Greg Nutter, Best Selling Author, Management Consultant
Greg Nutter is a management consultant who helps business owners and senior sales executives solve revenue growth problems through direct, indirect, or multi-channel sales models. He is also the author of the Amazon Best-Selling Book, “P3 Selling: The Essentials of B2B Sales Success”.
With over thirty-five years of experience, Greg has worked with a wide range of companies to develop strategies, programs, processes, and tools to grow revenues, enter new markets, increase sales consistency, and develop skilled sales, channel, and management personnel.
In addition to his work with start-up and small-to-midsized companies, Greg has had the unique opportunity to contribute to the success of many global Fortune 500 organizations in the manufacturing, distribution, services, and technology industries.
He has also had the opportunity to coach and train over 1,000 sales professionals and offered his expertise on a wide range of sales, sales management, and channel management topics through hundreds of executive briefings, interactive workshops, and keynote presentations throughout North America, South America, Asia Pacific, and Europe.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-nutter/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/p3selling/
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[00:00:00] You're listening to Scaling Up Services, where we speak with entrepreneurs, authors, business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service-based business faster and easier.
[00:00:13] And now, here is your host, business coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
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[00:01:20] Now, back to our episode.
[00:01:22] Welcome everyone. This is Scaling Up Services.
[00:01:24] I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host.
[00:01:26] Our guest today is Greg Nutter.
[00:01:28] He is author of P3 Selling.
[00:01:30] He's also principal consultant at Soloquint.
[00:01:33] We're going to talk about the world of sales, of selling, mindset, strategy, everything you need to really understand what it takes to grow and scale a business.
[00:01:42] From a sales point of view, I'm excited for this.
[00:01:44] I think sales is probably the number one challenge that companies have when scaling, right?
[00:01:50] When they're figuring out, OK, I've got a good strategy.
[00:01:52] How do I actually grow the actual strategic selling, selling process, selling mindset, developing sales systems, sales teams are huge challenges for many, many companies.
[00:02:02] And I'm excited for this because Greg has some really interesting background and some ideas and has worked with lots of folks.
[00:02:07] Hopefully get into really what does it really take?
[00:02:10] How do we do this?
[00:02:11] And I'm excited to share some ideas and takeaways that people can apply to actually growing and scaling.
[00:02:15] With all that, Greg, welcome to the program.
[00:02:17] Thanks, Bruce. Great to be here.
[00:02:18] Yeah, it's a pleasure.
[00:02:19] So before we dive into everything you're doing today and P3 and kind of the work that you're focused on, let's get a little background.
[00:02:26] How did you get into sales?
[00:02:28] How did you get into the work you're doing?
[00:02:30] What's the backstory?
[00:02:31] Well, I kind of fell into sales.
[00:02:33] My degree is in computer science.
[00:02:35] But after I got out of university, I decided I like talking about it more than doing it.
[00:02:40] Yeah.
[00:02:41] First job was a straight commission role where you don't sell, you don't eat.
[00:02:45] Yeah, exactly. Eat what you kill.
[00:02:47] Yeah. Unfortunately, I was able to figure it out.
[00:02:50] But wherever my career really took off, my understanding of sales took off as managed to get a sales job in Xerox in their computer technology group.
[00:03:02] And that's where I had a lot of exposure to training, sales training, best practices.
[00:03:07] And I grew up the latter as sales rep, sales manager.
[00:03:10] And that's where I really discovered that selling was more of a science and an art.
[00:03:14] A lot of people still think it's an art, very process oriented.
[00:03:18] So I did that for 10 years with Xerox back in the day in IBM where the only people were doing really good sales training.
[00:03:26] Yeah.
[00:03:27] And then I was VP of sales for some small companies, which was really different than working for a big company.
[00:03:32] You had to be a little more entrepreneurial.
[00:03:35] You had to figure stuff out yourself.
[00:03:36] You didn't have the resources.
[00:03:38] And then in 2015, I started my own consulting company, Soliquent, where I worked with very large companies, SAP, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, to name a few, in sales, sales management, channel management.
[00:03:53] Although today, most of my clients are probably in the one million to fifty million dollar range.
[00:03:58] So tell me a little bit about what did you learn, I guess, early around sales?
[00:04:03] I always find that's interesting.
[00:04:04] You know, people that get into sales kind of accidentally or haphazardly.
[00:04:09] There's oftentimes some sort of intuitive skills that they have or kind of things that they can do well that make them good salespeople.
[00:04:16] But then there's things that I have to learn pretty quickly.
[00:04:18] Tell us a little bit about as you got into sales, what did you realize you did well and then what do you need to learn?
[00:04:22] Yeah, I like to tell a story about the first more early days in Xerox.
[00:04:27] And we had this new guy come in.
[00:04:30] He was maybe early 40s, had the look very outgoing, very confident and thought he's going to be great.
[00:04:39] Well, he wasn't right.
[00:04:42] He couldn't get a sales cycle going and started disparaging customers.
[00:04:49] And he didn't last long.
[00:04:50] So that experience actually scared the crap out of me.
[00:04:54] I thought, here's a guy, you know, mid career and he's forgotten how to sell.
[00:04:59] So many he was selling at some stage.
[00:05:02] So from that point, I thought, I got to learn how to do this because I don't want to be caught out mid career not know what I'm doing.
[00:05:08] So I focused on every sales training book I could.
[00:05:12] I took lots of courses.
[00:05:13] I became a trainer at Xerox.
[00:05:16] And one of the things that I learned was I went on a lot of sales calls with sales rep, sales managers, and I watched the exchange.
[00:05:27] I watched the behaviors that sales reps did and watched how prospects responded.
[00:05:34] And that's very different than what normally happens.
[00:05:37] Normally you go out and you watch the deal.
[00:05:39] Are we moving the deal forward or moving the deal back?
[00:05:41] I'm moving the deal back.
[00:05:42] But I took a real interest in watching the behaviors.
[00:05:46] And that, I guess, helped me realize that sales is much more of a process.
[00:05:52] It's much more about planning, about certain and doing things very methodically.
[00:05:58] And I know a lot of salespeople like to just fly by the seat of the pants.
[00:06:02] Which you can do, but it's that structured approach that is really key in business to business sales.
[00:06:10] Yeah, I was going to ask.
[00:06:12] I certainly find for kind of the one off kind of sales process, right?
[00:06:16] Like I'm selling kind of one thing to one person and it's reasonably straightforward.
[00:06:20] You can kind of be a little bit intuitive or a little bit ad hoc or off the cuff.
[00:06:26] But the moment you're dealing with a more complicated sales process, you get multiple people on the buying side.
[00:06:30] There's some kind of configuration process or scoping process that needs to happen.
[00:06:35] It quickly becomes complicated and without some kind of process and structure, it's just really difficult.
[00:06:42] Yeah. In training I do, or in our book, we make the distinction between what we call a simple or transactional sale and a complex or consultative sale.
[00:06:53] Yeah, exactly.
[00:06:54] And a simpler, again, what we call it clerking.
[00:06:57] It's got a typical two-step to it.
[00:06:59] You give information and then you ask for the order.
[00:07:02] And if you don't get the order, you give a little bit more information and then you ask for the order.
[00:07:07] And you cycle and cycle around that.
[00:07:09] And to your point, Bruce, you're absolutely right.
[00:07:12] When you're dealing with a business where there's lots of people involved, lots of steps,
[00:07:18] why a particular feature is valuable isn't necessarily obvious.
[00:07:23] And everybody's got their own perspective on how to solve a problem.
[00:07:27] That two-step doesn't work.
[00:07:29] Yeah. Well, it quickly becomes eight two-steps going on at the same time with different rhythms.
[00:07:35] Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:07:37] Let's say there's five, six, ten people involved in making that buying decision.
[00:07:42] Each of them are going to go through their own decision process.
[00:07:46] Exactly.
[00:07:47] There's like four steps that everybody goes through when they're making a complex decision.
[00:07:52] And everybody goes through it at their own pace.
[00:07:55] So you need to know where people are so you can know what behavior to respond with.
[00:08:01] Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about P3.
[00:08:03] I guess, what inspired you writing the book?
[00:08:06] What was the book kind of intention about?
[00:08:08] Tell us about the content. What have you done in P3?
[00:08:11] Yeah, great question.
[00:08:13] So though, why did I write it?
[00:08:15] Again, I spent a lot of time coaching salespeople.
[00:08:19] Last few years, I've had presidents call me up and say,
[00:08:22] hey, we just had our director of sales leave.
[00:08:25] Can you manage the team for a few months until we get somebody else in place?
[00:08:29] And I began to see the same thing I saw many years ago in Xerox.
[00:08:34] People who were been around a long time, you know, mid-career.
[00:08:40] And they'd forgotten the basics of selling.
[00:08:43] They would make in the same mistakes.
[00:08:46] And I thought, I'm going to write a book and just give it to these people.
[00:08:50] So that was really the determination of it all.
[00:08:54] So what I wanted to create and I've read a lot of books on selling.
[00:08:58] And the reality is not a lot of people either use them or remember them.
[00:09:05] So my idea was to come up with a book that or a methodology that's simple to understand.
[00:09:10] There's no made-up jargon.
[00:09:12] It's based on research on how people make decisions, not manipulative tactics,
[00:09:17] which is why, you know, people who aren't typically sellers
[00:09:21] don't have the name, the word sales in their job description or in their title.
[00:09:28] It really resonates with.
[00:09:30] It's complete. It has strategies, processes, tactics and tools.
[00:09:34] And it's also really good for owners, sales leaders,
[00:09:38] because it provides a sales management framework that they can use to inspect
[00:09:44] and coach their sales teams.
[00:09:47] Tell us a little bit about the, I guess, some of the more psychology process
[00:09:52] that you've kind of uncovered or that you found helpful.
[00:09:55] Because I think people very much focus on kind of like, you know,
[00:09:58] gambits around sales, like, oh, like, here's how you handle objections.
[00:10:01] This is like do this thing and then do this thing, you know, say this and then wait for this.
[00:10:04] Right. Like it's very kind of transactional.
[00:10:06] But I think it's interesting. I always find it interesting underlying kind of understanding
[00:10:09] the psychology of buying or the psychology of selling.
[00:10:12] Like what have you kind of discovered and what do you kind of help people understand
[00:10:17] in terms of how it applies to sales?
[00:10:19] Yeah. So there's in a B2B environment, there's two decision processes going on simultaneously.
[00:10:25] One with each individual who's going to make a buying decision and a corporate one,
[00:10:30] which has got, you know, purchasing and legal and maybe IT and technical people involved.
[00:10:35] And you need to be able to manage both.
[00:10:38] From a psychology standpoint, people go through four very predictable stages
[00:10:44] when they make a significant decision, buying decision.
[00:10:48] The first one we call need recognition. They decide, hey, do I have a problem?
[00:10:52] How big is the problem?
[00:10:53] How important is that problem?
[00:10:55] Once they decide, yeah, we do have a problem. We probably should fix it.
[00:10:59] They start looking for solutions.
[00:11:01] They go on the Internet, talk to their friends.
[00:11:04] They do some research.
[00:11:06] Then they go into a third stage called evaluate alternatives where they think,
[00:11:10] okay, how are we going to make decisions?
[00:11:12] We've got all this information now.
[00:11:14] They come up with criteria.
[00:11:15] How do I decide between step one and two or option one, two or three?
[00:11:20] And then they move into a final purchase decision stage where they, you know,
[00:11:24] tie a bow around things, make check all of final boxes.
[00:11:28] So to your point about what's the psychology of it,
[00:11:32] we need to selling activities or influencing activities
[00:11:37] need to be aligned to where people are in those four stages.
[00:11:40] The mistake that a lot of companies and sellers make is they have a sales process.
