Be the Guide Your Customers Are Craving

(upbeat music) - Hey all, welcome back. Bill Kasky on the solo episode today. Hope you're enjoying these last week. We talked about the catchment. And if you remember right, or if you remember, at all, not right or wrong. I talked about this as a solution to a client that they brought me in to do some work. And I get this call a lot. I probably do one or two of these a month where a company calls me in and they want me to come in. And I always want to know, well what do we want to accomplish during the two to four hours? Typically that's the span of time. And a lot of times they won't have a really good understanding. They'll just know that, you know, what we just need some help. We're not closing enough or whatever. Well this company had done a fair amount of research on what their people needed. And so they provided me a laundry list. And as I said last week, I can't do a laundry list in two hours. If you're going to go deep on any one subject, that takes 20 to 30 minutes. You can only cover through four topics. And so I wanted to create an excellent solution for them that talked about what are the two or three things that if we fix these things, all these other 10 things get fixed. And last week we talked about detachment. I said if you can learn to detach from the outcomes, you get stronger everywhere. The other thing that we talked about was what is your role? What is your role in the buyer's seller dance? It seems like that's a really important element of, not only growth, but also just success. Is if you believe your role is to sell stuff to people who don't need what you buy or what you sell, but you want their money, well that's going to take on, it's gonna have some kind of effect of how you talk to people, how you show up, how you position yourself. So we talked about, and you've heard me talk about it before, the idea of being the guide. The ideal role that you play anywhere in your life really, whether you're a head of household, whether you're a parent, whether you're a caretaker for your elderly parents, whether you're a VP of sales, it doesn't matter. There are parts of your life where you need to be the guide. You need to be the one that people come to and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about going in this direction. What do you think?" And the way you become the guide is you hone your guide skills. And I want you to become the guide that customers are craving, because I believe that most customers, especially when they have a problem, and they kind of identify the problem, they're looking for guiding. They're not even, they're looking for solutions, yes, but they're looking for someone to walk alongside them and say, "Hey, here's, I'm gonna help you here. This is how to do this. If you want to buy from me, that's great. If you don't want to buy from me, I won't be offended, but I'm here to help you navigate this path, this journey, and help you get to the solution." So the way to think about the guide model is there's three components to it. Number one is an identification of current reality. Where is this person? And again, I'm going to use this in the sales and business development role, but you could also use it as a leader too. Leaders might say to one of their team members, "Where are you currently? What's the current reality of your success, or if you're lack of success, which are income, all those things, current reality?" The second part is the ideal outcome. Where are you wanting to go? What is the destination? This is why I love sales because you can be so, you can be so good and helpful at helping people get to the destination. If you know what it is, and sometimes people don't know what it is. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to a VP of sales and they say, "You know what, we want, we want our people to be better at negotiation and better at positioning and better at this and prospecting and digital and blah, blah, blah, on everything." Okay, that's great. What's the end goal here? What's the ideal outcome? Well, just be better. No, there's got to be some kind of a transformational result that you're looking for. If you do these things, then what happens? Well, we grow our business by 50%. We think that we've got a potential of two X, two X our business. We think those customers are waiting out. Well, okay, now we're talking. That's an ideal outcome. So one is current reality too is ideal outcome. Then we're going to fade back in between those two and see the bridge and the bridge is the vehicle. You are the vehicle. You're the vehicle that helps them go from current reality to ideal outcome. So how do you do this? Well, number one, you really have to embrace the role. You have to go all in on the role of being a guide. Half measures avail us nothing, as we say, in certain rehab programs. Be a part of the project. You're the one that supports them from A to C, from their current reality to the ideal outcome. Be fearless here. Know that you are the vehicle that will get them there once you know where there is. If you can't get them there, tell them that and back out. Number two, be destination minded. You can find the problem, and I know we talk a lot about finding the pain. Everybody does, find the needs. But I also want you to, okay, if you solve these, what's the ideal outcome? Where can you get if we can help you with this? Number three, commit to the map. There's got to be some kind of a road map on the bridge, where you're the vehicle, and this is the map that you're going to traverse down to get them to their destination. Be clear about this. Be step by step about this. I've talked about this, and I will in the future, I call it road map strategy. But you got to commit to the map. You're really helping people get to a new destination. It requires a map. And number four, understand value versus price. Price is not value. Price is simply the terms that they will agree to to get the value. So if your solution is $300,000 in the value is $4 million, then be willing to talk about that. Say, look, here's what I see happening here. You want to get to $4 million. I think I can get there. Here's how we're going to do it. It's called a cost of $300 grand to get there. If they believe you, that's an easy decision. If they don't believe you, then it has nothing to do with pranks. If they don't believe you can get them to the $4 million or whatever, whatever the transformation is, that's your problem. It's not the price. Often we use price as the reason somebody doesn't want to buy. It's just not true. So think about that. Be the guide. Become the guide that your customers are craving. Because they are. I'll see you next time.