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EPISODE 070: How Trade Show Sales Expert Ryan Brown Used Neuroscience and Analytics to Help His Team Prospect More Rigorously
RYAN’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “People will pay what they think something is worth” and that runs through my head almost every day, probably like 5 or 6 times a day when we’re talking about what are we selling, how are we selling it, who are we selling it to, how much is it worth. It’s really about getting to what the customer values and we can’t assume that it’s the same thing that they valued a year ago, a month ago, a week ago. We have to be experts at knowing what our customers are trying to get out of our product or our solution and providing that value, providing that solution. It may be a way that we never had to before, but that’s what everything stems out of.”
Ryan Brown is the vice president of sales and event services at NTP Events, a for-profit trade show management company that designs, produces and manages engaging business to business events.
Ryan oversees exhibit and sponsorship sales for NTP Events portfolio shows and also functions in a BD role for the company.
He has emerged as a sales leader in the trade show industry by pioneering the use of analytics and neuroscience in his training programs and sale strategy methodologies.
Prior to his role at NTP Events, Ryan spent 7 years selling exhibits and sponsorships for trade events at not for profit organizations including the American Composites Manufactures Association and the Consumer Technology Association.
Find Ryan on LinkedIN!
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about your sales career. You were introduced to us by one of our former podcast guests, Dan Cole over at Hargrove. He was episode 40 and I’m really excited to hear your evolution and how you’ve grown into your role. Tell us a little bit about what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.
Ryan Brown: If you listen to Dan’s podcast, you heard him reference, we sell booths, we sell trade show exhibits and really physically what we sell is we’re leasing space in a concrete floor, if you’ve ever been to a trade show, you know what I mean. What we sell is not that. What we sell is access to a particular market place that that trade show or event represents. That includes a face to face access to those people, that includes the data and the demographics that they represent, that’s really the value that exists there for the exhibitors and sponsors that we talk to on a day to day basis.
The exciting part about that is you get to – literally everybody that we talk to, this is a legitimate business opportunity for them. It’s never like we’re trying to coerce somebody into this, it’s like you make a product that fits this market, I know your customers and clients are at my event, I know this makes sense, we just have to determine how much it’s worth to you, what kind of opportunity you want to take advantage of and how much you want to spend on it. You get to feel good about what you’re doing and at the end of the day, you get some good stories at the end of the cycle where people are like, “This changed my year”, “This made my year”. It’s a rewarding sale.
Fred Diamond: Who do you typically sell to? Is it a marketing person, a CEO?
Ryan Brown: It depends on what I’m trying to sell. If it’s a more transactional interaction where the person has exhibited for several years and I know they’re just going to come back, we’ll talk to a trade show manager or somebody that manages events for the particular company. Depending on the size of company, not everybody has a trade show manager.
Sometimes it’s the same as their president and their marketing guy and the sales is all one guy, but if we’re trying to go bigger picture, if we’re trying to sell high level sponsorships, we’re usually looking for a CMO, VP, director of marketing or if we can’t get those guys we’ll try to track down the sales and business development guys and get them on board with what we’re trying to do and then they go ask the marketing person for some spend.
Fred Diamond: Very good. Most of the budget comes out of marketing, typically?
Ryan Brown: Yeah, I would say so.
Fred Diamond: Very good. Tell us a little bit of how you got into sales as a career.
Ryan Brown: I’m like the oldest millennial you can be. I graduated school, I didn’t really have a plan. I guess that’s happened to a lot of folks but I ended up selling golf clubs at Dick’s Sporting Goods just until I could find a real job and believe it or not, when I was preparing for this, I was thinking about how I sold there and the interactions that I had there and I can recognize some of the things that I do now when I sell. For instance, somebody would come in looking for the newest Callaway set of irons which are the most expensive clubs you can buy, and I’m looking at this guy and I’m like, “How many times have you played golf?” and he’s like, “I’ve never played.” I’m like, “Let’s go to the simulator and hit some other clubs.”
So it’s trying to put him in the right value for his skill level and almost every time, they would leave with a different set of clubs than what they went in then. My boss would yell at me because obviously we’d get payed more when we’d sell Callaway clubs but I got a kick out of pleasing that customer like, “Oh, man. I thought I was going to come in and spend this and I feel like I’m getting better clubs for less money”, that’s the part that I recognize in what I do now. I’ll forgo the huge ask at first to find the right value and find the right fit because that’s going to ultimately result in a longer term relationship and trust between the client and I.
