1976 – Building a Solid Sales Foundation with BeenThere Consulting Services’ Phil Whitebloom

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1:05With us right now, Phil Whitebloom. Phil, you are a sales coach and you're the founder and president of Ben There Consulting Services. Your website is BenThereCS.com. Phil, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, it's a pleasure. I'm so excited to be here with you. I assume Ben There has to do with kind of a Ben There, done that. Yes, it really is. Even though I haven't worked for many companies in my career of over 40 years, I've done an awful lot of things and touched an awful lot of applications. So that's where it came from. Why, particularly when we think about sales and growth and attracting revenue, client acquisition, why is that so critical compared to, let's say there's a founder that's listening to us and maybe he and another person or she and another person, they've just got all of this founder magic.

2:02and they're like, no, no, we've got great growth and excitement and a lot of good things are going. You know, why should we slow down and kind of focus on the fundamentals of, you know, good best practices for all things kind of sales and growth? That could be the best question. You know, I might as well start out with the best one. So I always tell people that Field of Dreams is a movie. It's not real life. And what I mean by that is build it and they will come. I've worked with an awful lot of very intelligent people, very successful people who have done all the right things to open their business, except they gave no thought on how they're going to sell their products and services like it was just going to happen.

2:44And they find that that doesn't happen. And or they don't know how to set up a sales organization and how to set compensation plans and how to motivate because that's not where they come from. You know, they could be a brilliant CFO and they became CEO and they come from an engineering background and they had a great product and great software and everything else that they want to sell. But, you know, so they get everything and all their friends come on board and everything else, but they need to go out and sell. So without sales, nothing else is really important. All right. So we think about learning best practices for sales and, you know, maybe we want to get some individual attention on that.

3:26Phil, I'll just share from my background and experience, not all sales training and coaching is equally efficient and correct and best for our use case. Do you mind maybe addressing personalization, why that's so important? Yes. In fact, that's exactly why I emphasize that I'm a sales coach and not a sales trainer. So I always tell everybody there's many, many great sales trainers out there and plenty of great sales training programs. You get them online or you get them in person. As a coach, though, I work with people where they are now and businesses where they are now because they're in business and they need results immediately.

4:06So coaching is is is focused on what's going on with them. Where are their priorities? What do they need immediately? And it builds for the future. So in my case, training comes with coaching, but coaching. But I'm saying my coaching comes with training. Sorry about that. Coaching comes with training, but training very rarely comes with coaching. So a great example is just recently, I was working with somebody just over the last six weeks. And what happened there is she had a$5 ,000 opportunity. She was talking to me about it and working with her. And one day, it turned into$150 ,000 sale. And then just this morning, right before this interview today with you, she announced that her sales got so big so fast, she got promoted to vice president.

4:57in her financial institution. Oh my goodness. So that was in six weeks. I love to tell everybody that results happened that quickly, but with her, it did. It was awesome. It is awesome. I suspect that there is maybe a lot of sales ideas that may have worked well in the past. You know, I'd say particularly around, you know, maybe some of more of the more, I don't want to say manipulative, but manipulative practices, in my experience, probably aren't as appropriate today. Are there any practices that you see still being taught or talked about or practiced in sales today that if you were to say, please stop doing X, Y, Z, what's X, Y, Z?

5:41So X, Y, Z would be stop making assumptions that the way things were done in the past don't work today. You have to model, You have to work closely with social media and other ways to get the word out there. But what's really important is that personal conversation, being able to inquire. You have to be able to ask questions. So how you get in front of people is harder than it used to be, especially if anybody was around before 9-11. After 9-11, it changed the world and how you could get into companies, into businesses. I have a big background in selling to the government. And that all changed immediately.

6:20So then you have the advent of social media. And the worst part is you have caller ID. So people look if they don't recognize the name or they don't even all, they're not picking up the phone. So it's not really so much of what you don't do now. It's what new things you have to do in order to be successful. And you have to be able to work all these methods. and it used to be you would do things one way and you would approach your customers in one methodology or another, but these days you have to do it all in parallel. It is not a linear thing. So let me explain. What I mean by that is you send an email, you leave a voicemail.

6:58Remember, if you call somebody, you don't leave a voicemail, you never made the call. So you leave a voicemail, you send the email, you could send a text if you have their number and then you try and get a personal appointment. And when you do all these things, it really improves the odds that you're gonna connect with that person one way or another. But if you do them one at a time, you could miss on every one of them. So it's kind of a reverse to what your question was. It's not so much about what you don't do, what you used to do, because those fundamentals are still really strong, but you have to modernize yourself and your approach by the way things are done today.

7:34Yeah, completely agree. Phil, share just a bit about what, like, how do you coach your clients or what does that look like? Yeah, that's great, Tom. Thank you. So what I do is I, when I meet somebody, just have a very brief conversation just to see what's on their mind and why they're actually interested in talking with me. The next step then is to go in and do what's called, I call it discovery call. It's just a lot of questions asking them, once again, why am I here? What are your challenges? What are you trying to approach? But what's really important is where are your goals? Why? It's that why, right, Josh?

8:11I've heard other people on your show talk about the whys. And why is this important? What are they ultimately trying to get at? There's a reason why they want to grow their sales. What is that reason? That's what we work towards. So it's not really just to make this next sale, but it's to get all the way up there. So what I do is once I have that information, then I take that information. I say, where are your challenges? What do you believe your situation is? And I have to tell you that the majority of the time people say, my people are not good closers or I'm not a good closer. And what I learned by being in there is it's not that they're good closers, it's that their prospects were not ready to be closed.

8:49They haven't done the right things. They haven't handled the objections. They haven't answered the questions correctly or they haven't asked the right questions. So when they go to ask for an order, if they get around asking for the order, it comes back negative because they haven't addressed what the real reasons are that they're in the room and what really needs to be accomplished. And it doesn't always have to be because of competition. It could just be because they just missed. And that happens an awful lot. Yeah. It's, I think, the example of the sell me this pencil, which you've seen a million times.

9:22Right, yep. And, you know, an amateur salesperson, especially back in the day, would just start getting right into features and benefits and not ask questions. Whereas, you know, a better way is like, you know, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, I think for me, when I think about sales, I don't know that I'm necessarily perfect at this. But to me, like, it would be offensive to just start pushing or promoting something because I don't know what they want. Like, I'm just here to be helpful. And as a sales professional, like I'm okay with whatever the outcome is, right? I don't know if maybe you would kind of tweak this a little bit, but I am okay with just providing the greatest amount of value.

10:03If it means that they get this pencil, awesome. I'm here to help them with that. And I'm here to help them discover if this pencil will help them solve some of their unmet needs right now or some of their pain points in life. But how would you maybe tweak that? Or how would you frame what we were just kind of what I was just meandering and rambling about? No, but it's a very traditional example that you gave. And it's great because it always applies. And I do a presentation and talk about this a lot. And I call it there's no such thing as a canned presentation. So if you want to call a PowerPoint presentation the deck, the PowerPoint deck, I tell everybody, just because you have the slide in the deck doesn't mean you have to present it.

10:47If it's irrelevant to the needs and the wants of your prospect, why would you show that? You know, all it could do is undo any good that you've done or prevent things going on because these people are going, this person's not connected. It comes back, Josh, to asking the questions first, to understanding what's going on. And you should be asking questions all the way through the entire process to make sure you've got it correctly and everything else. So take your pencil example. If you just start spitting out at somebody, I call it throwing up your pitch at them, just exactly as you described, right?

11:21But if you go in there and you say, hey, I know you're interested in a pencil. Why? What are you going to do with that pencil? There's lots of pencils out there, but what are you looking for that you haven't found in the pencils you've been looking at? And then I tell people, shut up and listen. And so why do I say shut up? Because if I say, then be quiet and listen, they get so excited when the prospect or the customer says something, they have to jump right in when they may not have the whole story. But when they hear Phil in their head saying, shut up and listen, no matter how excited you are, you know, for me, I say, put your seatbelt on, Phil, stay in your chair and hold your enthusiasm until you have the rest of the story.

11:59So how did I do in answering your question there, Josh? I love that. And I think what a great to-do item for our friend that's listening right now, go get a sticky note, go grab a Sharpie and write these words on that sticky note. Shut up and listen, hyphen Phil. Right. Right. Stick that right in front of your Zoom camera or wherever you need to see it every single day. It's absolutely. Phil, and I think like that principle that you just shared right there, the reason that I probably talk way more than I should be. If I'm critiquing my own ability, it's not because I'm even trying to make the sale.

12:42I'm just trying to be helpful. And when someone says something and I go, oh boy, I could talk for about 20 minutes on that topic. And I would honestly say the helpful part or the helper part of my brain wants to do, but that again is maybe not necessarily the best thing that I should be doing if I'm truly advocating for the positive outcomes or success of the person I'm chatting with in that time. So Josh, what you're talking about though is when you're sincerely enthusiastic and you're sincerely curious and you sincerely want to help, that comes out so this is what it's all about i mean it's not about making the sale you know we all want to make a sale we need to we you know that's why we're there they know why we're there you know do we know why we're there you know they know why we're there but when you're there really to help them like you were just describing and getting excited about it they appreciate that so you know one of the things that i do as a coach is there's many people out there that'll tell you why you do things wrong and they'll point out all the things that aren't right and how you could have done a better interview, Phil, and this and that and everything else.

13:54But I work completely the opposite. I like building off people's strengths and saying, you know, you don't have to be Josh. You don't have to be Phil. You be you. But take the best of what everybody else is offering there, but be the best yourself. Because when you've got that and you're really interested in them, they really appreciate it. And I had some customers, Josh, for more than 30 years, regardless of where I was at, even if I didn't have something, they always appreciated when I said, you know, I saw this other thing and I think it's going to be great for you. You should try it out or get an appointment with somebody, or I can arrange that for you.

14:25And I can't tell you how often, because even in business, that's not government, you know, they're mission oriented. There's something that they need to accomplish. And if you could help them to accomplish this easier, faster, less expensive, and reliably, you have a friend for life. I have a theory and I'm not going to share my theory, but let me share this premise. And I'd love your take on this. I think I've experienced this in life. And I definitely in the work that we do with our clients have encountered this, which we try to get them to be very aware of this. When I asked them, where have your best clients come from?

15:03Oh, just chatting organically. And we were friends first. And then we discovered that there was an opportunity for us to work together. And, you know, I said, well, how hard was that for you to sell them? I didn't even, I wasn't, you didn't even feel like I was selling and it just, just worked out that way. And I thought, Hmm, that's interesting, especially when they're reporting that in a more formal sales environment, they might say things like they're getting in their head too much, or, you know, there's just, it's harder that way. And I don't know if my experience is even something that's known out there.

15:42Do you get what I'm talking about? I do. I do. And I have to tell you that it's really amazing when people don't talk about themselves. So when you have the prospect or the client talking about what they need and they're talking about this, you're listening and you're asking questions. I could give you just an example from my own personal experience. So here I am talking about myself, right? But so just recently, just before we came on today, I was with somebody and I'm asking these questions and we're talking and I'm learning about them and what they want to do and asking all the right questions and they're fully engaged.

16:20And then I stop and they say, what's next? I said, I was going to ask you what's next. What's the next step for you? And they say, well, how do we work together? This has happened in the last three people I've spoken with and I'm coaching others on how to do this. You know, it's always important about asking for the order, but you could ask for the order without ever doing it. If you were fully engaged, if you are fully engaged and you're really talking to them and then you pause and they're looking at you because they want more. Well, what do you want? And I had a person recently say, well, when do we start?

16:53How do we get going? I didn't have to ask for that question. And then because I was coaching a salesperson who wanted me to coach, they said the person said looked at me and i said i want you to be able to do this why do you want to hire me what do you know about me they said well we know you're a coach and you were referred by somebody else so we figured pretty good yeah but what do you know about me how do you know my qualifications how do you know this how do you know that you don't know anything about me but you're ready to hire me and pay me good money and money that you know which will come back many, many times over for you.

17:29And that's what you need to be able to do. You need to be able to give such confidence and you do that by being totally focused on them. People will ask you for your qualifications and everything else, but they know by what you do, if you understand your product and you understand your service and you understand what they need, you could do a match. And I have to tell you, you really need to understand your competitor's products because it's not about bashing your competitor. You know, everybody knows that's a bad idea. Yeah. And so what it's important though is that will help you to know how your product will go better than anybody else's by knowing what theirs does.

18:08So when you're talking to them, you say, by the way, if you do this with our product, it's going to improve your process by 40 % because I have this document here that supports that information. And you know that anybody that comes in behind you with theirs, they're not going to be able to say the same thing. And the last thing, Josh, is I throw out to you here is ask your prospect what that prospect liked best about what you just offered and what you just said, and then shut up and really shut up. Because when they start talking about what they like, you know who heard it, Josh? They heard it.

18:48When they hear themselves saying positive things, they remember. If you had them saying negative things, they're going to remember that too. And that's what they're going to remember later on. Because at the end of the day, they only remember what they said, what they liked, and maybe about that one specific thing and whether you did a good job or not. Those are the things that they're going to remember. All that other stuff is noise. And so it's really important to ask, what did you like? Phil, your website is bentherecs.com. When I hover over what we do, you do sales coaching, sales training, consulting, workshops, motivational speaking, and strategic partnerships.

19:28But I really want to be on the nose for someone that's listening to our conversation. You're listening for a particular reason. You're interested in this topic and you're wondering, perhaps, if there might be some areas to improve. For that person, Phil, what would you recommend they do from this point? They could go right to that website, you said, and drop me a note in the contact us. And then I will be happy to get in touch with them. Leave me your contact information in there. I'll call you back, drop you an email, and we'll have a conversation. And then I'll learn about what their needs are.

19:58And as you saw, I said in their strategic partnerships, if it's something that I can't do, I'm not going to force it. I've niched myself into sales coaching specifically. Other coaches are my power partners, and they're there to help others. And that's how I get brought into so many opportunities is by other coaches. Say, hey, Phil, they need your services. And I bring that back to others. It's all about helping that prospect. So I'd never walk away from anybody. I just may not be the person that's helping them, but I will get them connected. Yeah, love that. Phil Whitebloom, again, sales consultant coach.

20:32Been there, done that. In terms of your experience, your website one last time, beentherecs.com. also some great resources on the website your blog is great and as well you've done a lot of podcasting and you've even done your own episodes and that's called the been there podcast yeah yeah been there sold that so to our friend that's listening if you're in your podcast app already and want to listen just again search for the words been there sold that uh phil white bloom it's been great having you thank you so much for joining us yeah it was great thank you josh i really appreciate the invitation

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