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"AI Will Happily Solve the Wrong Problem Very Efficiently" · Selling AI

• Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving into how you can stand out with storytelling in the age of artificial intelligence that's doing some of the other work for us now. I have Stephen Stiers on the show today and Stephen is a B2B sales consultant, keynote speaker and author, probably not in that order, but he's advised hundreds of companies on sales storytelling and process. Here's what makes today's conversation interesting. Stephen's core thesis is that your story is what closes the deal, not your tech stack. So in today's episode, Steve and I are going to talk about what the explosion of AI generated sales process looks like and how we can stand out as experienced sellers in this space. How he's actually replaced outreach with just high touch speaking and free consulting to win his clients. And then really what happens to the future of selling when anyone can spin up a pitch deck in five minutes. ⁓ All right, I'm excited about today. Let's do it, Steven. Welcome to the show. Stephen Steers: Hey Warren, great to be here with you. Thanks for having me, man. Excited to chat today. Warren Kucker: excited to dive in. great. So first, give us your background. Obviously, we know the end state and your focus now. How did you get here? Stephen Steers: Yeah. This is not the end state. This is a state on the way. Right. We're further along in the book but still have not written my final chapter. ⁓ I'm from New York City. I've been in sales officially like a bit over a decade and I started out selling ice pops as a kid. You you buy the 300 pack and then I would sell four for a dollar. I think you get the whole pack for like 10 bucks and that's how to get more money for candy which is what you buy when you're a young man who doesn't know much better. ⁓ Then went from there to cutting grass and buying things on Craigford. Warren Kucker: I'm Jessica. Stephen Steers: and flipping them and reselling them. That's how I paid my student loans for the first two years after I graduated from college. So I've always been around sales, but it wasn't until I actually formally sat down in a room and started to understand what lead generation's like, how difficult this lifestyle can be sometimes, and how you actually have to not just have something to sell, but you have to solve a real problem. And I didn't realize that until a number of years of banging my head against the wall. You need to solve somebody's problem. And so I'm sure we'll unpack a lot of that today. But where we come into storytelling and why storytelling is if you can tell a good story about how you've solved the problem someone's experiencing before Label it with the actual name of the problem and name of people and examples of how you've done it You have a much higher likelihood of being able to have a conversation with somebody about how you can solve their problem and I see a lot of sellers a lot of people in tech they talk about all the feature sets and all the bells and whistles that they built and how cool it is, but they don't actually know what problem it solves for their potential buyer and and that's why they don't sell anything. Warren Kucker: That's great. Well, mean, that ice pops, ice pop story is great. It sounds like it's like a 92 % gross margin business. We really need to like get this out there. Stephen Steers: Not for them. I think so, man. I think so. We're going to figure it out today. Warren Kucker: for a dollar. That's a steal when you're on the subway, right? Like I'll do over that route, right? So that's fantastic. Cool. So let's dive into storytelling. I think the core is that you think that we're leaving money on the table by being mediocre at best storytellers out there. Tell me more about that. How should reps be deploying storytelling in the process? Why is this a powerful tool for buyers to hear? Stephen Steers: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, great question. First and foremost, a story, why a story? And first, like I'm not telling you, you need to be Steve Jobs or some incredible cinephile who writes an incredible story. It's, mean, if you can, let's go for it. But it's more about the fact that you're clearly helping people understand that you know what problem they have and you're using social proof in a way that creates a chemical response in a person. So coming back to it, we're to talk about AI and tech stack and all these incredible tools we have access to. But at the end of the day, right? It's night, but at the end of the day, there's one key phrase I want to put out here to everybody. No matter what tools exist, no matter what the market says is the speed they want to move at, we are still, for now, until the robots take over, we're still humans solving human problems in a business context. Until that changes, you are still going to need to speak to a human about how you solve their problem, period. And one of the fastest ways, the fastest lines to getting to a place where you can help someone make a decision is a story. Why? Because it releases chemicals in the brain like oxytocin and other ones that help you actually have a person create real genuine empathy and feeling. Why is this important in sales? Because emotion is the framework that we make decisions in. So if you can't make somebody feel something about their problem, about the solution, or about a future that they can't actually peg and invest in, you are not gonna have them in a place they can make a decision. A story is a really fast way to help somebody get into a decision making framework so that when it comes time for you to make an offer and talk about how your services can solve their problem, not only have you demonstrated you've solved it before and you've given social proof that you've done it for somebody else, you've got them in an emotional state to say, actually, you know what, we should continue the conversation. And that happens on their own. So that's the first place where people are leaving money on the table is because they don't go into any call understanding that if I can help somebody get into an emotional decision making mind frame, we're gonna move the sale faster and I'm gonna be different than all my competitors who are not doing it. Warren Kucker: That's interesting. And so let's pull on this thread, right? So I say like, there's a lot that might change about the buying and selling process going forward, but humans are going to want to buy from humans. My very logical framework and unemotional one, that meant that I don't want to talk to an AI, right? So like, I just don't want to do that, right? But it's actually not what we're talking about here. I've heard this a couple of times over the past few weeks, and this is starting to really pop its head up. When you say that chemical response, that emotional response, right? Stephen Steers: Yeah. For now, yes. Warren Kucker: ⁓ The first question I have is, do you think that most sales reps are thinking about generating that emotional chemical response or no? Is that something you have to talk about to teach them? Stephen Steers: No, I have commission breath. No, I think it's something you have to teach them. so a lot of my work or one of my favorite places to work with folks is on their calls. So I have a framework I call contact selling. And one of the key features of this, if we're thinking of it as a pyramid, it's the situations of selling. So the call is the place where you actually put rubber against the road. What does your process look like? What do your frameworks look like? What experience do you create for your customer or potential customer? And so when I listen to these calls and run through them, it's very clear for me where We're falling short. It's almost immediate. I can be like, ⁓ this is why I wouldn't trust you either. Right. So in a place like this, a story can work very well. Like for example, I have a framework. It's about 28 different beats for how to run a proper discovery call. Again, you won't probably hit all of them. Some businesses don't know some parts don't apply. But one of the quick things is when you a question I like, I call it the kryptonite question. I'm sure you use it in your career. Warren. It's Hey, so just before we start, what made now the time for us to have a conversation about X? I call it the Kryptonite question because like Superman he has the one weakness, right? And this is the open book test in the question in sales. They're telling you what they're thinking about, what their intentions are, and you're ready can peg what else you should be asking if you hear and listen to that appropriately. That's the first place for a story. Oh, you're here because you're thinking about building this tool on your own and your team doesn't know how to approach it the right way with your clients? You're in the great place for a conversation like that. I actually worked with another company just like yours who had very similar questions and we were able to help them achieve that. I'll cover more on that today, but you're in the right place. Again, that's not a bloviating long story with like tons and tons of stuff, but it's more creating an emotional scaffolding to say, hey, I hear what you're saying. I've heard it before. You're in the right place and I've helped people like you. That's it. And that can lower some of the cortisol, which is a chemical that creates sales resistance in order to then let you run the rest of your script, which is, I would say, get into an agenda, which allows people to calm down as well, because you're not going to sell them something. You just want to see if it's a fit. And then from there, you have permission. And when you have permission, people are relaxed, and they're going to give you real answers and allow you to work your process. But I think people need a lot of training on it, because I've been on some bad calls before. Warren Kucker: Yeah, I imagine you have been. ⁓ I mean, this is a fascinating topic for me, because I think I'm bad at this. And so let's pull at it some more, right? And so you would think, yes, please, yeah. Working on getting better as of this moment when you've opened my eyes. So ⁓ that's great. ⁓ So you would think as like I'd say a founder led sales who's been on the other side of the fence and thinks his area is like that transition that I'd be good at this. And I may incidentally be OK at it. ⁓ But I'm working on it. Stephen Steers: Can I correct you? Can I correct you? Say, I'm working on getting better at. There it is. Warren Kucker: And then I actually think about it too logically. You have this problem. It's the biggest problem. Actually, you don't even know it's a problem. And I have this tool to fix it, right? So like, I probably approach my sales process too much like that. let's dive in deeper so we could help, let's say, reps that are listening to this or leaders who have reps that may need enablement in this space to get there. Do you feel that the barrier, let me phrase it this way, much of enablement is around what is my buyer's journey at this particular company? What is my product? I actually did a with that first, because people talk too much about that. And then like, what is the day to day? Like what's the industry or what's my user's workflow like? So you can understand what their life is like. That's much of enablement. Do you think that we don't get to the storytelling piece of enablement because that stuff is table stakes and it's taking too long to get through it? Or do you think we should switch it? And I can say like, great, let me give you stories and we'll do a sales process a year from now. Stephen Steers: think it absolutely switch it, right? I think three things you said was the day to day, the problem they're experiencing, and then the features. If I'm listening to you, I'd love to hear about, so have you ever been stuck at this part of your process where you click 15 buttons and nothing's happening and then you get billed for something you didn't use? Right, that's relatable, that's a story. It's like. Warren Kucker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stephen Steers: That's exactly what's happening to a lot of folks who are experiencing this problem. Here's what it leads to. It leads to a massive drop in efficiency of your team. They're wasting time. They're getting emotionally frustrated and it takes away from the real work of what you're doing, which is exactly why we built this. Warren Kucker: Yeah, this is interesting. Stephen Steers: We've established a whole line of context, right? Most people lead with the features versus here's why, right? A story is about the why behind what is happening and why it exists in reference to the context a person experiences. That's the order. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, this is an interesting gap. So it's almost like during, let's say, onboarding enablement first three, six, nine, 12 months, right? You have to get, all you need to do is get the meeting and then do the meetings well enough to close some work, right? So like, great, what do you need to know to get the meeting, right? And then what do you need to know to take that first meeting? It's almost like every time you have a meeting, you should just sit down with that rep and talk about who and where and why and enable them with the story, right? This user experiences this problem and we have this other customer that looks just like it and this is we solved it, right? And you try to pull out the emotional piece and the rep brings that, let me pull out your, when I'm implicating pain, I'm actually implicating an emotion, not just like a medic checkbox, right? Like, do you think you could run it? Like, do you think enablement should be more about this and less about process? Stephen Steers: Exactly. No, think process is the key. again, the storytelling is the context around the process. So. Warren Kucker: Okay. Stephen Steers: You've worked on you've worked in this business a long time like you've been part of a lot of great processes the best processes are the ones where the client Feels heard seen and knows that they can trust what's happening. And so it's the scaffolding around it I think process is one of the most underrated and underutilized things in sales. That's why people don't sell more, They're not they don't know where to look when there's a problem, right? That's why process is good But when we add a storytelling element to help the people understand that we know the problem We've seen the problem and here's how we approach the problem and here's why we Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Steers: we built what we built, it's a much easier through line because we can take the questions we asked during discovery and then layer that context over why we have this feature. When I first got into the business and I was selling tech, they took us through a demo of the platform and typically demos were showing them every single thing. That's kind of just what most people were doing and that's what you take up when you're in SDR. like, ⁓ look at this, look at this, ⁓ my God, this is so great. And then I don't know when it clicked over, I think I was sitting with one of the better reps and I saw like how he was doing it and I was like, wait a second, he's not showing this feature. He's just showing what they care about. It's not that that feature is not important, but I don't care. Right? You have to give me the context of where to meet me. Right? So, you made another point I wanted to uncover. You were like, ⁓ I have this problem you can't see. So there's a thing I learned from a guy named Taki Moore called the problem stack. Have you ever heard of it? Warren Kucker: Yeah, a little bit, like dive in, yeah. Stephen Steers: Sure. So there's three levels of problem, right? The first is the known said problem. This is a problem that anybody in your market who you're selling to knows they talk about readily. They don't, they don't hide it. Everybody knows it's there. The second level, ⁓ my mentor calls the two martini problem is the known, unsaid problem. So you go out for a drink with somebody, they trust you. And after about two martinis, they're going to tell you that something they only tell people they trust. They've labeled this problem, but they're not going to put it out publicly. And then the version that you're saying is something they can't see is the unknown unsaid problem. And this is the problem that people are unaware of until you show them. And then once you show them, they can't unsee it. Okay. Those are the three levels. And so for enablement, what we want to do, depending on how crazy our tech is or how crazy it is that we can help them see something they can't see. We have to walk them through the escalation of why seeing it this way is important. We can't just say, Hey, look, I didn't know this. You got to, got to take them through. Hey, here's what you're seeing every day. Here's what you probably are experiencing and don't tell a lot of people about. And here's what that's causing. And that's where your tech fits in. And that's how you leverage context, right? AI is amazing, but AI does not yet understand context. I read a blog post the other day and it said it really really amazingly I want to share it said AI will happily solve the wrong problem very efficiently And that's Jonathan Stark said that and I completely agree so people have these great tools But they're probably not asking enough questions to solve the right problem so they get the best output without the right context and that's where Experts like yourself like potentially like myself can add that extra layer to get the right as a result, efficiently with the right action plan to get the results we're all looking for. Warren Kucker: It's fascinating. I should start hosting more podcasts where I just get 45 minutes of free consulting work to help me with my own test for us. So this is great. Yeah. So let's have two threads. I'm going to stick on the thread you're on and then I'm going to pull on another one here. So problem stack, right? As you talk about this. So I've always thought so right now I'm personally trying to solve a problem that unfortunately I think is kind of unknown. So you have to teach teach on it a bit, right? Stephen Steers: That's kind of the point of most podcast these days, but that's that's Yeah. Warren Kucker: Then I always lean back on everyone says that. So like, does anyone's out there, you know what we saw a problem everybody knows about? Like, it's great. I'm not the first level problem. It's the biggest surface level problem everybody understands. I feel like that's rare, right? So like everyone thinks they have to teach, right? I probably am not going through those three stages in the way that you're talking about. I'm probably leaping into the unknown. And so instead of going like, great, this is your, this is what everyone is experiencing in your market. Here's the underlying unsaid thing. And then here's the real problem. Stephen Steers: Yes. Warren Kucker: to peel back, I jump right into the real problem. Do you find that one, you shouldn't do that and two, that's that's common or Stephen Steers: I'm gonna give you the consulting answers, it depends. I don't think it's the right way. Again, as we're talking through it, you're like, ⁓ like, I'm walking through someone through a train, you're a very logical person, Warren. Walk me through the logic of how I can arrive at a place where it's like, ⁓ I didn't think about it that way. And once you have that, now you have their captured attention and they're going to be understanding of why your tech solution and your features and your deliverables are the right thing to solve, not only the problems that they know about, but for the problem that they now cannot unsee. And so where I say that to anybody else and the way you've described it here is if we walk people through that train of logic, again, right there, that's a story too, right? That's a very simple story. I read about that in the book. Shout out to Taki Moore. Warren Kucker: Right, yeah. Yeah. Stephen Steers: This ascension, for lack of a better term, allows someone to experience the problem in the context that they know about it, which is the known said problem, help them be understood for the known unsaid problem where it's like, ⁓ like you do talk to people in this market where you do know what they're experiencing and what they don't really want to say publicly. You get it. And now I'm open to the context of what those mean for what I can't see. Not before. If you just jump in, like for example, like I'm going to give you a ridiculous example right now. Like it's, it's absurd. But if I was like, Warren, there's aliens and here's what they're going to do. Okay. They're causing all this stuff to happen on earth. You'd be like, yeah. All right. Now, again, that's a fantastical example. But if I was like, Hey, have you ever noticed that, uh, you turned off the power in your house and the lights were on one time or two times. Have you ever saw, a couple of shooting stars? Warren Kucker: Sorry. Never. Stephen Steers: Like, again, I'm just making this up as I go along, but if I walk you through a situation you're familiar with, and then one you're like, hey, this happened, and then I give you the context of, hey, that's actually aliens. Now, fantastical claim and ridiculous, and it's, I think there are aliens, but that's a whole nother conversation. Yeah, but mathematically speaking, there probably are, but just saying, like, if I'm gonna make a fantastical claim, like, hey, you can't see this, I have to walk you through the logic of how we got there. Warren Kucker: Right, yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. Right, right, Well, you'd probably be convinced if we spent some more time on this, yeah. Stephen Steers: Right? Fantastical claims require fantastic evidence. And so that train of logic is how I would recommend telling the story to get somebody there. Warren Kucker: you Yeah. Yeah, it's almost like, lazy's not the right word, but I'm going to use it. The lazy sales approach is to jump to the final part and be like, I'm having a hard time getting people to understand about this problem they don't know about, right? Like that's like, great, I'm going to leap right to the thing. Hey, you don't know that in deal communication is the biggest drag on win rates, right? I probably said this yesterday. ⁓ But like if you take them through a story, right? Like of what actually happened to a sales leader last quarter, right? and then drive them into like there's this thing under the surface that you know that's hard to talk about like that is there and then drag them to the final point that may be something they they know in theory but they haven't thought about in a while that progression is seems much better when I deploy it tomorrow and I'll send you a check for the commission that we close. Good good good good. ⁓ Stephen Steers: I accept checks. accept crypto. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, just, just putting a bow on that. That's a natural way to provide an experience, right? You're a human solving a human problem in a business context. And so for now, no machine could do that. Right. You've created trust in the way you listen and how you apply that context to what you've heard from them. That's the differentiator. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah. Stephen Steers: And that's where I see a lot of people don't even bother to take the time. Cause the way you previously described it, Warren is you're just like, Hey, here's what you're not seeing. Here's why this is a problem, which again, not saying you're wrong, but I don't know enough about you and you're making that about your solution. Not enough about my problem. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Right. That's a good call out because if you think about like AI intentionally has to restrict the context down where you as a seller is pulling from so many different areas of life. Right. So the emotional one to one aspect what's happening in a business right like body language what's happened in the past few meetings with a couple of folks that you're having AI is going to be like great like you gave me this information based on this information I'm going to produce a result. out of that information, but it can't be like, know what I also remember when I was talking to a friend six months ago and they had a similar emotional response, right? Like they're not gonna pull on that. You have to be context restrictive otherwise it would be useless. A human being can pull on all those windows correctly. ⁓ That's really interesting. Let me ask this. When you do consulting work and you talk about this framework, do you talk about or ever get to the point where you're deciding like your interview process needs to be designed so that Stephen Steers: Yeah. if they Warren Kucker: Really? I just see a scenario where all I test for is the skill. Where it's like, great, can you tell me the story? How do you walk me through the story and tell you operetta? So, your last role, something that's happening in your life. And if you are good at that, if you can pull up my emotional, like, let's say hormones, right? Like the, that are flowing, right? Oxytocin, right? Dopamine. If you can pull up that, I'll teach you about the industry. And we can talk about medic and like how to cold call. Stephen Steers: Yep. Warren Kucker: But like this is a core skill. you spend any time designing interview questions around this? Stephen Steers: have some training, I have a training I've done a few times called building and coaching a non-sales a sales team where I go through what the interview process should look like, questions to ask and stuff like this. yes, my two cents is the following. I think, and it's a hot take, I think soft skills are the most important skills right now within AI marketplace, period. Warren Kucker: Okay. Stephen Steers: Like, can you have a conversation with somebody? Can you ask good questions? Can you make someone feel seen, feel heard and feel understood? If you can do those things, again, I could teach you medic. I could teach you how to work a process, right? ⁓ Which leads me to another slight ⁓ tangent I want to pull on here is sales and business development are not the same thing to me. Okay. To me. Business development is figuring out what is commercially viable, what conversation makes sense and how the market would receive a thing so that we can then commercialize it and sell it. And you make a couple of sales across that thing, right? Sales is the repeatable process and system of getting customers and creating revenue. I mean this in the kindest way, you can just hire someone in to work a process and as long as they stay on top of their follow-ups and hit their number, we're going to hit our number. But that's not the same scale as business development. Business development is like you finding a person online and starting a conversation to understand is there a need here? What's the context of what's happening here? And from that context, then creating an opportunity for yourself. It's not the same thing. So what we've been talking about here, ⁓ storytelling works very well in sales. If we have them itemized for the types of stories we work and in business development, it's extremely important because we don't know if there's a need there yet. And once we uncover that need, then we can create context around how we can offer our solution. So for what I sell, which is consulting, it's generally very bespoke and it requires a lot of listening. So I'm always airing more on the business development side while working a sales process at the end because I can create the context from the conversations I have. Warren Kucker: So I'm going to continue to take your really well thought out emotional stories and then try to break them into the fundamental process around it. So if you think about it that sense, right? So I was talking Workday, right? They have a like, you have, we've had solutions engineers that have been more like processed. How is my software going to fit in your process pre-sales so we can understand that implementation, what it'll be like, right? Stephen Steers: Mm-hmm. to you. Warren Kucker: Workday has taken it one step further where actually they have like a sales process person, right? That like ushers you through, let's say stage two through stage five of the buying journey, right? To where it's like, while the account executive, right? Is doing discovery, like finding pain and like then walking you through in theory the emotional side of the buying journey, right? Like why should you do this while someone handles the mechanics of the sales process? That's kind of what you're describing here, right? Where it's a, I'll stop there. Stephen Steers: Yeah, I think that's fair. The process is the process, but I don't care about the process until you've given me context. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Stephen Steers: And so that's, that's really what the salesperson's job is. Obviously you want to uncover pain, but it's like, Hey, I understand that these are the real problems in your business. Here's what they're affecting and here's what stands to happen or not happen if we don't solve this problem. Does that make sense? Okay. Nice. Next. So based on that, here's the process that we recommend for people in your position to walk through so that there's very clear deliverables, there's measurable outcomes. And at each one of these instances, we're going to affect the metric that you care. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Stephen Steers: That's the job of the salesperson, is to bridge those two worlds. And we work a process so we know where things, like this is the reason a process is important, it's pretty simple. We know where to look when something breaks, right? You have top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, for the most plain thing. If we're getting 100 leads at the top and then we're only getting 10 in the middle of the funnel and then one at the bottom of the funnel. We have a couple places to look, but it's like, if I have a hundred leads, why am I only getting 10 here? Am I asking the right questions? Am I even targeting the right ICP? If I only closed one, what's the difference between those 10 and that one? What happened here? So we know what to look at for the indicators to know what to change or update. A process is always a living organism because we know where to look and where to update for change. But again, a process is useless until we apply context to it. And so when we come back to AI, a lot of people have all these crazy AI processes, but they don't have any context added to them, which is why they're, again, as Jonathan Stark says, they're moving very efficiently in the wrong direction. Warren Kucker: Yeah, it's a good way to put it. And I've often thought that at some point in this buying journey, an account executive turns into has to be a very effective project manager. Right. So now it's like, great, we've agreed that there's a problem. We agree we might be able to solve it. We have to justify a longer term relationship here for us to be the one to solve this problem for you. And you're pulling people in from your organization. You're pulling people from their organization. You're painting the picture. You're trying to make sure that Stephen Steers: Ahem. Yes, 100%. Warren Kucker: if you decide to buy, get the value out of it, right? So like, that's two very fundamentally different skill sets. This would be like if you turned it from went from like a psychologist who's there to uncover like how you're feeling and how you can make feel better in the future, then also turns into your nutritionist where they're designing meal plans for you, right? Like it's like very tactical, right? Like here's a, every day this what you should eat. Well, no, those are two different skills, right? So like, Stephen Steers: Yeah. Warren Kucker: having either dragging that solution consultant more towards sales process management and like pulling the sales rep away so they could focus on this side of things would be like an interesting future state. Stephen Steers: Yeah, I think it could be. It doesn't also have to just be one person, right? So we segment funnels, right? You have SDRs who just go and get the meetings. Sometimes they take those meetings, sometimes they don't, right? Like that, it could just be a segmentation piece. And then we have a process where after discovery and we've booked in a secondary step, we then bring on the nutritionist to add a little bit more color and whatever that looks like. So yeah, I would agree. Warren Kucker: Do you have a storytelling framework for, let's say, the outreach side of things? I'd throw like a BDR. Like you have a real short window, right? But like you still want to pull on some emotion to get them on the call? Is there something there? Stephen Steers: Yes. And so I think we kind of talked about like, I, ⁓ in our last conversation, I think scale is kind of dead. ⁓ so, and here's what I mean by that. There's tools. And I think we were talking about this last time too. You can send 10,000 quote unquote personalized emails a day, which is, know, that's absurd. We would have dreamed about doing that five, 10 years ago, but Warren Kucker: Right. All Stephen Steers: If you can do it, so can every other seller with a marginal cost, which means your buyer is so inundated with so many messages that why should they care about this? There's just too much, right? it's a lot. So when I usually start working with folks, I work with reps, I work with founders, I work with teams all across the board. I usually start with the biggest thing is like, how much money do we want to make this year? Right, let's get the number. It's like, okay, that's an awesome goal. How many clients is that? It's X amount of clients. Okay, if you are a completely average salesperson, you're probably closing about 20%. Right, industry average is 20%, like if it's just stock bone, like what everybody else is doing. Which means we then need to talk to or have a 5X amount of conversations running over the course of the year in order to hit that 20%. Warren Kucker: Yeah. ⁓ Yep. Yep. Stephen Steers: In order to hit that, we probably need to have 5X that of conversation started. Over course of the year. So let's say, just for simple math, that we want to close a million dollars, and our client... Warren Kucker: Right, yeah. Stephen Steers: ⁓ Average contract price is $50,000. That's 20 clients we need, okay? Which means we need to have 100 conversations with real people and opportunities over the course of the year, which means we probably need to talk to about 500 people over the course of a 12-month year, which is a really reasonable amount. That's 60 people a month. Or less, less than 60 people a month we need to just start conversations with. So when we do math this way, right? Warren Kucker: Yeah, right, yeah. Stephen Steers: If I, that's like two, one to two conversations of very well done research and highly contextual stuff done. think you talk to two people a day. Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Steers: every day for a month, right? How much more effective can I be if it's like, I've identified these 60 people I wanna talk to this month, what context can I get if I'm on LinkedIn, if I'm on email, what events are they going to? ⁓ et cetera, what podcasts are they on? Like if you have a much more tailored approach that way and your volume's not as high, but you can be that much more effective, again, you could use AI tools to help you find these types of contextual elements, right? But I don't think volume's the key now. I think it's a much more high touch, highly personalized approach that's gonna get you there because again, humans solving human problems in a business context. And if I know that you're using an AI tool or feels like you're using an AI tool, Warren Kucker: Right, context, right? Yeah. Stephen Steers: You're not reading 10,000 emails. Your template probably has some tells that show it's not gonna work. It's not gonna be perfect on every single one of them. Something's gonna look weird, you're gonna leave a bracket in there. It's gonna look weird. And again, at that scale, whatever, good for you. You could probably work the math out and get a couple people back for it too. And that's fine, I'm not telling people not to do it. I'm just saying for me, for what I sell, and for how I think most people should think about selling. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Stephen Steers: you can go into a much smaller group of people and have a real conversation with them. Like even look how we met. was like, I'm like, I didn't, I didn't try to sell you. I'm not, I'm not trying to sell you anything now, but it's like, we just had a conversation with each other. We got to know each other a little bit. Now I can refer people to you cause like, oh, I know Warren, Warren solves this problem. Here's why you should talk to Warren or vice versa for me. That's it's a, it's people are forgetting the relationship side of business because they have all these tools to go to scale. And I think that's a, that's going to bite people in the ass a lot. Warren Kucker: Yeah. All right. Yep. Yeah, and so what you're talking about there is using the tools to to de-prioritize or filter, right? So like we have this everyone, we still struggle to understand our Sam, Sam, Tam, right? So that's a struggle. We still struggle to understand our ICP, right? Like, but filtering down, taking a broad brush and saying, you know what, like, Stephen Steers: Yes. Mm-hmm. Warren Kucker: A good example is I was in dental before and we sold the dental groups, but like our product didn't really work well for ortho or oral surgery. And a lot of times those people look just like dental groups when you're looking at a public view. Using a tool to parse that down was really helpful. Like, no, we thought we had 900 accounts. go after 400 of them are in like tangential dental areas that we don't have. So here's the 503, right? Like, and then like, could you get one more or two more filters down where there's 125 that like truly might buy. Right. So like a third of them use our competitor that they're not going to switch from. Right. Like and a third of them are in this frame frame set where they're not going to use us. And now we're not a 125. And how do you find the right people that helps you close 10 deals a year. So it's still a numbers game. You still have to be talking to folks. Right. But like can you make the numbers work in your favor rather than like broad brush it and then use a really human day to day. I have I have a presence in your market. We should have a conversation approach to talk to one out of five of those people. If you're looking at your five five matter. Stephen Steers: That's it. That's the simple, again, that's a very, very boiled down to the Roo version of it. Again, tons of details and we need to customize it for your specific ICP and all that other stuff too. But yes, absolutely. Once we look at that math. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Stephen Steers: I know what I'm supposed to do every day. I know where I'm supposed to be with the end of every week, every month and every quarter. And that's where I know where to look to update or move something around. And if it's simple that way, we don't get lost in the tens of thousands. And again, if you had 10,000 emails you sent out a month or a day and you get a bunch of responses, your business is broken because you can't respond to these people in enough time. And people would be like, ⁓ I don't trust this. Let me flag this. Warren Kucker: Well, also I have like, if I had a 3 % response rate on 10,000 emails, that's 300 responses, right? That would be a really high response rate. I'd be thrilled for that, right? 300 responses, I mean, half of those people aren't going to show up. And then on top of it, it's 10 different industries and with four different personas, I might have like eight people that are actually the people that might be helpful in determining whether they have a problem that I can solve. So like the numbers get pretty stark. So I took 300 meetings to get down to the eight. Stephen Steers: It'd be amazing. Warren Kucker: Could you send a thousand emails and get to that eight much more efficiently would be the scenario. Yeah, yeah, agreed. I totally agree. ⁓ Great. So you talk about this. You say there's three types of objections here. Let's get tactical sales process again to price solution fit and timing. ⁓ You say that reps need to be armed with a story for every one of these objections that happened throughout the buyer's journey. Tell me more about that. What's it? Do you have an example or give me more about that thesis? Stephen Steers: Probably. Probably. Easily. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, think there's many objections you hear. So I first want to start with what is an objection. Let's define an objection. An objection is a request for more information. That's it, right? As long as we look at it that way, it's not that they don't want to buy, it's not that they don't like you, it's that they don't have enough information to make a good decision. And when we boil most things down, It comes down to prices and can I afford this fit as in is this going to work for me? Right? Do you understand me and what I need and can you actually do this? And then timing is now the right time to solve this. And so I maintain that those are the only three, everything else you've heard boils into some version of that. So somebody's like, ⁓ I got to talk to my spouse. It's like, that is a fit objection. Is this going to work for me? Do I have the right story to be able to tell this person to share with their spouse so they can make a come to an ahead and make a decision? Right? Do I invite the spouse on the call? Timing as in, ⁓ this at the right point in my billing cycle? Is this the right time to invest, et cetera, et cetera. And then obviously price is the cost. So when we talk about a story and we talk about qualification and running a proper call, ideally speaking, you can answer for two of the objections inside of your discovery, which are timing and price. By mentioning and referencing other folks who have had similar situations. and had similar problems and that we've solved those before. Doesn't mean they won't ask about it, but you are ready to plant the seed with, hey, at the beginning, as we mentioned here, why are we, what made now the time? X, Y, and Z, totally makes sense. We've seen this problem before. We actually started working with a company in a very similar industry to yours, had very similar problems, and here's where we got them to. I'm gonna share a little bit more about that later, but I want to let you know you're in the right place to have a conversation like this. Boom. At the end of a call where we would, after we've heard their needs, which is usually where we summarize their needs, we can go into more of that story. So you'd say, Hey, I heard this, this, this, and that. that right? Cool. So like I said at the beginning, we work with a company like yours. I'd to take a minute or two and just walk you through exactly what that looks like and how we did this for them. Here's, here's where they were. Here's what we found. Here's, here's what happened next. Cool. Does that sound like results that you might want to have for your business too? Yes. It's a fit. Right? Boom. Or at least a light fit, right? They're not going to say, no, it's not a fit because they've acknowledged that that's something they want. Right? So one thing with call structure, and I'm nerding out here, so stop me, is ⁓ the way we want to structure a call is again, people are going to have objections. It's a natural part of sale. Again, they don't have enough information or the way we've portrayed the information doesn't allow them to have enough context to make a good decision. So. Warren Kucker: No, don't. Stephen Steers: It's always on us in discovery, but we can always take people back to the last place of agreement if there's something that we lose as we go further on. So the more we get them to say, Hey, did I get that right? Did I miss anything? Does that sound like something you want? Does that make sense? That's the last place they've agreed. And so anything that comes after that, that makes a mess, we could just go back to the last point of agreement and work ourselves back. That's the important part of structuring in some of those ways. ⁓ Warren Kucker: Right? Yeah, right. Stephen Steers: As far as the stories are concerned, when you hear someone's like, that's kind of, I don't know if now's the right time. You say that totally makes sense. You remember the, I just mentioned this company work with, I was, it was working with Julie and Stephanie and they had the exact same concern that if now was the right time. And so when we did the math on where they were, where they wanted to get to and how long it would take to get there, it was very clear that by waiting another two, three or four months, they were going to be leaving in excess of $2 million on the table by not investing and not moving forward. So what I want to say is, as just a point of you thinking about it, as we run the numbers based on what we said today, it also looks like you're about to leave a million and a half dollars on the table by not addressing this problem. Again, I hope it's with us, but just in general, my job is to help you make a good decision. You're leaving about a million and a half dollars on the table over the next three to six months by not investing in something like this. So. That again, I'm spitballing here as we talk about it, Warren, but you get to the point where I'm giving you an example of I solved it for this person. Here's the math on how we did it. They also thought now wasn't the right time. And when we did the math, it made sense because they were going to leave this much money on the table. That's how you your reps. Warren Kucker: No, right, yeah. So that particular story that you just told, what's the bad or let's say not bad response, what's the opposite response that's a little bit more typical? If you're in a sales ⁓ organization you're consulting with and they're struggling and you're like, listen, I bet you this is an area and then you look at their meetings and this is what they're doing instead, what do think maybe would be the alternate that you see a decent amount? Stephen Steers: What do I see people doing when they have that? Like, ⁓ I don't know if now's the right time. Warren Kucker: in that timing objection, right? Like, hey, now is not a good time, right? Like, what's the typical response from an accounting executive there? Stephen Steers: When do you think would be a good time? Warren Kucker: Right, yeah, right? Yeah. Stephen Steers: Yeah. So, so, and again, I've made that mistake tons of times in my, in my career, especially earlier in my career. the key to this is, and again, that's not a bad question. It just gives you no power. And so the, as my mentor likes to say, people hate to be sold to, right. They love to buy, but most people Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Stephen Steers: you're at the mercy of someone's process for buying if you don't have a process for selling. And we know most people don't know how to buy anything. And so if you're allowing someone to decide like, ⁓ no, you know what? I don't know. We'll get back to you. Warren Kucker: Okay, right. Right. Yes. Stephen Steers: That's when you've given them control and cd control to them for whatever their whims are. And again, they may be totally well founded that now is not the right time. That's okay. But your job as a seller and more as a consultative seller, right? I'm not a pushy salesperson. If you're not locked in with me, you're not a believer who are not going to work well together. And that's okay. But I want to leave you better informed. So, ⁓ Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Right, breath, yep. Stephen Steers: what I just walked through would be kind of like a cost per objection handle in a story form. So that's like, here's how much you're spending a day, here's how much you stand to lose, et cetera, right? That would be one of the ways I would teach a rep in that context, again, depending on what they sell, to handle that particular objection and conversation around that. And what that enables you to do is to say, ⁓ Warren Kucker: Right. Stephen Steers: If we've itemized it, here's what you stand to lose over the next couple of days. If we, they're, and it's like, all right, cool. How much time do you need to think that over? Now we've assigned, if it's like, ⁓ I need a week or I need a quarter. It's like, okay, cool. Just what we're clear. That's going to be about $467,000 during that thinking period. So I just want to put that in front of you. That's it. And correct. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Right. Which in that scenario, Boston, they come back to that last point of agreement, right? Like that's a number that you've already come up with together, right? Stephen Steers: And one other point I want to jump in on this too, do you know Tom Hopkins, the sales trainer? So he's awesome. He's famous for selling one house a day for 365 days at the age of 26. So this guy's a real, real seller, like serious, serious guy. Warren Kucker: No. Right, right, Yeah. Stephen Steers: And I went on a tear of looking for more OG sales material, like the first guys to write books before it was like a, you know, sexy social media thing, like the first couple of books, and he's one that I found. And he says something I really like, and I've added an addendum to it. He says, whatever the customer says is true. Warren Kucker: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Steers: Okay, so if we get numbers from them, if we get the context from them, if we understand why now is the time, that is, for the sake of our conversation, the facts. Right? That's what we can always pull back on because they said it. What I added is, whatever we say as sellers, we must defend. So if I'm offering you a solution, I can only defend my solution in reference to the facts that you gave me. And when we put those two together, we can have a much stronger accord for what's possible if we work together because I'm taking the facts and then adding my context and showing you what our future looks like. And so most people don't do that. And again, storytelling is a great way to add that. like, hey, here's what you said, here's what we've seen, and here's what our methodology looks like. And using this methodology with people like you over X amount of time period, here's what we project that we can get to together. Warren Kucker: So in that framework, if you don't have the facts, something that your buyer said, then your defense is with hypotheticals then, right? So like, great, like you don't, you're gonna pitch a solution with the basis of things that you know happened with other folks, which is not like, it's still storytelling in its core form, but you can't like get a buyer on board without defending it with their own. like their own facts, right? Is that kind of what you're talking about there? Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Steers: That's it. then the other piece I would add is you can't sell anyone a solution without knowing their success criteria. So if you don't know what success looks like for them in their business, not necessarily with your solution, just in general, then you have nothing to tie whatever you're selling back to. That's the facts. Again, hopefully it's numbers, hopefully it's hard data and you can give an example of how you can affect that data. But you at least want the context clues for what success looks like in their business over whatever timeframe to then say, Hey, you want to make this much amount of money in X amount of time. Here's why our solution tying into your systems the way they have will produce Warren Kucker: Right. Stephen Steers: an outcome that's favorable in this amount of time. Warren Kucker: So maybe last question. You've already kind of given us a hot take on Scales Dead. foresee anything changing about ⁓ the buyer's journey or the seller's process over the next two to three years fundamentally? ⁓ That might be helpful. do think it's going to be? I think with AI, there's also old has become new again, right? Where it's like the focus. ⁓ It helps kind of focus the right areas, the things that always kind of worked. But yeah, what do you see over the next couple of years? Stephen Steers: Yeah, thank you for the question. I think a lot will change, but fundamentals are fundamental for a reason. And so I come back to what I've said a couple of times on this call already is we're still human solving human problems in a business context. And as long as that's the lens that we build any outreach, any follow-up, any solutions, any stories on, we're giving ourselves a chance to do what we need to do no matter what tools exist. And so I think, like you said, what's old is new again. because there's a need for it. like salesmanship, again, sales is a four letter word to most people. They hate salespeople and I think that's a reputation well worn and well earned in a lot of cases. And it's probably even worse now because everybody doesn't even, you don't even have to call the person anymore and have some chutzpah. You don't have to, you can have somebody else or something else write the emails and you just press play, right? It's so much less personal than before. And I think people will be more on guard than ever before. And so. Warren Kucker: Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Steers: I think what will change, hopefully, hopefully not too quickly so I can carve out my piece in the larger part of what's left over or before people get over there is I'm going heavy, heavy, heavy at getting in rooms with people. That's it. I'm somebody that needs to be experienced and you spend time with me, you'll know if we're a right fit for each other. And again, I don't need thousands of anything in order to do very, very well. I need tens of, so that's how I'm focusing on it. And if that means I got to fly into a place and go sit down with somebody at a conference and meet them, and that cost me a little bit of money, my LTV is way higher to justify those costs. So again, my business is different than most, but what I would say is what I think will change is most people will move further and further away from the fundamentals. Warren Kucker: Right. Stephen Steers: because they have a tool. And I think the people who are going to be really, really successful are going to leverage those fundamentals with the context of having understood human relationships to see outsize gains. And I think, Warren, that's going be people like you and me and some of our listeners. Warren Kucker: That's awesome. That's great. Any people that take your advice. ⁓ Great. All right. Where can people find you or where you at or plug what you're working on right now? Stephen Steers: Thank you for the question. can find any, I have a couple of resources that might be helpful to your listeners on stevensteers.com slash podcast. You can download the call script that I have that I offer to people and a couple of other resources that I use throughout my daily and whatever else if you want to get contact with you there. I'm also all over LinkedIn with content. I'm not really hanging out there as we talked about a little bit, but yeah, I'm easy to find. Warren Kucker: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. I'll put that link in the podcast notes for anybody that's trying to reach out. So Stephen, really appreciate it. You have a thoughtful approach to the sales process that I think is a little bit different than most. So I appreciate it. I learned a lot on this particular call. So if nobody listens, you got one good, one good, it landed home with one guy here. So Stephen, I appreciate it. You have a good, take care. Have a good one. Stephen Steers: Thanks for having me. That's what I'm here for, You too, man, great to see you, thanks again.