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Today’s show featured an interview with “Thank You, It’s True” Movement Creator and TEDx Speaker Cynthia Barnes.
Find Cynthia on LinkedIn.
CYNTHIA’S TIP: “Whatever I thought the compelling offer was, most likely wasn’t the compelling offer. I had to shift from the lens through which I was looking and get inside the head of my buyer, to the point where I started to think like them. I was then thinking, “What would my prospect do? What would my prospect say in this instance?” I wanted to feel what they felt. It was the psychology of my buyer. That’s how important it was.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited, we got Cynthia Barnes. Cynthia, you’ve been a guest on the Sales Game Changers Podcast as well. We’ve had a lot of communication with you. You’re an amazing advocate for women in sales, and we’re very proud of the amazing work that you’re doing, and I’m just thrilled to hear this story. I’m excited about what you’re going to be telling us. Cynthia Barnes, give us a brief introduction to who you are and let the audience know.
Cynthia Barnes: Fred, it is so great to be back. Thank you for having me. Hello, everyone. I’m Cynthia Barnes, keynote speaker, founder of the National Association of Women Sales Professionals. I’ve been selling since Girl Scout Cookies were $1.50 a box. I used to say that I was selling for years until someone stopped me and said, “Dang, that’s longer than I’ve been alive.” I got my feelings hurt. Now I just say, I’ve been selling longer than Girl Scout Cookies have been $1.50 a box. With that, I have tons of experience. Been selling forever, and selling is part of my DNA. Sales to me is nothing more than influencing decision makers to say yes.
I’m thrilled to be here, thrilled to share my story. It changed the way I sell, and I promise you, after hearing this story, it’ll change the way you sell too.
Fred Diamond: With that being said, Cynthia Barnes, tell us a great sales story.
Cynthia Barnes: When I first started selling, I thought it was the easiest thing in the world because I thought all you had to do was just talk. I could do that with my eyes closed. In fact, I spoke and talked so much when I was a kid that my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Rowe, brought in a refrigerator box and put it around my desk, because he thought that would stop me from talking to my classmates. He was surprised, and probably a little dismayed, to find out that that didn’t work. I was also a little surprised and dismayed to find out that selling is not all about talking.
Selling is influencing decision makers to say yes. Once I realized the power that I held to influence those decision makers, internal customers, external customers, my 5-year-old niece, my 80-year-old grandmother, I knew I was onto something special. But what I didn’t know was the difference between a convincing offer and a compelling offer.
One day, my boss said to me, “Cynthia, you have a remarkable gift of gab, but unless you harness that into something constructive, that’s all it will ever be.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Sales is an art and a science. What you’re giving your prospects and buyers now is a convincing offer, and they’re not going to buy, because you convinced them to listen to you. You’ve got a great voice, but that’s not enough to convince them to buy. What you need to do is give them a compelling offer.”
I said, “Well, what does that mean?”
He said, “Let me give you an example,” and Fred, here’s the example he gave me that changed my life. You ready?
Fred Diamond: I am.
Cynthia Barnes: Picture this, it’s Friday morning, about eight o’clock, and you pick up the phone and someone with a British accent says, “Fred Diamond.”
You say, “Yes.”
They say, “We’ve been searching for you for a while,” and you’re puzzled. It’s eight o’clock in the morning, you haven’t had your coffee yet.
You say, “Who is this?” Ready to hang up. They say that they are from a bank over in the UK, they’ve been searching for you high and low, and you say, “Why?” Kind of irritated. You haven’t had your coffee.
They say that you’ve had a long-lost relative who has passed away, and you are now ready to hang up because you’re thinking what? Nigerian scam. But they convince you to go ahead and listen and hear them out. You do. You say, “Okay, great.”
They say, “You are entitled to some money.”
You say, “Okay.” Next question, for kicks and giggles, “How much?”
They said, “$10.5 million.”
You start to laugh, and you say, “Okay, cool.”
They said, “You may not believe us, but call this bank. Don’t call the number that’s on your caller ID, but call the number, do your due diligence, and find out whether or not it’s legitimate.”
Curiosity gets the best of you. You hang up the phone, you do some work on ancestry.com, come to find out the name he mentioned actually is in your lineage. You call the bank, and they do have someone working there by that name, and you think, “There may be something to this,” so you call him back.
Long story short, you are entitled to this $10.5 million. You say, “Oh my gosh.”
He says, “We’ve been looking for you for so long, but time is of the essence. You’ve got to be here in person to collect these funds, and we’re dispersing them Monday morning at 8:00 AM.”