[00:11:45] We prospect, then we ask some questions,
[00:11:48] and then we do maybe a demo or proof of concept,
[00:11:51] and then we do a proposal and then we ask for the order.
[00:11:54] But the problem with that is that we only do those things if the buyer is in the corresponding stage.
[00:12:03] And so I like to say that the selling activities always follow where the decision maker is
[00:12:11] in their decision, not the other way around.
[00:12:14] So you look and say, what stage is somebody in?
[00:12:17] And based on that stage, these are the things you should be doing.
[00:12:21] In fact, we have in the book, there's a table that says,
[00:12:24] if your prospect is thinking and doing these things, they are in this stage.
[00:12:29] And then there's another table that says, if they're in this stage,
[00:12:32] here's your selling objectives and your key activities.
[00:12:35] Right. So you need to align to where they are.
[00:12:39] You know, classic example, if somebody is in the first stage
[00:12:43] and they haven't decided whether or not they're actually going to fix the problem,
[00:12:47] then it's not very appropriate to come back with a proposal
[00:12:52] because someone's going to say, that's stupid.
[00:12:54] I didn't even decide I'm going to do anything. Right.
[00:12:56] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:57] Or if they're in the final stage, someone pop it out.
[00:13:00] Hey, there's a feature I didn't tell you about.
[00:13:02] Can I tell you? Share. Well, it's coming out in a few weeks. Right.
[00:13:06] And someone says, that's kind of stupid.
[00:13:08] I'm just about to sign an order. Yeah.
[00:13:10] So you need to do things based on where people are,
[00:13:14] not based on what your sales process is.
[00:13:17] Okay. And how do you tell?
[00:13:19] Like what are some strategies or techniques that you can use
[00:13:22] to kind of gauge where someone is in the buying process
[00:13:25] or maybe where they've shifted to?
[00:13:27] Yeah. So if, you know, the first stage,
[00:13:30] you look at what they're doing and what they're thinking.
[00:13:34] So have you guys decided to make a decision on solving this labor issue
[00:13:39] or this capacity issue or this HR issue?
[00:13:45] No, no, no. We're still kicking it around.
[00:13:47] Okay. Well then in the first stage, if someone says, yeah, we are.
[00:13:50] What are you doing now?
[00:13:51] Well, we're evaluating other options.
[00:13:54] We're bringing in some different vendors to see what they've got.
[00:13:58] Ah, they're in the second stage.
[00:14:00] Hey, we're putting out an RFP or an RFI.
[00:14:03] I don't know. Let's say an RFP at the end of the month
[00:14:05] and we'll send it to you.
[00:14:07] They're in the evaluate alternative stage.
[00:14:09] They've got criteria that they've developed,
[00:14:12] and now they want to sort of compare that to various vendors, right?
[00:14:15] So you look at what they're doing
[00:14:17] and based on what they're doing, it tells you what you should be doing.
[00:14:21] Yeah. I guess for service companies
[00:14:24] where we're kind of selling things that are sometimes very intangible
[00:14:29] or, you know, it's hard to kind of point at or quantify at some level.
[00:14:33] We're dealing with either intellectual work or service work in various ways.
[00:14:38] How does that change the sales process
[00:14:41] or how you approach the sales process?
[00:14:43] Great question.
[00:14:44] You know, if I look at the people I deal with,
[00:14:46] I use, you know, help in improving their selling skills.
[00:14:50] They're kind of three areas.
[00:14:51] There's professional salespeople.
[00:14:53] There's owners and sales leaders.
[00:14:55] Third group are consultants and advisors.
[00:14:57] And you might say, you know, consultants and advisors, they don't sell, right?
[00:15:01] Well, if what I'd say is if you need to influence someone
[00:15:05] either on the merits of your approach,
[00:15:07] why you're a better option than your competitor
[00:15:09] or for them to accept, you know, your recommendations,
[00:15:13] you need influencing skills.
[00:15:16] And the way I define B2B selling is it's all about influencing.
[00:15:20] It's influencing someone to change
[00:15:23] either their perspective, their behaviors or their situation.
