1522 – Selling Better with Buyer-ology® Karen Green

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0:58with us right now it's karen green karen you are a business coach and mentor you've got a unique set of skills karen uh you are found on the web at buyerology.co.uk so again it's just buyer and then ology o-l-o-g-y.co.uk and your book has just released as of when this episode's going live And that is Buyerology, Know Your Buyer, Sell More and Sell Better. Karen, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited. All right. Tell us about the new book. Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. So this one's been a while in the making, to be honest. So I started my career as a buyer, a retail buyer.

1:46For those of you in the US and globally, I worked for Tesco, which is the UK's biggest grocery retailer and Boots, which I think is part of Walgreen Alliance now, which is a US pharmacy business. And I worked, as I say, buying and marketing and then crossed the table into selling. So I did a lot of corporate selling right back at the retailers, selling everything from sushi to Christmas puddings to turkeys. So quite a bizarre wide range of products and then eight years ago I moved to the south of France where I live now and you can probably tell from my accent I'm British and so I thought this would be an amazing experience which it has been but it's very hard to manage a business at that kind of distance so I set up a coaching and consultancy business working with mostly food and drink companies.

2:43I have a few other businesses as well as I've developed my selling skills and developed the biology theories we've started to roll that out to more people so because it's broader than just food and drink it works not just for CPG but for for anybody really who wants to sell better and that could even be although the book doesn't really go into it but it's applicable say you want to sell yourself if you're out there going for an interview or going for interviewing for a podcast the principles are all the same it's like you know biology the whole principle of biology is if you study your buyer well enough and this is especially for business to business then you will have a really good idea of how to sell to them so the point of the book is part of it is to talk about the three by three matrix that I have the biology matrix which looks at the buyer the corporation and then the third piece of the puzzle is how the two interact because I think traditionally we we tend to think about either the person we're selling to so if we're selling to maybe founders solopreneurs we're going to go think about that person as maybe we might think of them as a human but then we might not think of their their corp the the company but we might look at the company but then actually if you're selling to bigger businesses it's the interaction between the two so so that's the kind of the principles of virology and then the second part of the book is is a is applied virology so it goes through we've created this acronym fire because it kind of worked quite well which stands for um building awareness is the b u is creating a unique value proposition why is getting to yes i'm sure there's another book about getting to yes in fact there's probably several um and then the e and the r are the bits that i think sales people also tend to forget which is execution and then review so you know a lot of us work really hard in the initial stages to sell the products then we kind of go a bit and we do the execution especially if you're doing consultancy and mentoring but then do we think about well how can we turn that business into reviews, reorders, referrals.

5:00So the R is pretty critical actually in the whole process. So that's the book in a nutshell. Yeah. Okay. So Karen, I'm curious, maybe we can kind of workshop this in live format so we can see how the matrix works. So we've built up a pretty big audience with my influence of folks that both launch podcasts and then also want to be guests on podcasts. And so I'd like to be of service to people maybe who aren't monetizing their podcast appearances exceptionally well. I know a lot of stuff that they're leaving on the table and missing, but what's the best way for me to design that product? Like what questions should I be asking my audience so that I can make sure to present my solution in a way that meets what they're most interested in?

5:56So I think the whole challenge is tailoring. So the principle of the book is in that you. It's the unique value proposition. And the difficulty is when you've got a wide audience like you've got, it's like going, right, how can I chunk those people down into niches? and then you know what can you do is there's some easy wins where you can build an overall proposition so you say okay so these are these are podcast aimed at entrepreneurs and you know these are podcast aimed at people who are earning seven eight figures these are and then you say okay so what are the needs of those people so you can build an overall selling proposition and then you have to tailor it so if you know I don't know how many people you've got on that list but if you can tailor it to some extent then it just becomes more powerful um it to me the tailoring of selling proposition is probably the most critical piece of the puzzle because if you don't personalize it and we go right down to granular so we look at um selling to the individual buyer.

7:18And I have a, I don't know, have you come across Crystal Knows? Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar. Let's assume I haven't though. So Crystal Knows is an AI and I found out about it before AI and ChatGPT became so trendy in the last kind of three months. Oh, it's an Enneagram test, yeah? Say again? Is it Crystal Knows, the Enneagram test? Oh, no, your buyer before you sell. Oh, OK, cool. Yes. So what does is it looks at LinkedIn and it's a it's a Google extension and it basically looks at the personality of the person who's written their profile. so you can do anybody you know you can do anybody who's got a linkedin profile uh you don't have to be linked in with them and what it does is it looks at their their disc profile which is just a way of analyzing personality but the great thing about it now is as they've developed and they're developing more and more ai they're also telling you what kind of email to write what kind of language to use, what kind of things to include.

8:31And there's 12 personality types, 16, 16. Anyway, so you could say, well, actually, I mean, God forbid you get somebody to analyze it, say, I don't know, how many people are you targeting? Well, we have many, many thousands. Many, many thousands. So that's going to be tough to do. And then there's our broader social media audience. Yeah. And it's really interesting. Like these are really important conversations to have. So to anyone who's listening to our conversation right now, and you're thinking about launching something or you need to vet something, you know, I really value this. And Karen, I can't wait to pick up your book so that I can go through this exercise.

9:11Yeah, and I think, you know, I think predominantly like we can help people that have more than just like a$12 product, right? I would be probably better served helping people that have consulting or coaching, like, you know, maybe hire, take a keynote type stuff on the back end. Because, again, when we think about monetization to a podcast audience, podcast audiences tend to be, and this is a compliment for our listener right now, you're generally pretty sophisticated. You're pretty savvy. You're generally pretty successful. Your podcast audiences are pretty valuable, which is why you're here.

9:46I don't want to get too mad. I feel like this conversation is getting awfully mad at. no it's it's it's great but but you're right it's it's i mean my biggest client is a 800 million pound turnover business um and they use this system for selling big contracts so they do all the intro logistics for people like ocado and the big delivery people i'm not allowed to mention and they've told me I can't say that. And a few others as well. And that's probably where it sits best, where you're negotiating big contracts, where you are needing to build relationships that maybe are more intimate. I'm hesitating here because I don't want to say your relationships aren't intimate, but they're a slightly different type of relationship.

10:40So there are probably more person to person interactions. But but the principles are the same. What you're but when you're working with the numbers you're working with, it is you are going to have to become more generic. So you are going to have to say, right, OK, on the company side, I look at missions and goals. We look at resources. So resources, I think, is a really key one. I've just been through a mentoring program with a PR lady who's absolutely fantastic. But every session I had with her, she was like, right, you need to do all these things. You need to do this this week, this, this, this, this, this, this, this.

11:20And I went, whoa, it's too much. I didn't have the resources to implement the stuff that she was giving me to do. So that's something I think is really key for a lot of coaches and consultants, because we've got so many great ideas. I have so many great ideas I can tell people to do. But if you don't solve that problem of implementation, have you read the book Buy Back Time by Dan Marta? Well, you're giving me just all kinds of great resources here. I love resources. I'm addicted. You know, I do podcasts. I do resources. And Buy Back Time is a great book. And it's all about, I know it's my book, but this is all about how to get more time.

12:06Whatever, whether you're a tiny business, whether you're a multi-million pound business and you're the CEO, he talks about how to buy back time. And I think that's really critical when you're looking to promote yourself to big groups is to think, well, what's their resource levels? So that's another element of that three by three matrix that we work on. All right. Yeah, that was, by the way, the book recommendation, Buy Back Time, Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom and Build Your Empire by Dan. Martell. So cool. Well, all right. So Karen, the book, you know, again, the kind of the test that we want to do, this is just so critical that we, how much time should we be spending to truly identify our buyer before we start communicating?

12:54Or do we need to start communicating in order to learn more about, I mean, it's like, we're not just answering these questions subjectively. Do we get objective data? And if so, how do we get that objective data? So I see it as an ongoing process. So you don't do your little matrix, pop it in a drawer and then think, well, I've done that, ticking that box. I think it's an ongoing process. So to start with, you know, you are identifying who your customer avatar is. That's not rocket science. We've all done that. you're then saying okay of these these are the types of businesses I really want to go for this is where I'm going to invest time and then you can get quite granular about those particular businesses but you're right especially if you are you know most of my clients and and before we came on air you said oh do you have a you know a download a brochure you know more details most of the work I do is bespoke because everybody all of my clients are quite specific and quite different so you start talking to clients and you find out what they're looking for and then you can you know pad out that information with your observations your research your network as well I use my network an awful lot for building up um bio profiles and customer profiles because again Again, you can read what they say on the website and you can read what you see in the press.

14:24But actually, when you go to somebody and go, you talk with these people, what are they like? Do they pay on time? That doesn't get published in the press. Yeah. So would we survey or would we, like, what is the process for gathering data? so the process for gathering data is um probably well again it depends yours is a broad business so you I would suggest going out surveying the data asking the questions um I have a scorecard um a biology scorecard we can put a link in the show notes afterwards yeah that's a really good analysis of where people are. So that might be a really good rather, I mean, do a survey, but that asks on mine, I think we've got 18 questions that asks people where they are in their business journey.

15:20And that's really, again, going to give you great data. Oh, I muted myself. You saw that. The audience did not hear my sneeze. thank you um so yes something like a scorecard is really great um because that's again going to give you loads and loads of valuable data and if you're trying to cover a lot of people in one go as opposed to maybe doing one-to-one work that i do that's going to give you the kind of information and you can put whatever questions you like in but it's it's supposed to help the customer obviously because you're saying you know how good are you at selling where are you in your selling journey.

15:59And then do you know how to sell more and better? And they go through all the questions and at the end they get a report. But at the end I get all that data. It's just bliss. It's very interesting. Yeah. So I'm on your website right now, birology.co.uk. And I just clicked on resources there and that's where there's a link. Is it the birology template that you were referring That's right. Yeah. It's a biology app. By the time this goes out, it will all be updated. We've just been putting it together. Oh, yeah. So don't mind me, listener. Just go to biology.co.uk. It's there. Now you're listening.

16:37It's there. Yeah. How else do you work with clients? What does that look like? So I do training programs. So I do quite a lot of work with the UN, Nice Nations. So with them, I deliver workshops for specific groups of people and do some one to one work for their clients. And I also have a range of courses. So we teach how to implement the biology matrix. That's one course. And then another course is teaching people how to build up that buyer five step applied biology process. And then we do a specific about negotiation because I think negotiation is so key. All right. So really easy for our friend that's been listening.

17:25Just go to birology.co.uk or you can search in Amazon for birology. Anything else, Karen, that you'd recommend if someone's enjoyed our conversation thus far, what they do next with you? The easiest thing is just to drop me an email. So karen at birology.co.uk. And we can set up for your listeners, so long as I don't get the whole 130 ,000 or however many you've got now, I'm very happy to do a quick call, strategy call with people and see where they are and see how I can point them in the right direction. Yeah, fantastic. Karen Green, again, congratulations on the new book, Birology. And thank you so much for joining us.

18:09Again, your website, birology.co.uk. Hey, Karen Street, Karen Green, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's been great.

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