That’s how I get into it, I started at Dick Sporting Goods in Fairfax, Virginia and then kind of leaned on my dad’s relationships a little bit and actually he introduced me to Dan Cole after about a year and I met with Dan. I actually didn’t even have a resume with me when I went in, it was just supposed to be a conversation, it turned into an interview and they hired me a few weeks later as a sales coordinator at CES, the rest is history.
Fred Diamond: What do you think it was that got you to tell the customer, “You really don’t need the Callaways, this is really what’s better suited for you”? Is it something that was just in you or did you foresee possibly the longer term relationship? I’m just kind of curious where you think that came from.
Ryan Brown: Honestly, I had no idea. I had no concept of a repeat customer, particularly if it’s golf. You buy a pair of golf clubs, you’re not buying another pair of golf clubs or set of golf clubs for 20 years. That wasn’t really across my mind, I just came out and I don’t know if it just made sense or if it was an upbringing thing like buy responsibly, find value, you don’t just have to always go buy the most expensive thing. Northern Virginia is a pretty affluent area, you get a lot of that, you get a lot of BMW’s and Mercedes and Range Rovers driving around here. It’s not necessarily the best car, right? Same with the golf clubs. It just came naturally, I guess.
Fred Diamond: Curiously, when you’re selling today, you talked about you’re selling access to a market place but essentially you’re selling a plot on a trade show floor, if you will. Back to the example you used before, what do your customers think they’re looking for but you then coach them that they might get more value from?
Ryan Brown: Well, they think they’re coming to just find as many leads as possible and if any of you have ever done a trade show before, you probably have a marketing person that’s making you scan everybody’s badge, “Scan it, scan it, scan it.” Really, that’s because that’s the only way or that’s the easiest way to justify the ROI, or justify the spend on that exhibit and that presence, “How many leads did we get and if we can let’s try to track that back and relate them to a sale later in the year.”
Problem is is it takes, depending on your buying cycle, a long time to close that deal, could be years so it’s really hard to tie a close sale back to an exhibit or an interaction you had face to face at a trade show. Scanning leads and just seeing the most amount of people in your booth is not what it’s about. If you guys have been to a trade show and see people that do the goofy game of Vacation or something totally unrelated to their product, they’re just trying to get people in the booth. 90% of the people that come see them and play the game aren’t a potential customer. How valuable was that?
When we talk to them, we try to get them to understand and we try to understand who are you really trying to see, who are you looking for and then what are the opportunities in things that we can do and we can offer that are going to help us put you in front of those people? Whether it’s a networking event or an offsite sponsorship or something that’s a little bit different than just plopping down in a 10 x 10 and sitting there behind a table and waiting for your customer to come find you. Let’s get proactive about this and connect you to the right people right away.
Fred Diamond: That’s great. Ryan, why don’t you tell us a little more about specifically what you are an expert in? Why don’t you tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance?
Ryan Brown: I’m hesitant to call it brilliance or even call myself an expert in some of this stuff yet. I would love to become one, but really I’m probably a couple of years in to what should be like a tenure study in some of this stuff. One area that we’ve been ahead of the game in terms of trade show sales is on the analytics and business intelligence side and I’m not talking about big data or some fancy AI software type of things. We know that’s out there, but realistically we tend to work with finite databases of attendees and groups, so we don’t really need an analytical program that like Amazon or somebody would need to sift through the terabytes, or whatever’s bigger than terabytes of data that they have.
We’re working with a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand records which really you can go through that yourself and you can start to segment and sort and find some real intelligence in the data that we already possess. In terms of using that to identify grow in product sectors for a sales plan like where are we going to try to find growth this next year, identifying the product categories over the up and coming ones as opposed to the ones that have stagnated or are starting to merge together, we see a lot of M&A activity, we’re doing it in terms of trying to acquire new attendees for the show, find out when they register and target our marketing and our sales efforts to when they’re typically starting to think about our specific event so we’re topical and top of mind when they’re ready to think about it.
Things like that and applying the talent is – I mean, anybody can do analytics. Anybody can plot numbers into a chart. The hard part is where a lot of people call us or ask for help is then interpreting what it means. I’ve got this data and I’m looking at my sales trends but I have no idea why there’s a spike here and a dip here and why attendance growth and exhibit growth don’t seem to be related. That’s where we come in and we’ve done it enough times across enough show, we can bring in our knowledge of specific markets, of overall economies globally and in US to try to put some context into what’s happening in terms of our particular client’s sales trends. It just helps overall and not just on our sales strategies over the years. It helps them determine where they want to focus their education, where they want to find new attendees, where they want to find new members just as an association, not just for their show. It’s really beneficial information and I would say that our industry is behind the rest of corporate America in terms of how other sales organizations are using this data.
Trade shows are funny, they’re kind of successful despite the organizer, I hope there’s no organizers listening to this, but a lot of times it doesn’t matter what you do, 100 thousand people are still going to come to your show. CES could do half of what they do and they still would see 150 thousand people just because everybody wants to know what the next cool electronics are. Because of that, we haven’t really had to innovate. We haven’t been in a situation where we’ve been forced to change and do something different which is why I think we’ve been slow to respond to some of the analytics and business intelligence products and services solutions that are out there.
Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about neuroscience and how that plays into what you do as well.
Ryan Brown: It’s kind of accidental that I stumbled onto it but now it’s become somewhat of an obsession like any of my team members would tell you that. I was trying to -this is probably a challenge for most sales folks out there, but – in hiring young person, trying to teach them how to do this and how to build them into like a monster sales person, I can’t get them to pick up the phone. I want them active. I want them talking to people, there’s proven track record of success for sales people that do that, but they’re afraid of it, they’re afraid to just start dialing and calling and hearing the word no.
I was like, “What would appeal to me? What would make me understand why I’m being asked to do this and to actually get me to do it?” and I stumbled on to this Ted Talk by this gentleman named Paul Zak, he’s a professor out of a university in Southern California and you may have heard of him. He’s the doctor, I think they call him the love doctor sometimes, but he studied the neurotransmitter Oxytocin which is largely and for a long time thought to be just something that women’s brains emitted when they were nursing a baby and gendered a bond between a mother and a child but it turns out and through professor Zak’s research that men and women produce this neurotransmitter and it’s produced when you’re having an interaction and you’re building trust.
It started to make sense, I was like, “OK, so everything we do about building a relationship is about building trust with a customer.” I’m interested in this so I reached out to him. Really, I was just trying to find out if I’m trying to sell to a client and I want to engender and build trust with this particular client I need to elicit this response from his brain, what’s the most effective way to do that? And I wanted him to tell me over the phone to justify getting my sales people on the phone and that’s in fact, what he said. Obviously the strongest way to build trust between a person is face to face, and then he said it’s basically like scales down, so the next strung is when you can do it digitally or over the phone, the next strung, way to build trust and elicit this neurotransmitter is with a video chat and then the phone and then email or some other digital interaction and then social media.
You can do it, too, as long as there’s some kind of relationship that already exists between you and the person you’re interacting with on social media. But it basically led us down a rabbit hole, here. Now I have my reasoning for justifying why my salespeople need to get on the phone because – and nobody takes face to face meetings anymore, they used to be the way you did it, you went on an account visit but it’s so hard to get people to accept a meeting now, just because they don’t have time. The next best way to do this was video chat and on the phone but we started to build upon that and it’s like, “OK, so if getting on the phone is how we’re going to build trust, what are the things that we need to say and how are we going to elicit this response from them over the phone?”
So we started to pay attention to the phrases we used and the things that we said to them over the phone and Dan and I have some really interesting conversations, Dan Cole, because a lot of the stuff that he says and if you listen to his podcast he’ll say things like, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” What’s actually happening is your brain creates neural highways when it’s doing something that it recognizes, like if you’re taking a shower, your brain gets off on this highway and if you’ve ever heard anybody say to you like, “I have my best ideas during the shower” it’s because their brain has gotten off on this neural highway and all of the other parts of the brain, all these resources have suddenly freed up for the creative parts of your brain to start working. Or if you’ve ever been on the highway driving and all of the sudden you’re ten exits down and you’re like, “I don’t even know how I got here”, your brain did the same thing and other parts of your brain were getting active.
So when you call and a customer recognizes a sales call, their brain does that. They turn it off right away, and they’re not going to listen to you and they’re not going to engage with you. Dan says they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, you need to be engaging and Dan will say, “Be audacious early in the phone call with probing questions or something jolting to get their brain off of that highway and engage in that conversation so all of the resources that they have are being used to talk to you and they’re not thinking of something else or answering email or doing whatever else while you’re talking.
Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful, and the IES brings great speakers to the region to do programs and in January of 2018 we had a speaker called John Asher who spoke specifically on how to engage the customer in what we call the old brain. The new brain is selling feature specs, those types of things and the customer typically hears, “Blah, blah, blah.”
But when you talk about how it impacts him, how you’re audacious, certain words that you use at certain times, you can definitely trigger things which will allow you to accelerate the sales process. Ryan, why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales career mentor and how they impacted your career?
Ryan Brown: I mentioned Dan a couple of times already in the podcast, obviously he’s factored in heavily to my career and how I shape the way I do things here at NTP Events. I worked for Dan for 2 years at the Consumer Electronics Show. When I was the sales coordinator, he was the vice president there. Honestly, I was 24, it was my first real job and I was in awe of the energy, of the enthusiasm, the belief in the product, his ability, one of the things that I try to do that I’ll never forget, the account team that was there was also awesome.
There were some really good guys there that were very good salesmen that I still keep in touch with and talk to all the time, but Dan would get in there with them and get on the phone with them. As vice president, he was in there helping them close deals throwing his weight around, his ability, lending his skills and talents to those guys and they’re still learning from him but then they’re closing deals and making money so that was something I’ll never forget. It’s something I try to do with my guys. Unfortunately, I don’t get to do as much as I want but I think it’s something that as a sales leader, you never want your team to feel like you’re asking them to do something that you’re not willing to do yourself or that you can’t do yourself so I think jumping in there with them on the phone is huge.
I’ve also worked for some really powerful women which I think was important for me in my career. Very strong, smart, nothing’s-going-to-hold-them-back women and I learned a ton in terms of how to be around and work around different types of people, how to be aggressive, how to challenge and overcome obstacles that I had to watch them, hoops they had to jump through. It just makes you feel like there’s literally no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do anything, watching them perform. There’s no excuse.
Fred Diamond: Speaking about that, what are two of the biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?
Ryan Brown: I think recruiting is a big one. Recruiting and training, finding the next generation, my top two sales people are very seasoned and god forbid they work for me for another 25 years but I don’t know that I’ll have them that long so it’s constantly on the top of my mind how am I going to build the next generation of great salespeople, where am I going to find them, what kind of people are they going to be. Dan mentioned in his podcast you really got to look for that attitude and then you teach them the ability but it’s definitely a unique challenge with this young crop of individuals because of their familiarity with the digital age, with the internet, the way that they do things going through school and the access to information that they have. It’s a different individual and so relating to them and getting them to understand what it takes to be successful, as much as you like to say you can do this all digitally, there’s a level of you definitely have to build relationships and you have to be in front of people and you have to talk to them and be on the phone.
The other one that I struggle with a lot is challenging assumed norms, and particularly in our industry there’s a lot of things that have been built over the years and years of trade shows have been going on that kind of dictate how we do things. All of a sudden, we’re seeing some changes in the market place where our customers are asking for very different things, sponsors nowadays don’t want to just buy the lanyards and the bags anymore, as a big sponsorship they want to do something experiential, they want to do something very different and getting your vendors, getting your suppliers, getting your teams to think outside of offering them the lanyards or the bags is a challenge and not everybody’s built to do that. It’s a constant push to get people to think outside the box, to offer new opportunities, to get to the root of why somebody wants to spend some money so that you can truly provide a solution that’s valuable for them.
Fred Diamond: Take us back to a specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of.
Ryan Brown: I heard some other guys on previous podcasts say the same thing. It’s not one particular. I mean, there is one big sale for this particular instance, but basically when I came to NTP Events, we were trying to launch a new show and it was an amateur motor sports event called an MSX, North American Motor Sports Expo. I was plucked to be the lead sales person on it. I never launched a show before, I had never had to delve into a market that deep before to understand the needs and desires of the attendees or the buyer’s and the exhibitor’s side, the supplier’s side. It taught me a lot of what I do and what I implement today just by having to figure this out.
Building a trade show floor from scratch, we formed some huge partnerships with companies like Mazda USA and the racing divisions to support this event to the first few years, we doubled the size of the exhibit hall floor in the second year and unfortunately the market wasn’t able to sustain a trade show, amateur motor sports guys or amateur motor heads. We didn’t anticipate it when we could have anticipated it, but when they get any money, they spend it on their car, not travelling to Charlotte to sit in some education sessions like we thought they might. Ultimately, the event didn’t last but the relationships that we built, the partnerships we built in that community that we helped forge, we were very proud of what we were able to do even though it wasn’t able to last.
Fred Diamond: Ryan, you’ve had a great career in sales. You’ve talked to us about some of your success, some of the responsibilities you’ve taken on, I’m very impressed about your discussion on the analytical side and we’re talking more and more about the neuroscience and things like NOP and speaking to the customer’s brain, if you will. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s just not for me”?
Ryan Brown: No. Not yet. It’s still a young career, definitely not as seasoned as some of the folks that you’ve talked to. I have a large family, I have three siblings – maybe that’s not large, it’s large for me – and I have one brother in particular that was trying to figure out what he was going to do with his career. Our dad gave us this book called, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by a guy named Cal Newport.
Basically the gist of the book is about how doing something that you’re good at, that you have aptitude at is ultimately what you’ll come to love in a career as opposed to chasing your passion. I’m sure you guys have all been told before, “Do what you love” but a lot of times what we love is not a way to make a living and if you try that, sometimes you end up resenting what you love because you’re broke. Find something that you’re good at and that you can be successful at and ultimately that success will start to engender you’ll start to love what you do.
So far, I’ve been really lucky. I’ve had great teachers and mentors and I’ve been able to find success in this career so so far I haven’t doubted it, it provides a comfortable living for my family. I’ve been able to elevate myself a little bit and become a leader in this industry which again, it’s fulfilling as an athlete and as a coach getting to teach people about this and what we’re experimenting with and what we do is really fulfilling. I haven’t had to question it yet, I haven’t had a low point, not that that won’t come, but so far, it’s been rewarding as most sales people will say. The pay that you can earn, the satisfaction of closing that deal, it’s all been there for me so I’ve enjoyed it so far.
Fred Diamond: Ryan, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the junior sales professionals listening today to help them improve their career?
Ryan Brown: I think the most important thing that you guys can embrace and that I can impart is the concept of practice. It’s just like anything. You’ll hear people say they’re a born sales person, really what that means is they just are a little bit fearless and not afraid to try things but they still have to practice. They get told no, they have to learn from mistakes, “Well that didn’t work, I’ve got to try this next”, but you have to keep practicing and you have to keep trying. One of the ways we do that here at NTP is we role play with each other. We get in a room and we make it uncomfortable for each other. What’s the worst thing that somebody could say to you?
The concept of practice, it doesn’t just come right away. Everybody has a different style, a way of approaching things. Practice, practice, practice. The other thing too, this was a really impactful for me. One of my former bosses, Heather Roderick, used to say to me all the time because I was eager and enthusiastic and I run in there, “I got an idea, I’m going to do this” and she would say, “Did you think it through?” and I hadn’t, she was right, and 9 times out of 10 I go, “Yeah, that was a bad idea, I’m really glad I went back and thought about it.” I think that’s important because you’re young, you’re excited, you want to be impactful, you want to make a difference and so you just want to try things, you want to do things but you definitely have to use that brain.
You’ve got to think through what you’re doing, “Is this appropriate, is there political impact, if I’m going to sell this to one exhibitor, am I going to upset another exhibitor?” You’ve got to really think through the potential consequences or rewards of what you’re trying to do.
Fred Diamond: Ryan, I’m going to take you off course here for a second and it’s triggered by your answer of practice. We’ve interviewed some former athletes on the Sales Game Changers podcast and if you’re a football player, especially if you’ve made it to the professional level, the game isn’t where you practice. It’s the tens of thousands of hours leading up to that three minutes. You’re an athlete, you played college lacrosse, you’ve coached lacrosse as well. What have you learned from being a college athlete which has required tens of thousands of hours? What have you taken off of the pitch into sales, is there anything that you can think of from being a very successful lacrosse player that has transferred into your career in sales?
Ryan Brown: Yeah, particularly because of the position I played in. If you guys have ever seen the game of lacrosse, the face off is actually a highly skilled position, it’s almost a game within a game, a little competition with the other guy to try to win possession of the ball. I didn’t come into college as a face off middy, it was kind of a niche that I ended up falling into and I wasn’t good at it right away. I had to work, and work, and work, and work to play myself into that role. In fact, I’m an OK athlete but I’m not one of those guys that you just see out of the field and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, he’s the most amazing athlete I’ve ever seen.” I had to work, I had to keep my body in shape, I had to get in the gym, I had to practice.
When everybody else was out practicing shots and running through offenses, I was in the corner taking face offs. I think going back to the concept of practice, you have to build your ability, you have to build your aptitude and your skills. Then just having a sense of continual improvement and coachability that a lot of athletes bring, it’s never good enough. You can always be better. Yeah, you won this game but now there’s a game next week. We’ve got to keep moving forward and keep thinking ahead and keep getting better at what we do.
Fred Diamond: What are some of the things that you’re doing to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?
Ryan Brown: Part of it is we’re constantly training with each other, whether we have new employees on board or if it’s just a refresher for the team. Because we sell across so many different industries and so many events, it helps us to all get in the room and work with each other to get better at what we do, and you never know what somebody will come out with, one sales person will be having a particular problem with a certain objection and then another sales person is like, “You know, I’ve been hearing that a lot last few months and I’ve tried this and it works so far.”
Just getting in the room together and training with each other and I participate in that. I get in there and I role play with them. I end up playing like the bad guy most of the time, but I think that helps, just living in it like I was still selling every day I think helps keep sharp. Then also the business development role that I play for the company here, I’m actively out there trying to sell what we do at NTP. I’m trying to diversify our products and come up with new things that fit the needs out there in the market currently, and I think that that also helps keep my mind sharp, keep me thinking about what customers are looking for so that I can help my sales people bring in some new business for NTP Events.
Fred Diamond: What’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?
Ryan Brown: Part of that is again, focus towards business development rule of what I’m doing here is really differentiating NTP from – there aren’t too many competitors in the show management business in terms of exactly what we do – but definitely trying to differentiate ourselves whether that’s through the analytical way that we sell, the analytical way that we look at market places, the science that we’re trying to incorporate into how we sell and really appeal to the rational side of folk’s brain when they’re trying to decide who to go with when they’re outsourcing parts of the management of their event. That’s a constant challenge, but then also the diversification of our revenue.
NTP was founded as a company that owned trade shows, currently we do own one but a huge part of what we do is based on show management, but what else can we bring the market place? Everything that we’ve learned and everything that we know, are there other products and services we could be providing whether it’s consultation or software products or efficiency, whatever it is, how do we put that together and we package it up and offer it?
Fred Diamond: Ryan, sales is hard. We’ve talked about some of the challenges throughout today’s podcast. People don’t always return your phone calls or your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?
Ryan Brown: I think it goes back to what I mentioned early on in the podcast, way back to when I was selling golf clubs at Dick’s Sporting Goods. I was talking to people and putting them in a situation where they’re making a purchase or they’re making a decision that they feel is the highest value and the best possible deal for them, not for me. For them. I know that salespeople sometimes get a bad rap as they’re always trying to hose you or pull one over on you but I think particularly in terms of what we sell, access to this market place which is ultimately sales and leads for these companies, I feel like we do a really good job of putting companies in a position where they can take advantage of everything that we have to offer. You feel really good about that, especially when it works.
Sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes you talk somebody into it and it doesn’t make sense, but most of the time it’s a really good opportunity for folks and so just that, not only the satisfaction of closing the deal but the satisfaction of knowing that what you just sold that person could make the difference for them for years to come or that next year or that next month if they make one sale from your event.
Fred Diamond: What’s a final thought you’d like to share to inspire the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast?
Ryan Brown: One of the guys that I worked for at American Composites Manufacturers Association used to say all the time, “People will pay what they think something is worth” and that runs through my head almost every day, probably like 5 or 6 times a day when we’re talking about what are we selling, how are we selling it, who are we selling it to, how much is it worth. It’s really about getting to what the customer values and we can’t assume that it’s the same thing that they valued a year ago, a month ago, a week ago. We have to be experts at knowing what our customers are trying to get out of our product or our solution and providing that value, providing that solution. It may be a way that we never had to before, but that’s what everything stems out of.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez