Most businesses, particularly startups, fail with their transactions when selling to innovators because of ineffective strategies and poor communication skills. Regardless of your business niche, the best way to closing such deals is by building genuine relationships. Joining Ben Baker is Patrick Talley to share his secrets and strategies when doing transactions with super innovators through empathy. Patrick explains why innovators’ shoes and connecting with them beyond mere business reasons is a sure path towards a successful deal. He emphasizes how the desire to solve problems must be the driving power of every communication with innovators to yield the best results.
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Patrick Talley On Using Empathy And Communication When Selling To Innovators
Welcome to another show, my wonderful audience. Thank you very much for tuning in every week. Thank you guys for your sharing, subscribing, and your comments. It is amazing the comments that I get each and every single week from people that are sitting there going, “Ben, you got to get so-and-so on the audience. You got to get these people onto the show.” I truly am listening because you guys all have great ideas. What I want to do is want to make sure that every single week, we’re talking about things that are relevant to you. In this episode, Patrick Talley is on the show and we’re going to talk about selling the innovators.
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Patrick, welcome to the show.
Thanks. I appreciate the time. I’m looking forward to this. It was a pleasure speaking with you and getting to know each other. The question you asked me about the innovator sector, what goes on there, how is it unique, and why is it so important when you look at an entire adoption of a market. When I think about the innovator sector, I look back on my career and I realized that in the first years, I didn’t know that I was only selling to innovators. I was constantly migrating back to the early stage of even the innovator sector and what I found in the ten years into my career with a couple of exciting, fortuitous rocket ship successes, an exit, an IPO, and another company that became one of those companies written about in Forbes and Fortune. We were the most frequently front cover of Forbes and Fortune of any privately held software company. It’s all pre–dot–bomb.
The intellectual stimulation that goes on in the innovator sector exceeds the value in the joy around putting processes in place and scalability that you start to see as you move into early adopters and mainstream. After the second huge success story that I was a part of, I said, “This is my joy. This is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.“ For 39 years, I have always stayed in that innovator sector. When you only live in one sector and look at the adoption curve, that innovator sector is a tiny portion of the market. I did something genius if you will. I took that adoption curve and drop it on top of the innovator sector, macro to micro, and said, “Let’s break up the innovator sector as if its own market. Let’s take a look at the nuances, personalities and idiosyncrasies of the customers, the product solution, and the company I’m either running or working for that are delivering to the market.“
The first 3 to 5 customers are generally driven by someone on the technology side. Share on XIf you do a technology adoption curve that bell-shaped curve over the innovator sector, you’ll see that yet, “We have these early–stage innovators.“ When we look at the whole curve, we never talk about early–stage innovators. We glob them into a bucket called innovators. When I’m speaking to people about super innovators, that’s the first 3 to 5 customers. That’s going from whiteboard ideation to 3 to 5 customers that are paying. That’s a unique experience on the product, company, customer, sales, marketing, and delivery side, then 4, 12, to 15, somewhere in there, 16 to 30 and 35, 35 to a 100 and 100 to 150. You start to look at repeatable processes. If your experience prior to that, and certainly in the super innovator stage, there are no processes. You’re trying like hell but you don’t have enough data points. You don’t know your customer acquisition cost because you’re begging these people to answer the phones.
It’s duct tape and band-aids at that stage.
So as the product. When I talk about the inner dynamics of the company, that’s building and delivering a product, whether it’s one that I run, one that I advise, or one that I’ve been a head of sales for. The rest of the employees hate that the tip of the spear folks driving revenue is selling deals with hair all over them. Every deal is different. Every deal has got one more feature that has to be added. I’m the head of product development. I’ve got a full whiteboard and project plan. That’s eighteen months out. Now, you want to add a purple whistle or a belt of this thing to close the deal. We, on the sales, side want to say, “If we don’t add that thing, we’re never going to get it closed.“ Nobody is going to buy this stuff exactly as it is. It’s not ready for prime time. On the customer side, the joy is you generally have more pragmatic customers. They’re going on the journey with you and helping you put the thing in place because nothing exists that serving the function.
We talk about idiosyncrasies instead of nuance. Those are nuances. An idiosyncrasy is that in the innovation whiteboard, the first 3 to 5 customers are generally driven by someone on the technology side. Someone with a maven personality may or may not even know how to buy something within there. They may not have any responsibility to write a check within their company, but they’ve recognized the need. They’re going to beat you up when they face you because your product can’t do the five things they want it to do. By the way, three of them, they’re the only person on the planet that wants the product to do those things. You have to convince them that those three things may be important to them, but nobody else seems to care. It still buy my solution.
There’s so much to unpack there before we go any further. Let’s take the time to unpack this because what we’re talking about, as you just said, is the tip of the spear. We’re talking about innovation. We’re talking about almost from the position of concept where you walked in the door and you had this a–ha moment to try and get those first customers to buy into the idea that you have. We’re not talking about the early adopters. We’re not back here about the people that are crossed the chasm that we’re dealing with the mechanics. How do we scale the company? This is way before pre-sale.
This is down on your hands and knees at the stage of begging saying, “Could you take a chance on me so we can do it?“ Let’s talk about the challenges because you intimated in some of these things where your product engineers said, “We’re going to do this.“ Sales come up and say, “We need this. It blows the whole thing apart.“ How do you keep all those balls in the air when you have a mission, vision, and value that you’re heading towards and this is what you want as a goal, but you still have those unicorn customers saying, “This is interesting but what we can do this?“ How do you understand what those customers are worth paying attention to?
There may be two things there that you flipped a light switch on. One of them is a shorter conversation, which is the inner dynamics of your own company. In true Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, the chapter on mavens, connectors and salespeople, if you have a technology product or engineering product that’s being built, it’s being built by mavens. That‘s a certain personality type. Salespeople are generally either evangelist connectors or connectors evangelists, and that’s a different sale personality type. The communication styles are very different. The most critical thing there is culture and culture of respect. I quit counting a long time ago, but something that $500 million worth of technology solutions in my career. It’s not that big a statement of brag. I’ve been around a long time.
I’ve never written a line of code. I would not have been able to take care of my children and my retirement, everything else, if it weren’t for wonderful mavens who wrote code. I respect them. I would also make sure that they respected me and that I was an expert and a professional in what I was doing. It wasn’t saying caving in and saying, “We’ll add these five things that make their workload harder to get the deal done.“ It was belabored to get those concessions with the customer. I’m moving back. You will notice that I tend to oversimplify everything because my small brain only handles things in small digestible chunks. It’s all about killer to close.
Am I involved in a conversation or is this the transaction and one of the problems? You’ve seen this, every startup company, every early–stage company, “We’ve got a pipeline of 47 companies or want to buy from us.” I’m like, “How many have bought?“ “None yet, but 47, we’re talking to on a weekly basis.“ I say, “You’re doing something cool. You’re a smart person with a big brain. That’s recognized a problem and built a solution or propose a solution that solves a big problem. You’re like the guy or girl with the brand new cool sports car in the parking lot at the high school. Everyone wants to come out and stand around and talk about it.“ Those aren’t the people we’re looking for.
None of your friends can afford to buy that car because your mom and dad bought that for you.
What are we looking for? We’re looking for someone that can either conduct a transaction or can drive us to the point of conducting a transaction with our help. How do we identify those people? Again, my oversimplification and the killer to close the conversation of the super innovators is I’m looking for someone who recognizes it’s a big problem trying to solve the problem themselves. It’s a bigger problem than I thought. I wish someone would come along and show me a solution. When you show up and say, “I’ve got a partial solution to your problem, will you engage with me? We’ll go on that journey together.“ That’s who you’re looking for. They answer yes to those five questions.
That end question is, will you go on that journey with me? It takes a certain type of company to have a leap of faith to sit there and say, “This is an unproven solution. I’ve got this problem. It’s causing me pain. It’s tearing my hair out. I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve tried to fix it. I can’t fix it. Here’s a new solution.” There’s not even a proof of concept on this. As we said before, it’s duct tape and band-aids and the question is, there has to be that leap of faith by those super innovators to sit there and say, “I’m willing to go through the pain of innovation with you to be able to make this product viable for me and also lucrative for you.” That takes a special type of customer. How do you communicate those types of empathy necessary to be able to get those innovators on board?
There’s a lot in that question. Empathy is such a huge thing, especially in this part of the market, because your product is going to fail them. These are human beings that have put their faith in you. They put their professionals and credibility in you with their executive management and then you’re going to fail them. I tell people all the time, what we need to figure out how we’re going to handle this 6 weeks or 6 months when this thing breaks. Are we going to throw rocks at each other? Are we going to say, “Let’s have a kumbaya moment and bail the boat outright together?“ The first way I go about that is by asking those five questions. Have you recognized it’s a big problem? Try to solve the problem yourself.
Problem solves the problem yourself is important because they recognize it’s a big enough problem that it should be solved. When I hear that, I salivate a little bit. I’m like, “Now, we can start talking about the journey.“ The interesting thing I mentioned is that when you’re coming from whiteboard ideas to the first few customers, the super innovators, the people you’re engaging with are not necessarily check writers within an organization. They never bought anything for the company. They don’t know how to drive a transaction. I’ve never heard anybody do this before, but I found it very useful to take in some point to say, “Joe or Jane, we’re going to have a 30–minute conversation on sales processes. I’m going to lay out our sales process to you and ask you to lay out your buying process to me. We’re going to overlay those two and marry those two.“
What ends up happening is now you’ve got them engaged with their fingerprints on their buying process. Four weeks later, proof of concept was supposed to be shown to an executive VP as part of their buying process. When that’s not happening, you can say, “We’re stepping off the plan. Where we’re headed towards the goal, but we’re missing a milestone. How do we step back in here and get this?“ You’re working together to get this thing done. This is the part that I enjoy most. When I used to go to the Rice University, the students would raise their hands and promise you I knew the first question every time I ever went to speak there. That is what books can I read to help me? I would tell them immediately, “Read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and every psychology book. You can get your hands on.“ That’s what we’re doing is we’re dealing with human beings and trying to help people make decisions. That’s all we do in cells. Help them make decisions. Decisions are hard for people.
We hope that it’s a decision in our favor, but frankly, when you’re looking at it, trying to move ahead and kill it or close the conversation you want him to make a decision. “I know. Give him a hug. I’ll see you in a year or two. You’re not wasting any more of my time. I love you for that. Where’s my super innovator.“ The question you asked, I don’t know if I’ve gotten to meet around the straw person on that. Once they’ve answered those five questions, I always felt that ROI and business value are the only way to go. I came from a world where I was inducted into technology and some super science geophysics and petrophysics, and I knew nothing about any of that stuff. I couldn’t go toe–to–toe with those mavens and PhDs that were my super innovators.
People must put on their empathy shoes to get into the world of innovators and protect them. Share on XWhat do you do? You go to business value. It was all–around ROI. You start digging into what are the costs of not doing this. Why did you try to solve this problem before? What pain points? Those pain points. It’s a great question. Always ask somewhere in that and get to know you session. Who’s going to write a check to solve this problem? Does anybody care about this other than you Joe or Jane? If you have to ask all of these questions around the company, it’s one thing I joke about, if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody care. Are we solving a problem? Nobody cares about in this company who cares, who’s going to carry this thing across the end zone and write the check.
It’s a lot of that empathy thing. I love to use the word empathy because that’s what it is. I always tell people to put on their empathy shoes, get in their world. You’ve got to protect them. They’re usually not rocket butts within the company. They’re usually people who are highly valued, but they’re in a role that they’re probably going to stay in that role for a while because nobody else could do as good as them. How do we make them a hero from 8 to 5 and then get this solution into the company and grow it around and guarantee all the way through that? We’re going to have each other’s back when we stumble because we’re going to stumble.
I love the word that you use as a hero because there are multiple people within organizations that need to be consulted, need to be talk to, need to feel they know, like, and trust you before this process will go forward. You need to be able to communicate with different people differently. I agree with you 100%. I’m dealing with my first contact within the company. My goal is to make them look good to their boss. Plain and simple. If it’s a great idea, that’s it. It was yours. If it was a bad idea, it was mine.
You sit there and you want to protect them as you’re bringing this process forward. If you can give them the tools that they need to succeed, they can champion this. This thing will die on the grapevine very quickly. You also brought up another thing and I’ll let you go with this is that the fact is being able to speak to different levels in their own language and allow people to have their own set of comfort based on where they are is like your propeller heads, your technical guide, or mavens need a different level of communication than does the CEO the person who is your champion of your solution.
One of the things that I love about the innovator sector is it’s a place where individual acts of heroism carry the day. Individual acts of heroism don’t carry the day for Prudential, American Express, and Facebook. They do carry the day in an early–stage company and the day when it’s the customer, pulling off an individual act of heroism. Interestingly enough, when I spoke about going on the journey. That point of contact and that person carrying the torch for me over at another company was a brilliant, beautiful cat.
I worked with Whirlpool, believe it or not, 1,000 years ago. We blew something up. The software didn’t work. He got egg on his face and he trashed us to his management to save his skin. I came back to him and I said, “That’s a path to go, but here’s the problem with that path. We’re going to need something else from your company at some point. I don’t need your management thinking we’re dogs and not able to deliver. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to make you a hero in my company and you’re going to make me a hero in your company because when I need something from my company, I want them to love Whirlpool as a customer. I want Whirlpool to be their favorite customer and I want to be your favorite vendor.“
This is a tiny segue. One of the things I always do when I’m dealing with a customer who‘s going to be a customer for a while is getting to their procurement people who are going to pay us the right checks. These are the people I love. I say to them, “I want you to tell me, you don’t have to say who it is, but I want you to explain to me who your favorite vendor is. You personally, Jane, who managed pain vendors. I want to know who your favorite vendor is because my goal is to become your favorite vendor. That means that I get paid first or when something gets stuck, you give us the attention.“
Why are they your favorite vendor?
I need to earn it. The question is, what do I need to do? This has happened more than a few times in the ladies was named Jane that I did this with first. I sent our contracts director over and said, “Take her to lunch, get her on a whiteboard, get her to show you documents, copy everything you that she’ll allow you to.“ We’re going to be her favorite customer. I remember someone from accounting and my company come in and say, “This company X is late on a quarter–million–dollar payment. Will you call them?“ I was like, “I’m going to tell you something. If they’re late on a quarter–million–dollar payment, there’s an error in our invoicing process because Jane will pay. You go fix that and come back to me and ensure enough it was that way.“
He probably got paid within ten days.
Remember who pays you. One of my beautiful friends out of Austin is a German by the name of Bijoy Goswami. I had the pleasure of working Bijoy at Trilogy Software and met him on the first day. A handful of years Bijoy got in touch with Malcolm Gladwell and said, “Your mavens, connectors or salespeople is a brilliant chapter in The Tipping Points. That’s a whole book in and of itself. You should take that and run with it. Here are some ideas. I’m so excited.“ Gladwell said to Bijoy, “I’m done with that book. I’ve moved on and I don’t even know the rights to that thing or whatever. If you think there’s something there, go do it.“ Bijoy did. He wrote a book called The Human Fabric. My favorite chapter of The Human Fabric is Break the Golden Rule.
Bijoy says, “Don’t treat people the way you want to be treated. Treat people the way they want to be treated.“ We know enough now about psychology and different personality types that we don’t treat everyone the way we want to be treated. Perfect example, I have two children, my daughter bursts through the door with a hug and my son will lean in and give you his hug. He’s done. He does that for me. He doesn’t do it for him. My daughter is soaking up that hook, perfect different personality types. She’s a raving evangelist actress and he is a die–hard maven.
According to Bijoy, treat people the way they want to be treated. When you want to communicate with a maven, an evangelist, or a connector, know who you’re talking to, and it’s not that hard to know who you’re talking to. Sometimes the role itself. I worked with geophysicists and petrophysicist for a long time. I never met a geophysicist that wasn’t a pure maven because that’s the personality type, engineering and software development. Know who you’re talking to across the room and deliver this respect they want because they want it, not necessarily in the way you want. Thanks for allowing me that. It’s a brilliant thing Bijoy wrote.
The key thing that I took away from that is having conversations to find out from people. What are the things that are important to you? I do that all the time when I’m talking to procurement departments, clients, or whatever, what are the key things that are going to influence your buying decision? What are the things that are going to make you happy? What are the things that are going to allow you to achieve your goals? First of all, what are your goals and how can we work together to be able to achieve them?
The innovator sector is a place where individual acts of heroism carry the day. Share on XWhen I walk into a customer, I understand what their goals are, the motivations, the purpose of the company, and the personalities of the different people within the company. Work with them is easy. If you’re walking in trying to sell somebody something, it’s an us versus them. I want to find out is when we’re selling the innovators or trying to get those first customers, where is the best place to start? Too many people go for the head of the dragon. They go to the CEO, go to the CIO, go to whatever the C-suite designation they think is the person who‘s going to write the check. That’s the person that they’re going to. It’s the wrong decision, but I want to hear your thoughts on it.
When we’re selling an innovative solution at the executive level, they may not even know the problems exist. That’s true for a lot of different reasons. One of them is because people don’t want them to know the problems exist. Another one is they’re not measured on that problem. They’re not measured on that solution of that problem. They do not feel that pain personally or professionally. There’s a couple of things there. One of the things you want to find out as soon as you can when you engage with someone and you’ve qualified them as the super innovator or an innovator, depending upon where you are in your journey as a company and selling your solution is what are their personal goals and what are their professional goals.
Those things are very important. It was always how do you get a gold star? How does your boss get a gold star? How does their boss get it? I want to know those things because I want to be able to address those. By the way, what I’m saying here to talk about doesn’t put a gold star on your page, your bosses page, or their bosses page, then we need to hug each other. You need to tell me who cares about this tree that falls in the forest and find me somebody who cares. One of my favorite things is I had the great fortune of becoming friends with the CEO of a huge multinational customer. It was by saying yes to everything, which was one of my mottos.
I tell everyone, “Say yes to everything because you don’t get over–prescribed or subscribed to because people half the time don’t show up to the second meeting.“ It drops off. There‘s a guy who was had moved from Alaska to Calgary and his family wasn’t there. I was in town for a business meeting with him. He’d mentioned that all he’s doing is playing with commercial models at night because his kids are back in Alaska and they’re not moving for six months. I was like, “Let’s go to dinner.“ We went to dinner. We hit it off great. I made four trips immediately after that. We had dinner every other week for several weeks because I’m not that intriguing. We became good friends. I remember joking with him about the old big four consulting company, that’s what I call it. You and I are old enough to remember what big four consulting companies, but it’s the walk–in and say, “Give me your biggest problem. Tell me your biggest problem.“
I told this guy, I was like, “You’re one of the smartest guy I know. I don’t want your biggest problem. I’m sure if you can’t figure it out, I’m not smart enough to figure it out with my team. Give me number six. It’s still important to you. It’s still a problem you want to resolve. As soon as we resolve number six, we’ll look at number five. Maybe you’re number seven. Give me some of your top tens. Let’s talk about those, but 1, 2 and 3, those are billion–dollar problems that I’m not going to affect because they’re bigger than me.“ If you think about what’s happening at sea level, these aren’t the problems glimpse that they’re looking at. They’re looking at its stakeholder value or M&A. They’re looking at things that aren’t necessarily causing a problem because the security gates are not monitored properly by the security cameras. That’s not something to look at.
What’s interesting is by looking at question number 6, number 5, number 12, or whatever it is, you’re earning the right to talk about problems 1, 2, and 3. If you go in and sit there and say, “I can fix your billion–dollar problem.“ How? You’re a small little startup company. You have no proof of concept, no infrastructure and no capitalization. There are a million things you don’t have. You don’t have what it takes. You may have a good idea, but can I trust you to do it?
I can’t scale to it either.
Maybe I can scale to it in 3 to 5 years, but certainly, not at this stage of the game. You are far better off as an innovator, as an early adopter, looking at that problem number six and doing that well and say, “We did number six for you. Can we tackle number five? Who did number five? Let’s tackle number four. We built up some expertise in this area. Can we come in and do some consulting for you on your 1, 2, 3, 4. We can’t solve it for you, but at least we can look at this particular area of it.“ Companies need to sit there and realize what stage they’re in and not always trying to chop down that in the center of the meadow with a tiny little hatchet.
I talk about a lot with frequency and in the book, I talk about the Oracle of Delphi’s Know Thyself. You need to know where you fit into the conversation. If you ever watched the Shark Tank television show, you’ll hear someone say, “Who has a whopping $10,000 in monthly revenue.“ Say to the shark, “You’re going to regret not investing in my company.“ It’s like, “You don’t know where you fit in this conversation and the power dynamic.“
You don’t even know what you don’t know with that stage.
Do anything you can do that's moral, ethical, and legal to get a customer that's paying. Share on XYou’re not endearing yourself to anyone. Do you know who I am? Going back to something that we touched on that is of paramount importance in this conversation. I talked about the nuances and the personality types that exist at the super innovator stage when we’re going from those 50 customers or less. One of the things that you don’t often find, I said, “They didn’t always know their buying process.“ Oftentimes, they’re interested to learn that sales are a process. I thought you took people to play golf. That was it. I took them to lunch and bought them. It’s an actual process with a goal of milestones and dependencies. It’s important to take them by the hand and walk them through the value proposition. In a session, walk through your value proposition and there are two statements around a value prop that are critical.
The other aspect is you have to get them to start giving you their best guesses on costs or not solving the problem. I see the ROI when you start building your case on to allow them. As I said, all we do is we ask. We’re trying to help people make and help them build the case to make a decision, pull the trigger on putting some of this gunky solution in place, not ready for prime time solution to help build it to a real solution. Around the value prop statements, I oversimplify things. I tend to do rules of 3 rules of 5 and 1 of my rules of 5 around value props. Every marketing person goes this part. The good ones go a step further. Every marketing person can say, “What’s the cost of the problem? What’s the solution? What’s the value of the solution? How are we unique?“ Pretty simple five statement value prop.
On that 2 and 4, which is a cost to the problem to the customer and value of the solution to the customer, not too many early–stage companies can append in real dollars. What’s the cost of the problem in real dollars and the value of the solution in real dollars? I always tell people that it’s interesting because when I’m working with mavens as founders on technology companies, they come from the technology side, not the sales marketing side. They’ll say, “I don’t know that exact number.“ I’m like, “I don’t need the exact number. I need a number that allows me to sit at the table and get into a constructive argument.” If I say it’s $10 million and the prospective customer pushes back and said, “Over here, it’s $7 million. I’m charging $100,000.“ I’m okay with $7 million. “Give me $7 million. Let’s run with that. Where does that $7 million.“ You started unpacking those two cost and value in terms of real dollars. That’s how you start helping these people that you find in the innovator sector to get to the point of decision, to buy.
I got two questions for you. I’m going to let you go. The first question is, what’s the one piece of advice you would give a founder who’s just starting out and looking for their first innovator to go out and pitch their product to?
Get a day job. It’s going to take you longer than you think the check is going to be smaller than you expect. Your partner at home is going to tell you, “Deloitte call three times with a job with benefits. Why are we still chasing this dream?” That’s not ingested. Make sure you’ve got enough squirreled away, or you have some way to sell a part of your life. If you’re building an accounting solution, you’re probably good at accounting, sell some accounting service work to cashflow this thing as you go so that you’re not panicked down the road or you abandoned. In most of these startups, we see people abandoned because they ran out of cash to tobacco.
The next statement I would make is to know your value proposition. Those five statements are pretty tight. Answer those five questions. What’s the problem? What’s the cost of the problem in real dollars? What’s the solution? What’s the value of the solution in real dollars? How am I unique or different? You should be able to sit at the table and talk to those folks. Do anything you can do. That’s moral and ethical and legal to get a customer that’s paying. If they say you come over on Sundays and wash my car, they will go over Sundays and washer. Nobody wants to be first. Nobody wants to be 2nd or 3rd, but nobody wants to be first and you can’t get to 2 and 3 and 5 without 1. Do whatever it takes to get that first or two in and then ask the world of them. Ask them for a lot of things as you start to help them out.
Patrick has been an incredible conversation. This is the question I ask everybody as I let them out the door. When you leave a meeting and get your car and drive away, what’s the one thing you want people to think about you when you’re not in the room?
People buy from those they trust. We earn trust by showing up, listening, and helping solve problems. Share on XI hope I plant that seed with the last question that I ask in every meeting I’ve been in for the past ten years. That is, “What else can I do for you today?” I want those people to think that guy is selling to me, that guy wants to do a transaction with us, that guy is showing up and trying to help us. That’s called trust. I want them to trust me. I don’t think people buy from people they like. People buy from people they trust. We earn trust by showing up, listening, and helping solve problems. Begging forgiveness when we stumbled.
Patrick, this has been a great conversation. There’s lots of gold in there.
Two things, Ben. As I was talking, I was thinking, I don’t think there’s anything that I’ve mentioned that I haven’t written down in that sales book. That’s exciting because, again, we’ve got some things of value to offer folks. Before I turn you loose, I have to ask the question, what else can I do for you?
I am looking at my new course. It’s called 30DayPodcastChallenge.com. It’s all about teaching people how to create and run a podcast successfully. I’m teaching people how to innovate.
That fifth question of the value prop, how are you different, is key to that. I’d like to learn more about that.
Patrick, thank you very much. Thanks for being such an incredible person and we will talk soon.
Ben, thanks a bunch. I appreciate you making time.
Cheers.
Important Links:
- Selling to Innovators
- Patrick Talley – LinkedIn
- Facebook – Patrick Talley
- 30 Day Podcast Challenge
- The Power of Myth
- The Tipping Point
- Bijoy Goswami – LinkedIn
- The Human Fabric
About Patrick Talley
Patrick L. Talley has a long career driving revenue in the innovator sector of the technology adoption curve. Patrick has personally closed over $250,000,000 of high margin technology sales.
He has spent over 35 years refining and redefining what it takes to successfully accelerate the rate and decrease the risk around revenue attainment. He is currently a Managing Director of a B2B fund, Investor in Early Stage B2B Companies, Advisor to early-Stage Companies and a few days a month he offers up his time as a Fractional VP Sales to companies selling into the Innovator Sector of the Technology Adoption Curve. These are early-stage companies or mature companies selling innovation with new products, into new markets.
Patrick is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys long multi-pitch trad climbing and long snowshoe treks to glaciers or just nice saunters up a mountain.
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