[00:15:27] And that's the core of consulting, right?
[00:15:30] And so what we help with consultants or advisors
[00:15:35] is first change their perspective.
[00:15:38] It's not about just talking about their expertise
[00:15:41] and their recommendations.
[00:15:43] It's again, understanding where somebody is in their,
[00:15:47] you could say buying process,
[00:15:49] but it's really their acceptance process.
[00:15:51] It could be their buying process,
[00:15:53] but where are they in getting their head around your recommendations?
[00:15:57] Yeah.
[00:15:58] That process is exactly the same as that influencing process
[00:16:02] is the exact same as B2B selling.
[00:16:04] I'll give you a great example.
[00:16:06] Yeah, please.
[00:16:07] This summer, I got a call from owner of a law firm
[00:16:10] and he'd read my book and said,
[00:16:12] I want you to come out and train my attorneys.
[00:16:15] And you think, attorneys? Do they sell?
[00:16:18] Right? They just give advice.
[00:16:21] Well, they do, but they want people to accept their advice.
[00:16:25] This was a smaller company.
[00:16:27] They had four or five attorneys.
[00:16:29] They wanted to differentiate themselves from the big boys, right?
[00:16:34] The big law firms.
[00:16:36] And the owner realized that to do that,
[00:16:38] they needed to have influencing skills,
[00:16:41] also known as selling skills.
[00:16:44] And so it just shows it whether again,
[00:16:47] whether you've got sales in your title or your job description,
[00:16:51] if you have to influence someone to change their perspectives
[00:16:55] or their behaviors or their situation,
[00:16:57] then that's kind of the skills that we're focused on in our book.
[00:17:01] Yeah.
[00:17:02] You know, when you work with organizations,
[00:17:04] what are some of the common challenges
[00:17:06] or common things that are not going right
[00:17:08] or that they're doing wrong from a sales point of view?
[00:17:10] See, there's a couple.
[00:17:11] The big thing I see is it happens not just in sales, but in marketing
[00:17:16] where people spend too much time talking about their products, right?
[00:17:20] Me, me, me.
[00:17:21] Right?
[00:17:22] We've got a great widget.
[00:17:25] The analysts say we are the best
[00:17:28] or we have the best consulting services.
[00:17:31] Here's all the people we consult to.
[00:17:34] And I like to say no one cares.
[00:17:36] Until you put your offering in context
[00:17:40] with a problem that somebody wants to solve
[00:17:43] or an opportunity that somebody wants to capture,
[00:17:45] it makes no sense.
[00:17:47] So I was talking to, I'm doing some coaching for a company right now,
[00:17:52] sells kind of robotics services.
[00:17:55] They set up robotic systems for car manufacturers.
[00:17:58] And one of the sales guys said,
[00:18:00] I'm going to go to a lot of places and drop off brochures
[00:18:03] that talk about how good our products are.
[00:18:05] And I go, no, you don't want to do that.
[00:18:07] I said, what you want to do is drop off a little one pager
[00:18:11] on the problems you solve
[00:18:12] and the opportunities you can capture for them.
[00:18:15] And number one, people will go, wow, you know, I hadn't thought of that.
[00:18:18] That's pretty important for us.
[00:18:20] Come on in and tell me more.
[00:18:22] The second thing is, they told them,
[00:18:24] is that that will differentiate you from everyone else
[00:18:28] instead of coming around and saying, this is how great we are.
[00:18:32] It's hey, would you be interested in knowing
[00:18:34] how we help companies solve this labor issue,
[00:18:38] this legal issue, this compliance issue?
[00:18:41] Right?
[00:18:42] Yeah, I'd be interested in that.
[00:18:44] And that's the mistake is we spend too much time talking about our products
[00:18:49] and not about problems we solve.
[00:18:51] Yeah, interesting.
[00:18:52] In terms of kind of the training process, the strategy process,
[00:18:57] how does this play out?
[00:18:58] When you first come into a company,
[00:19:00] what are the questions you're asking or things you're looking for
[00:19:03] and where do you start in helping them improve their sales strategy,
[00:19:08] their sales system, sales process?
[00:19:10] Great question.
[00:19:11] So I always like to stand back a little bit and say,
[00:19:13] there's three things you need to scale sales revenue generating capability.
[00:19:19] And this is particularly true in small organizations.
[00:19:24] You need good sales processes, you need good management processes,
[00:19:29] and you need consistent execution of both of those.
[00:19:32] And so particularly for small and mid-sized companies,
[00:19:37] you can't expect to hire a rep, give them a comp plan,
[00:19:39] and see sales.
[00:19:40] It just doesn't happen.
[00:19:42] So it's really important that you have some structure in place.
[00:19:45] So the first step is getting people on the same page
[00:19:49] with regard to what our sales process look like.
[00:19:53] And whether you use mine or someone else's,
[00:19:56] everybody needs to be on the same page.
[00:19:59] How do we sell?
[00:20:00] How do we look at opportunities?
[00:20:02] How do we prospect?
[00:20:04] How do we evaluate where we are?
[00:20:06] The second step, and that's just concept.
[00:20:09] So I'll go in and run a workshop, for example.
[00:20:12] We've run two-day workshops.
[00:20:13] I've done it live.
[00:20:15] We also can do it virtually.
[00:20:17] The second step is, you know, you'll know this, Bruce,
[00:20:21] but two weeks later people forget it all.
[00:20:24] In fact, probably a week later.
[00:20:25] Mine are like a sieve.
[00:20:26] Yeah.
[00:20:27] So the key is then you need to start getting people to use it.
[00:20:32] And we have a number of tools, processes.
[00:20:35] So we give people, like again, this other company, once a month,
[00:20:40] we do a 90-minute session.
[00:20:42] Here's a tool.
[00:20:43] Show me how you use this to develop, let's say,
[00:20:46] a prospecting message or to build a call plan or to,
[00:20:51] we'll do a role play.
[00:20:53] So you need to use it.
[00:20:55] And it takes a while before it starts becoming second nature.
[00:20:59] The third key ingredient,
[00:21:01] which is really important, is engaging management,
[00:21:05] owners of the business or sales leaderships.
[00:21:08] Because if they aren't using it, then no one will use it.
[00:21:12] Right?
[00:21:13] Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:14] I was talking to this one sales leader,
[00:21:16] chief revenue officer a couple of months ago.
[00:21:19] And I said, you know, if we run a program for you,
[00:21:22] one of the key success factors is you've got to reinforce it.
[00:21:25] He goes, what do you mean by that?
[00:21:26] And I said, well, let's say somebody comes into you with a deal.
[00:21:30] You know, a deal, an opportunity.
[00:21:32] What do you typically say?
[00:21:34] How much and when is it going to close?
[00:21:36] You might say, oh, and what's the next step?
[00:21:38] What's the next step?
[00:21:39] How much is it?
[00:21:40] When is it going to close?
[00:21:41] Instead, you turn that around and you'd say,
[00:21:44] well, what problems are we trying to solve for that company?
[00:21:47] What are the people that have that problem?
[00:21:50] And do we understand their perspectives?
[00:21:54] Right?
[00:21:55] What's their buying decision process?
[00:21:57] And where are they in that?
[00:21:59] And then based on that, what's our next step?
[00:22:03] So management can, and what I did there,
[00:22:06] I just walked you through the three P's and three selling.
[00:22:09] It's problem people process.
[00:22:11] By asking those kinds of questions,
[00:22:14] you force the sales rep to say, hey, you know what?
[00:22:17] We're the consultant.
[00:22:18] That these things are more important than how much by when.
[00:22:22] Or ultimately, I mean, the way I see that is if we're really going to win,
[00:22:26] we have to solve these problems.
[00:22:27] Knowing how much the deal is and when it's going to close,
[00:22:30] it doesn't actually advance the deal.
[00:22:32] Correct. Correct.
[00:22:33] It's not good.
[00:22:34] It's just a quick, easy thing to say,
[00:22:36] when's this going to close?
[00:22:37] When can I forecast this?
[00:22:39] But if you really want to coach and advise,
[00:22:42] if you ask those questions, then the seller might say,
[00:22:45] hmm, I haven't thought of that.
[00:22:47] I'm not sure what kind of problems we're trying to solve.
[00:22:49] What are we going to do about that?
[00:22:52] So if you know your gaps, if you know what you don't know,
[00:22:55] then you can do something about it.
[00:22:56] You can go on a call, you can ask those questions,
[00:22:59] you can try and get some coaching from other people there.
[00:23:02] But if you don't know what you don't know to use,
[00:23:05] forget his name, but Rumsfeld, yeah, that was him.
[00:23:09] Famous quote.
[00:23:10] Yeah.
[00:23:11] Then all you can do is pitch product across your fingers.
[00:23:15] Yeah.
[00:23:16] Kind of just talk about features and hopefully it lands somehow with the client.
[00:23:19] Yeah.
[00:23:20] I wanted to circle back on something.
[00:23:21] You mentioned marketing.
[00:23:23] I guess how do you differentiate or how do you define kind of marketing versus sales
[00:23:27] and how they work together?
[00:23:28] What's kind of your working model for that?
[00:23:30] Because I think that trips up a lot of companies.
[00:23:32] Yeah.
[00:23:33] It's no secret that the marketing and sales often don't get along, right?
[00:23:36] Marketing salespeople never close all the leads we give them
[00:23:39] and salespeople say, oh, they give us all these crummy leads.
[00:23:43] Right?
[00:23:44] But I think there's some really good areas where marketing can support sales
[00:23:52] to do a better job.
[00:23:53] One of the areas is just what I talked about is to create marketing materials
[00:24:00] that are more about problems and opportunities and less about product.
[00:24:04] Because that's where sellers struggle.
[00:24:07] Tell me what problems we solve, right?
[00:24:10] A website instead of saying, hey, we were voted best services company
[00:24:16] three years in a row.
[00:24:17] Who cares?
[00:24:19] Here's the problems we solve right up front, right?
[00:24:22] Here's the opportunity to allow people to capture right up front.
[00:24:25] Right?
[00:24:26] So messaging from marketing could be really valuable.
[00:24:29] The second thing where I've worked with marketing people is around those four stages
[00:24:35] that we talked about earlier, you know,
[00:24:37] that whether it's need recognition, information search,
[00:24:41] value options and purchase decision.
[00:24:45] Marketing generally produces a lot of collaterals or support materials
[00:24:52] that are late in the cycle.
[00:24:54] They fit into that evaluated alternative stage.
[00:24:58] And so if marketers understood that psychology about how people make decisions,
[00:25:04] they could help sell by creating more tools that fit up front
[00:25:09] in the prospecting stage.
[00:25:11] And how do I get somebody interested in having a conversation with me, right?
[00:25:15] Rather than just late stage material, which are here are features
[00:25:19] and this is why they're so good.
[00:25:21] Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:25:23] Greg, this has been a pleasure.
[00:25:24] If people want to find out more about you, more about P3,
[00:25:27] what's the best way to get that information?
[00:25:29] Two places.
[00:25:30] Certainly have a website, p3selling.com.
[00:25:33] Check it out.
[00:25:34] We've got a lot of great blogs like this one loaded up there
[00:25:38] and a little more information.
[00:25:39] You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.
[00:25:41] It's a Greg-Nutter.
[00:25:43] N-U-T-T-E-R.
[00:25:45] And I try once a week to get a post out with a little bit more information.
[00:25:50] So either of those two are the best way to connect with me.
[00:25:53] That'd be great.
[00:25:54] I'm like sure that those links are in the show notes
[00:25:56] so people can get that information.
[00:25:57] Greg, thank you so much for taking the time today.
[00:25:59] It's been a pleasure.
[00:26:00] Thanks, Bruce. Really appreciate it.
[00:26:01] You've been listening to Scaling Up Services with business coach Bruce Eggbelt.
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