You say, “Okay, I’m going to go on kayak.com, find a flight, and I’m going to be there Monday morning at 8:00 AM.”
By now it’s around two o’clock in the afternoon because it takes time to do all of this due diligence. You go on kayak.com, you find the only flight that will get you over to the UK in time, and it is $9,000 because it’s the only flight and it is first class. Fred, let’s say that you’re not the best financial wizard and you haven’t been a good steward of your money. You don’t have a credit card that has a $9,000 allowance on it. What do you do? What would you do?
Fred Diamond: I want to get there. I would find someone to loan me the $9,000 or I would find somebody who has a credit card with $9,000 worth of credit.
Cynthia Barnes: Right. You would do whatever it takes. I told my boss I would do whatever it takes to get over there. He said, “Why?”
I said, “Because it’s $10.5 million.”
He said, “Whatever it takes?”
I said, “Yes, I would eat peanut butter and jelly and pay back all my friends because I want to get there.”
He said, “Would you do it if they were giving you $200?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “What about $2,000?”
I said, “No, because that’s less than the price of the ticket.”
He said, “What about $20,000?”
I said, “No, that’s still not enough ROI.”
The moral of the story, Fred, is if the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count. That’s the difference between a convincing offer and a compelling offer. We as sales professionals have to position our offer in such a way that our buyers stop what they’re doing and say, “I have to have that because it solves the problem that I have been searching high and low for.” We have to package it and present it so that life will not be the same unless they have it. I’m not saying lie. I am saying, you’ve got to do your due diligence, you’ve got to do your discovery and find out what is it they need, and then give them that compelling reason to buy it from you.
That takes work. It takes diving deep into them. It takes learning about sales psychology. It takes knowing about your product, your service, the industry, the trends. It takes becoming a professional student of sales. If we are going to be professionals in the art and science of sales, we can’t be willy-nilly about this. You wouldn’t go to a doctor who doesn’t read medical journals. You wouldn’t go to an accountant who doesn’t study for the annual exams. The same thing applies to being a sales professional. If you want to be considered a professional, study the profession of sales. Make compelling offers.
Fred Diamond: One of the things that we talk about at the Institute for Excellence in Sales and on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is exactly that, sales is a profession. If you’re a professional, what do professionals do? They prepare. They get better at presenting. You just told an amazing story. They have to get better at telling a story. As you told the story, I was in. I was like, “What would I do if I had this opportunity to get this big thing? Who would I call? How would I get the money? What would I do to get there?”
There’s so many things that a true sales professional needs to understand. How to communicate to people, how to prepare, how to research, how to get assistance. I remember I had in one of our Sales Game Changers Podcasts a guy who was bringing in a couple million dollars per year, said he would pay somebody to do his expense reports because it was lower than what he would potentially earn with his time.
Cynthia, it’s such a great story. Give us a couple tips that you learned from that particular story.
Cynthia Barnes: Whatever I thought the compelling offer was, most likely wasn’t the compelling offer. I had to shift from the lens through which I was looking and get inside the head of my buyer, to the point where I started to think like them. Remember those bracelets people used to wear that say, “What would Jesus do?” I was then thinking, “What would my prospect do? What would my prospect say in this instance?” I wanted to feel what they felt. It was the psychology of my buyer. That’s how important it was.
I wanted to anticipate their needs so that I could speak their language. I wanted to be able to talk about the books they read, the groups they belong to on LinkedIn, because familiarity makes people comfortable. It allows you to build rapport. That compelling offer is never from my point of view, it is from my buyer’s point of view. What do they find irresistible? What do they want and what do they need and what are they willing to pay for?
Fred Diamond: We talk also a lot about, and this is hard, but you have to think, what is the customer thinking? Why is this important to them? One thing we talk a lot about is salespeople may move from place to place. Maybe they follow a bus or something, or their company shrinks or whatever it might be. A lot of times the customers that we’re selling to, they don’t move. Especially when we talk about enterprise, business to business, and business to government sales. If you’re in operations, accounting, or IT, most cases, you want to have a nice, stable job where you’re doing interesting things. A lot of our customers aren’t looking to jump. If they’re going to be in the same place, hopefully, for 10, 15, 20 years, they’re looking, what do I got to do now to help my company be successful, or organization? Then what do I need to be doing to help us be strategically important? But they want to stick around. They’re always thinking, how can I help my company, or organization, or government agency, whatever it might be, achieve their goals?
This is great, Cynthia. I’m so glad we had you on the Sales Story and a Tip Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo