Transcript
Joe Troyer: The next question that we have is … was really what are the best questions for me to ask an agency or social media marketing prospect, right? So if I have the opportunity, I’m in a meeting with them or I send them an email. What are the main questions that I should be asking? And at the end of the day, if you’re running any type of consultative sale, right, you should be asking, I believe, kind of nine core questions and I believe that these nine questions are really like the foundation and they’re the basics to running a consultative sales process, right? The nine questions, if you will, are all listed here on the screen and I’ll take you through these. But you’ll see that ultimately at the end of the day, the goal is to get somebody that doesn’t necessarily know us very well. They could be cold. They don’t know a whole lot about us to, at the end of the call, willing to fork up and invest some money in our coaching or training or, marketing services.
Joe Troyer: The first thing that I like to do when I start out one of these calls is, I ask the prospect, what made them join the call? Right? So whether I’m doing outreach or whether they’ve came to my website, they found me, whether they’re a referral, this question is good because this question gets them talking and this question turns the table a little bit. Instead of them just grilling you from the get go, you’re able to turn the tables and get them to really start opening up from the beginning of the conversation.
Joe Troyer: A consultative sales process should be 80-90% your prospect talking and 10-20% you talking. Understand that you’re not going to make a sale in a consultative type of sales environment if the roles are switched. Okay, so this can be forward if you’re not used to running a sales process, you can feel like you’re talking way too much. Okay, but you got to figure out some ways and some methods to turn the table, so to speak, to get your prospect to open up.
Joe Troyer: This first question is a great way to set the tone and to get your prospect talking right away. Okay, so what made you join today’s call? And typically they’ll be like, “Oh, I need help with my marketing. Right? Or they’ll say, “I really need a coach or I need help with my social media marketing.” Right? And I want to push upon you to keep asking why and to keep asking why until this conversation kind of gets uncomfortable. Because as you keep asking why, you’re going to get closer and closer to the root issue, the root problem and the root opportunity that you have. You’re going to learn why it’s important that the prospect solves the issue that they’re coming to you for guy.
Joe Troyer: Okay, so a very real example of this. Just the other day, I was on a consultation helping somebody with their SEO strategy, and at the beginning of the call, right, I started it off, “What made you reach out to me? Why are we having this conversation today about SEO?”
Joe Troyer: And the first couple of questions is like, “Oh, I need help with my SEO.”
Joe Troyer: And it’s like, “Well, why?”
Joe Troyer: “Well, you know, my, my organic search presence isn’t very good.”
Joe Troyer: “Okay, well, why?” Right? And I just kept asking why and it got awkward for a little bit, but by me asking why so many times I got to the root issue. Okay, so guys, the root issue is they had no organic presence, it was all paid traffic, and they’re getting ready in the next 12 to 18 months to sell their business and they want to be able to check the box that they have organic traffic, right? And that’s part of kind of the, the equation for them and the multiplier that they’re going to get when they go to sell the business. And so there were some other things that were important. Their website kind of sucks. They need some help with that. They want some on-page help. But really at the end of the day, they just want their prospects that are interested in buying that business to be able to find them in kind of the major keyword search phrases.
Joe Troyer: So I was able to figure out what makes this buyer tick simply by asking this first question, “What made you join today’s call?” Right? “What’s the reason that we’re on this strategy session?” And then by me just keeping digging and asking why. So the interesting part about this is because I kept asking why I learned that they are trying to sell the business.
Joe Troyer: So folks, if somebody is trying to sell a business and they’re going to be getting a multiplier on their traffic and revenue and sales, does my help with marketing, does that help equate to a bigger buyout number? Right? Do my services become more valuable or less valuable? They obviously become more valuable, right? So not only do I understand what’s making them tick, but now I understand that I’m going to be able to charge a healthy premium for me helping them because they’re getting a much bigger return than I had initially intended or that I had initially thought on the investment that they’d be making with me.
Joe Troyer: If you’re joining me live, give me a two in the chat that makes sense and you got a little aha moment there, like, “Yeah man, I really got to press that “why” at the beginning.” For everybody watching on YouTube land or on the blog after this gets posted and you’re not live, I’d love to see your feedback anyway. Let me know in the chat. That’d be great. All right, good stuff. Cool.
Joe Troyer: So then I start digging in, “So what made you join today’s call?” We keep asking why until it gets super awkward and we just can’t do it anymore. Then I want talk about advertising or SEO. If they’re hitting me up for SEO specifically or pay-per-click specifically, my goal is to to zoom out a little bit. Like, “Tell me Mr. Prospect, what’s worked in terms of advertising? Tell me what hasn’t worked?” And again the goal is to get them talking and you’re going to start to understand through these questions what type of a prospect you have in front of you. Are they going to be a good prospect? Are they going to be a good customer? Are they the type of customer that you want? Are you going to get along with them? Right? Do you want a relationship with them?
Joe Troyer: And ultimately at the end of the day, these are all important things that you should know and that you should be considering in terms of qualification, right? Should I pitch myself, my service to these people? Right? Or to the person that’s on this call? So if you’re talking with a prospect and you’re like, “What’s worked in your marketing?”
Joe Troyer: And they’re like, “Nothing has worked.”
Joe Troyer: And you’re like, “What hasn’t work?”
Joe Troyer: And they’re like, “Everything..”
Joe Troyer: Is that a prospect that you really think that you should be pitching services to? Does that make sense? Is that a prospect that you think you should be pitching services too?
Joe Troyer: You better be saying hell no in the chat or at least in the back of your head, right? If nothing’s working or has worked in terms of advertising, you don’t ever want to be a business’ last hope, right? That puts way too much-unneeded pressure and angst on your shoulders that you don’t want to be dealing with.
Joe Troyer: So then what we want to do is we want to identify the goal, right? And every business has goals and if they don’t have a goal, there’s a problem, right? “What’s the goal for the next three months? What’s the goal for the next nine months? Where are you guys trying to get? What’s the vision and how are you guys going to get there?” If they don’t have this? Again, is that really the best prospect for you? They got to have some goals and they gotta be able to conceptually talk about this at least high level. They might not know exactly how they’re going to get there, but they should be able to say, “My goal in the next three months is to add this many members or to increase our bookings per day to this amount, and this is what it’s gonna do for me.” Right? This is why.
Joe Troyer: If not, again, I want you to really challenge yourself and prospect. And really thinking in the back of your head, is this the best use of your time and is this the right customer? Right? Are they gonna quite literally fall out the backend? Meaning, quit as fast as they came in the front door, meaning like contacting you.
Joe Troyer: And that’s what you don’t want for your business. If your an agency, you’re a social media marketing agency or you’re a traditional agency, your a coaching business, if it can’t keep customers and they just churn, I’ve got to tell you guys, there’s nothing worse than that than the entire world. Right? You’re literally running on a treadmill and getting nowhere.
Joe Troyer: So then once they give us that goal, we got to identify and we got to come up with a gap. Right? And what I mean is we got to get them to realize that they’re not going to get to where they want to go without something changing. Right? We need ideally in agreement and a buy-in from them and it needs to be blatant. Right? That they aren’t going to get to their goal with what they’re doing now and that they obviously have to do something different or in addition, in order for them to get to their goals.
Joe Troyer: Okay. Then ideally the next step is, we have to get the agreement that what you have to offer, whether it’s a coaching offer, whether it’s a training program, whether it’s a done for you marketing service, that what your doing is going to help them fill the gap between where they’re at now and where they’re trying to go. And it doesn’t have to be the only thing that’s going to help fill the gap. It doesn’t have to solve the entire gap so to speak. Right? But you’ve got to get them to agree that what you have is going to help them at least start filling that gap. And if you’ve got that last piece, then it’s time to ask for the sale.
Joe Troyer: So depending on what you have and how complex it is, right, that agreement that what you have is going to fill the gap, the second to last bullet there, that time can differ. That can be five minutes to talk about that. Right? That could be 30 minutes to talk about that. And that really depends on how complicated what you sell is. It also depends on if you’ve given any type of training, content, webinar or any type of training on the front-end before they’ve gotten on that, that phone call with you or the strategy session with you. Right?
Joe Troyer: And it also depends upon the prospect, right? Like you can be selling the easiest thing to conceptually grasp and understand, right? And you can get stuck on the third to last bullet there, agreement that they won’t get there with what they’re doing now, right? And that what you have is going to fill the gap. You could get stuck there for 20 minutes to 30 minutes to 45 minutes just to get that breakthrough before you can finally ask for the sale.
Joe Troyer: So as you keep running these strategy and you keep running them for the same types of products and offers, you’re going to get better at question asking and knowing where to go in a conversation to get to the end result faster, right, to get to the the gap faster, to get to the goal faster to get them to really open up and explain their business. Right? And so I need you guys to really think about this nine step process as a process and that you’re not going to become an expert in the process overnight.
Joe Troyer: But if fundamentally you can take these nine questions as a base, this can be the outline for your strategy session or for your consultative sale that you use to lead your prospect from being brand new and green and not knowing you from Adam, right, to closing an hour later on the spot for a $1000 to $3000 to $4000, $5000 a month recurring residual.
Joe Troyer: Any questions, real quick, for everybody joining live on kind of these nine best questions so to speak? Does this make sense to everybody? Give you guys a chance to ask a question and then we’re going to move on to the third and final topic for today’s quickie AMA. All right, cool. So a bunch of good questions. Like, “Thank you. This is good. This is gold. I’ll start using it,” et cetera.
Joe Troyer: I want you guys to conceptually … A good practice if you’re going to take this and start using it, is think about the last time you had a meeting with a prospect, right? And I want you to think about this outline, so to speak, and these questions and this flow of a call because that’s really what it is. And I want you to think about where your prospect got stuck. I want you to think about what didn’t happen, right? Start to make a synapse. Start to make a connection between why a deal went well or didn’t go well based on this outline. And I think it’ll really, really help you guys take your closing skills to the next level.
