Decision Maker, Influence Them, and Eventually Make the Sale · [13:10]
Will Barron:
So I want to ask you in a second, Tom, how we uncover these nuanced problems if we are not visible… if they’re not visible to us right now? Whether it’s more questions, better questions, questions with different people, we’ll come onto that in a second. But you have a, perhaps a couple of examples of this were seemingly you’ve spoken to someone who couldn’t quite see where the value really lies with their product, and you’ve helped them uncover it? Just because I know there’s going to be sales people listening now that say, “Well, that’s great. Well, Tom, it’s great for you guys, but I’m selling a widget.” And I guess there’s a business skill element to this of being able to go deeper. There’s also probably a mindset and a people being set in the ways element to this of not going deeper than what they’ve been taught in the past about their product or service. So do you have a couple examples of perhaps a person who, or a company that thought, “Well, we only do this,” where in fact they did X, Y, Z, and they didn’t realise it?
Tom Searcy:
Problem is I have too many examples. So I’m trying to think. First, start off with the idea that you see yourself as commoditized. We have clients that are commoditized down to nuts and bolts, literally that level. Cement makers, who truly pour cement to make roads and are involved in that or asphalt, and they say, “Listen, it’s a state controlled bid and it’s a sealed bid programme. All of us use the same rocks and stones and all the rest of that stuff.” And we help them by saying, “Who is the person or people or committee that is going to make this decision?” And, “Well, we all use the same stuff,” and we say, “Okay, you all use the same stuff. So that’s the commoditized part of it. What’s the problem of the decision makers?”
Tom Searcy:
“Well it’s a committee. Okay, the committee created an RFP. That RFP had to make certain assumptions.” What were the assumptions that they made? “Well, they made the assumption of labour, they made the assumption of materials, they made the assumptions of certain kinds of things.” What assumptions do you know that they didn’t include? All right? So you need to work into the conversation what those assumptions did not include, that you are going to bring value to the conversation and have those included into the RFP process. And in doing that, you can say, “Okay, everybody answered the RFP, but in doing this, we’ll be able to demonstrate our value.” That’s a very low level, high commodity kind of organisation. And there are other organisations that we work with that are-
Tips on How to Use an RFP to Differentiate Yourself · [15:55]
Will Barron:
Let’s just stop here a second, Tom, because RFPs are something that come up regularly when I’m engaging with the audience. Had to deal with them with the NHS, but we would want to create the RFP, in a perfect world, from our product specifications so that only we can meet them. So that aside, perhaps we haven’t managed to do that for whatever reason, but clearly that’s the best case scenario. How do we practically hand in an RFP and show that we aren’t like everyone else? Do we hand in a document with it that says, “This is what you’ve asked for, this is what we’d recommend that you’d also ask for”? I don’t know, that seems a bit kind of pushy and you might get people’s backs up. What, practically, does it look like when you hand in an RFP and that separates this organisation that you’re helping versus the competition?
Tom Searcy:
Well, thank you for the easy question. I wrote a book on this called RFPs Suck. Truthfully. It’s true, you can get it on Amazon. I wrote it a long time ago. Well, no, three or four years ago. Because they truly demonstrate someone’s lack of understanding of what their own problem is, because they’ve over-commoditized. But here’s three ways that you can do this. One, it is that the RFPs… no one reads an RFP front to back. No one in the buying company. Some people will have three out of the six units that they’re responsible for reading, another person has a different two units that they’re supposed to read and et cetera. And so you’ve got a message that needs to be in every segment of the RFP and it’s the unit, but you’re going to… And you think to yourself, “Well, there’s only a pricing segment,” and the answer is, “Yeah, but you’ve got your own difference that you need to work into each of those sections.”
Tom Searcy:
There’s an overview letter, you’ve got one page, and it says, “This is what you need to be looking for,” and it’s got a couple of bullet points that says, “You’re going to find this in every page or you’re going to find this in ours, that it will add a perspective to the RFP that you provided. And so you will find this throughout what it is that we have to offer.” Of course, everybody says you’re better off if you help sculpt the RFP or write the RFP or get access to the people that write the RFP. We all know that. I mean, that’s no surprise. And it’s true, by the way. I mean, the reason it’s cliche is because it’s completely accurate. I would say that you can change the mind by saying everyone’s RFP that you will receive, these are the seven things that we will, all of us that answer this, will have, and we’re all going to have a good enough value that you don’t need to read them.
Tom Searcy:
So by saying that, you’ve just told them the people that you’re going to get, they’re as good as we are. So you’ve already picked them out, they’re all going to hit the minimum threshold. What’s this RFP really about? It’s really about these three things, and we’ve given you a couple other to add. You will, having been said, “Look, this is going to come down to this.” Yes, it’s going to come down to money, but here’s a couple of little things that you forgot to add in the RFP. You get them wrong and, honestly, you’re going to get all sorts of little change orders that are going to bug the heck out of you. That’s for the RFPs that come in that are a little different than the RP. And everyone’s going to say to you, “Well, that’s not the way that they like it,” et cetera. Well, it’s real simple, you’re going to lose an enormous number of the RFPs that you didn’t have any control on.
“If you don’t know somebody on the RFP, why are you filling it out? You’re going to lose. Here in the United States, the fluctuation is between 88% and 93%, if you don’t have a background and strong contract of the RFPs.” – Tom Searcy · [20:39]
Tom Searcy:
Here in the United States, the fluctuation is between 88% and 93%, if you don’t have background and strong contract of the RFPs in the United States. That’s statistical. It’s an 88 to 93%. If you don’t have control, or if you don’t know somebody on the RFP, why are you filling it out? You’re going to lose. Now, that’s a broad spectrum statement, so there’s some industries where that’s not the same.
Will Barron:
It was all awesome. There was one thing that stood out in my mind then, a super easy question to ask, which gets rid of all the bullshit, for want of a better phrase here, Tom, and that is, “What is this RFP all about?” If you ask someone that question, they’re going to tell you probably what you don’t want to hear, which is what you just aligned with that statistic of, “We’ve got the person that we want to work with, we’ve just got to legally go through this process.” And I face this loads of times, and when you’ve got good relationships with the surgeons, like I did, they would say, “X is going with this company. We’re going with this company. This is happening. We’re only doing this, don’t really want to waste your time, it’s the NHS, it’s a government organisation. We need to get three quotes, five quotes. We need to bring you all in.”
How to Uncover the Extra Value Your Prospects Expect From Your Sales Interaction · [21:45]
Will Barron:
And so it saves you a load of time, right? Because that’s the most precious thing we’ve got as salespeople. So bringing things back around, how do we… and you’ve somewhat answered this, but I just want to dive into it a bit deeper. How do we know or work out or assume or uncover what extra value that we can offer? And this might be on a salesperson’s perspective, it might then level up and we can ask our sales managers about it, it might be something that we have to go to then sales directors and bring people on board to try. And this could be a national sales meeting for different size companies to try and suss this out and give ourselves a competitive advantage. How do we suss it out? Is it more questions and go down the rabbit hole of, “Well, everyone offers this, everyone offers this, everyone offers this,” until you get a light bulb moment? Or is it better questions?
Tom Searcy:
Well, here’s the problem that you have, is that you know the answers of this because you’ve done it so many times. And in the book, and I don’t make any money on the book, honestly, there’s 12 questions that you’ve got. But what you just said is really accurate. You have to ask more questions that simply say, “What do you think everybody in your finalist…” And that’s what they’ve got, is their finalists… “Has to have to have made it to the finalist list?” And their answer is, “Well, they have to be within, let’s just say, my cement group.” Because I was trying to make it as low commodity as possible for the sake of our conversation.
Will Barron:
And just to say this, Tom, and I don’t want to knock you too far off your tracks there, but in medical devices, seems like sophisticated product, but there’s so much regulation that they are very similar anyway. So from cement to highly developed glass optics, there’s not that much differentiation in that market either.
Tom Searcy:
We could do the same thing with highly customised service in the IT industry and I could walk you through the same thing. But let’s just say that it’s going to be cement for this thing. There’s going to be a distance. Okay, look, they don’t want to pay what would be buried in there of shipping and handling greater than 20 kilometres, Right? So if they’re farther than 20 kilometres away from the work site, that’s going to get knocked out. And if they’re here in the United States, it’s unionised versus non-union, they have to be either one or two on the work site. We won’t have anybody on the work site who is greater… has less than five years of experience. And so they’ll go through and then say, “Okay, don’t fill it out if you don’t meet these particular requirements, because we’ll just throw it out.”
Tom Searcy:
And you can ask that question and just say, “This is going to take me a lot of time for me to fill it out. What’s going to kill me? It’s going to waste my time.” And then because there are things in that RFP that are the yes/no, you will not make it to the finalist. RFPs, like I said, no one reads the RFP from front to back. No one. They overlap, right? In parts. But the front to back, would you? I wouldn’t. But what they-
How to Successfully Differentiate Yourself and Your Offering · [25:09]
Will Barron:
Well, let’s leave them to one side for a second, Tom. So let’s say it’s just a competitive scenario with no RFP, perhaps there’s very little… you’d be better to come up with a product that fits a scenario, but perhaps there’s very little legislation around the service that’s going to be implemented, or regulation that it needs an RFP. Perhaps we’re going into a room, one after another, with four or five other competitors. And let’s make this somewhat real, we’ve got two or three days to prep for this big sale, or this big meeting, anyway. So we’ve not got months to do extra market research that we don’t already know. What do we need to go into that room with? What document do we need to send them after the meeting? What do we need to do to really separate ourselves?
“The issue is past the people that you’re selling to. So you’re not selling to the company about what they need, what you need to know is what their customers need.” – Tom Searcy · [26:11]
Tom Searcy:
Great question. The issue is past the people that you’re selling to, all right? It is their customers. So you’re selling to the company about what they need, but instead what you need to know is what their customers need. So in your case, medical devices, we say, your patients or the physicians who will be treating your patients, or the family members who will be dealing with your patients, have five needs around your patients that will dictate whether your patients believe that you are providing good care, whether they are providing…. that there is appropriate pay, whether other people about the quality of working with you. And let’s talk about what those five things are and how they reference that.
Tom Searcy:
Because of that, we’re going to focus our conversation, not on our capabilities of providing that, because ours are phenomenal devices, we own half the market share, competitors in the market share have dramatic enough ownership of the market share that they have credibility to talk about their device. But let’s talk about what we deliver past the product. Then your ability to offer in-depth discussion and focus on the patient. So at that point, we’re up the discussion, right? We’re past the product, service, and quality, and we’re up to what we talked about, the time, power performance, and financial yield. Those kinds of discussions make your presentations. So your research is less about the company and more about the end user. We could do the same thing with cement, we could do the same thing with IT services.
Offering Value to Your Customer’s Customer is the First Step to Differentiating Yourself · [28:17]
Will Barron:
So the question that we need to ask ourselves to get all this started, and you may be able to refine this further, is essentially what can we do for our customers’ customers that our competition can’t? Is that the starting point?
“Your ability to access your customer’s customers should be your differentiator. That’s where price becomes a non-issue against revenue generation. That’s where you are a multiplier rather than incremental.” – Tom Searcy · [28:34]
Tom Searcy:
Absolutely. And through that, because their revenue… the people to whom we are presenting, their revenue is not based upon our cost performance, it’s based upon their ability to access their customers. And it’s from that ability to access their customers, that we are in fact a differentiator. That’s where price becomes a non-issue against revenue generation. That’s where you are a multiplier rather than incremental.
Will Barron:
Okay. I like this. I think that’s a real practical… that’s a snippet in itself that’ll go out on Instagram and Facebook of just a real practical step that everyone could take when they’ve got a meeting in two days, a week, in 35 minutes of the drive into the meeting and they think, “Oh crap, I’ve not thought about any of this. I need to up my game.” This is perhaps something that can tickle some competitive advantage in their mind.
The Perfect Mindset For Selling to a CFO · [29:20]
Will Barron:
But what happens, Tom, go back to the beginning of the show here, from a mindset perspective, when someone’s listening to the show… and I’ve been in this scenario, when they go, “Oh, I’m comfortable talking to a surgeon about a physical widget. I’m not comfortable talking to a CFO about these concepts. I’m not sure about the language they’re using. I don’t want to look stupid and then ruin the whole potential account.” I guess some of it’s a practical element of what we need to do to brush up on our business skills and then what do we need to do to brush up on our mindsets, to enable ourselves to feel that we are capable of going for these bigger deals and pushing about, speaking to people higher up the corporate food chain?
“If you are able to demonstrate that you are a partner in increasing your client’s growth, they’ll become a partner in increasing your growth.” – Tom Searcy · [30:43]
Tom Searcy:
The mindset is that the lower you are on the food chain, you are focused on the shorter period of time. You’re focused on, “What do I need in a day, in a week, in a month?” The higher up the food chain is, you are focused on a quarter, a year, and the higher up the food chain, you are focused on money, less on saving money and more on generating money. So no matter where you are in the discussion, if you are about saving pennies, that doesn’t impact the company to whom you are presenting enough that you distinguish yourself from the people at the lower level. If you are able to demonstrate that you are a partner in increasing their growth, you’ll become a partner in increasing your growth.
A Courage-Based Approach to Selling Up the Food Chain · [31:30]
Will Barron:
And for someone who’s listening, Tom, who isn’t quite sure where they should be speaking to on the food chain… and you give some good analysis there of it, is there a… For example, if I can provide a percentage of turnover increase on last year, if it’s a public company and it’s public, the data, on the revenue, I should be speaking to X person versus if it’s only a small percentage I should be speaking to Y person? Am I being too analytical about all of this, or is there a structure of I’m going to save them, I’m going to make them, I’m going to do this, so I need to speak to the CFO, I need to have that meeting with them? I feel confident about knocking on that door, metaphorically, because I know I can do this value. Is there a structure of numbers that we should be looking at and then where we should be pitching our pitch?
Tom Searcy:
It is a courage based approach. What it does is that you call the CFOs… whoever there is, their aid, their secretary, and you say, “My name is and I wanted to have an independent meeting. We are in a sales conversation about saving money and providing a service. I want to have a conversation with you about generating money and providing X amount of dollars to your organisation. And I’d like to have a cup of coffee to talk about that method by which we will do that, and provide a wire frame or a discussion model, that will explain that. I will not be speaking about our performance of our product or service and I will not be speaking about price.”
How to Close a Meeting with an Influential CFO · [33:06]
Will Barron:
Is that a script that you would use? Because I know a lot of people listen to this show and they will very literally do what is said on the show. So let’s say a public, kind of like, here the UK, like a [inaudible 00:33:18] 100, 250 company. So a reasonable size company here in the UK. Would you be asking a CFO for a coffee, or would you be asking them, for example, for a sit down at the desk, kind of meeting?
Tom Searcy:
If it were me, I would ask for a coffee or a lunch, depending upon what I got in the temperature inside of the 15 to 30 seconds of the beginning of the meeting. They are often… they represent themselves, and if I have the intuition, anyone who has the courage to make that phone call, will have the intuition to read the temperature of that phone call. This is a statement of courage. I’ll just tell you, in US dollars, this system, I have personally generated, and my clients have generated, $10 billion in US currency selling, using a full system of what… that part and all the rest of the other pieces doing it. What does it take? It takes a lot, it takes a process, and takes a lot of the things that we’re talking about. But one of the core things it takes through all of it is courage. You can’t make that call without courage, and the understanding that you will get hit back some of the time.
Will Barron:
I’ve been there, Tom. I’ve been there, mate.
“When you say to someone, “I have a million pounds in my back pocket, are you interested in a million pounds in the next quarter of pure profit?” There are few CFOs that are not curious over lunch or a cup of coffee to hear about it. Because a million pounds of profit is hard to come by. But you’ve got to be able to back up it at the meeting.” – Tom Searcy · [34:50]
Tom Searcy:
Yeah. And I mean, but when you say to someone, “I have a million pounds in my back pocket, are you interested in a million pounds in the next quarter of pure profit?” there are few CFOs that are not curious over a lunch or a cup of coffee to hear about it. Because a million pounds of profit is hard to come by.
How Important is Courage in Sales? · [35:50]
Will Barron:
And you’ve got to be able to back up the meeting, clearly, there’s no point… You can do more harm than good, I guess, if you meet and you can’t provide what you’re suggesting. But saying that you can, but someone’s listening to this episode and they’re struggling to differentiate themselves, is the courage a big enough lever here that that can be your differentiator? Versus, I know I was competing against a bunch of nerds on my local patch, they didn’t like to cold call, they didn’t like to just literally cold walk into an operating theatre and say hi to a surgeon. And I knew that was one of my competitive advantages, and to see the C-suite, and to meet with CFOs and to… if I was meeting with CFO, I’d bring in our CFO, I’d bring in product specialists, I’d bring in other people and they would do… I would just sit there and not say anything at this point.
Will Barron:
But one of my best advantages was, in hindsight, as we’re saying this was, I don’t know I would use courage, however I’d use just blindness to the fact that perhaps I shouldn’t have been in the room. But I’ll use that word courage. Can that be a competitive advantage of someone who’s listening to the show? Should that be something, a skill, that they should be working on from a business context? And is that going to earn them more cash, more commission, help them close bigger deals over the next kind of 12 months, 24 months, moving forward?
Tom Searcy:
It is. You do have to show up with an understanding of how that all works. You can’t wing it, you can’t fake it, it could be this amount of money. You have to understand how their business works for their end customers. One of the failures of sales people… and I’ve done this, I’ve failed this way, you’ve failed this way, is spending more time understanding how their business operates on an internal basis, than understanding how their customers lives operate. And so I want to know how do I save them money or work through their lives or do the things that are going on in their side, instead of saying, “Look, you serve an end customer, and that’s where your revenue is generated,” I’m going to figure out them and how they interact with my prospect and be able to say, “Look, solve their problem and let’s figure out how to make you margin over here and then take that margin back,” and then I can go to the CFO and say, “I offer you a way to do that.”
Tom’s Go-to Resources For Getting Better at Account Management · [38:30]
Will Barron:
Makes total sense. Final thing on this, Tom, and we’ll come on to your books, your everything that you offer, service-wise, in a second, but are there any more resources that you’d recommend to the sales and podcast audience on account management, on speaking with higher level individuals than perhaps they have done in the past? Is there anything you could recommend on that front?
Tom Searcy:
Well, of my own stuff, go to Amazon.com and all of the stuff that’s there. I’ll tell you, one of the things that I really like is I like The Challenger Sale. There is a book out there called The Challenger Sale, I think they do a great job of talking about it. Challenge for it is it is built for much bigger companies, so it’s harder to apply it. So if you are the member of a bigger company, it will make more sense to you, you’ll have more resources to build it. But there are good nuggets in that book that you can use. I think that Seth Godin has good ideas and stimulates good thinking and I’m a real fan of what he does. So I would just leave those ideas and I think that they are great second and third levels of ideas.
Will Barron:
And just as Seth Godin, a thought process, a thought game that he has, which really impacted how I put the podcast together, the fact that I did it from the perspective as a salesperson and multiple levels deep of, it is purple cow kind of thought exercise, if you see a field full of because, who gives a shit? Field full of cows, you drive past them a lot. I went to uni in Wales here in the UK and it was just field after field of… mountain after mountain of cows and sheep. But if you saw a purple cow, you’d slam on the brake, you’d be, “What the heck’s that over there?” And you’d pay attention to it.
Parting Thoughts · [40:47]
Will Barron:
So a lot of this differentiation is not just how do you twist a check box in an RFP, it’s how do you be a purple cow that people can’t ignore? And clearly it’s crazy difficult. Because if it was easy, everyone would do it, then everyone would just be in a normal sea of cows. But he’s got a book, I think it’s called the same, I think it’s called Purple Cow, which is very thin, very easy to digest, and I’ll link that and show notes with everything else as well. But with that, Tom, for everyone that you just blown the minds of, of sales nation, where can they find out more about you and everything that you offer to both the corporate and everyone else as well?
Tom Searcy:
Huntbigsales.com. So huntbigsales.com, and Tom Searcy… if you just go to TomSearcy.com, or on LinkedIn, you’ll find more information on all that. You’ll find Tom Searcy if you just search me on past felons… No, sorry. No, if you hit Tom Searcy on searches on any of the search engines, that’s… I shouldn’t have said that last thing, that might be something that they only… that they only remember.
Will Barron:
Well, I won’t link to that page in the show notes. I will link to everything else in the show notes, over at salesman.org. With that, Tom, pleasure as always, mate. Happy to have you back on in the not too distant future. I feel like we only really scraped the surface of a lot of this. There’s a lot of rabbit holes to go down. Want to thank you for your expertise, mate. I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.
Tom Searcy:
Thanks as well, truly my pleasure. Thanks so much.
