Sales Is About Solving the Drama

What does getting locked out of a house while cat-sitting have to do with sales? It's about drama. Getting locked out is a sudden, stressful, and expensive problem. A key safe solves that drama. And at its core, that’s what sales is: your job is to solve the drama for your client.

But in this episode, Benjamin explores a bigger challenge: the drama your client thinks they have is often not the real one. He shares a powerful case study of a company with flatlining sales. The manager was convinced the drama was a "lazy Gen Z" sales team. The real drama? An outdated sales approach that was demotivating the team and failing customers.

Too often, we jump to solve the surface-level problem without digging deeper. The most effective salespeople act like detectives, uncovering the root cause of the issue. By focusing on the real drama, the company in the story transformed its 47-second calls into 15-minute conversations and increased sales by 147%.

At Showing Up, we teach that your greatest value isn't just in providing a solution, but in having the clarity to identify the right problem in the first place.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why the most successful salespeople think of themselves as "drama solvers."
• How to diagnose the real problem your client is facing, even when they can't see it themselves.
• A case study on how a simple change in a sales script led to a 147% increase in sales.
• How to turn your problem-solving successes into compelling stories that win new clients.
  
  

Exercise

1. Write down all the dramas you have solved for your customers over the last year.
2. Next to each, note if the customer initially thought the drama was something else.
3. Finally, outline how you can turn each of these solutions into a powerful story to share with future customers.
   
   

Links & Resources

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What is Showing Up: Very Good Sales?

A weekly micro-lesson for B2B sales teams. In each 5–10 minute episode, we share one practical idea, model or strategy for how you become brilliant at growing sales with integrity. All focused on building trust and delivering real value to your clients. Find more learning at https://www.showinguplearning.com/

Benjamin: 00:11

Welcome everybody. It's really great to have you with us. I'm your host, Benjamin Weston. And you'll listen to Very Good Sales, the podcast brought to you by Showing Up. We design sales training that enables people to see that their potential reaches far beyond what they might imagine, building the traits, the behaviors, and the skills that customers trust and value most, so you can grow sales with great integrity.

Benjamin: 00:32

Head over to showinguplearning.com to learn more, and there you'll also be able to access some free training. And now, let's get into this week's micro lesson. When I was 17 years old, a friend of mine's mum who's absolutely awesome, her name is Karen, asked me to house sit their cats while the family went away on holiday. For two weeks she offered me a mind blowing 200 Now at the time I was earning £4.27 an hour at McDonald's and that's before tax. So £200 for feeding cats felt like winning a lottery, especially because I absolutely love cats and had a really gorgeous home and I felt really guilty about this, it was too much money for what was basically an enjoyable task for me.

Benjamin: 01:08

So I decided I could at least wash their cars as well. And while I was outside with a sponge and a hose, the front door slammed shut behind me, locked, cats inside, me outside. In the end, this is like days before WhatsApp or anything and I was frankly embarrassed, in the end I had to pay a locksmith £100 to get in and even then he wanted proof of course I actually lived there and luckily there was a random photo of me in the house before he let me back in. That was the drama. Getting locked out is sudden stress and expensive and I thought to myself then why on earth would you ever get locked out of the house?

Benjamin: 01:41

Lucky to say we've got things like key safes but even still I've never been locked out since because I've always hidden the key somewhere. Now a key safe or hiding the key somewhere solves the drama. That's exactly what SAUZ is about. Your job is to solve the drama. But here's the bigger challenge.

Benjamin: 01:58

Often your client thinks they've got a particular drama, but it's not the real drama. Let me give you an example. We were invited to an organisation that had enjoyed thirty years of growth, single digit, sometimes double digit, for over three decades the graph went up. But for the last five years things have flatlined, in some parts sales were even in decline. They had multiple sales teams but they asked us to begin with one of the sales teams which was inside sales.

Benjamin: 02:21

Their job was to call lapsed customers. So this company had over 100,000 different accounts and a lapsed customer is someone that had an account but hadn't spent for a year. And so it was a big part of the model of of course, those customers back in and find out what's going on. The manager who had been there for fifteen years was frustrated, he said our sales methodology which he had designed has always worked, he said but now we've got 47% attrition in the team, morale is really low but they're not making enough calls and honestly I think it's a generation problem. Gen Z they're just lazy.

Benjamin: 02:50

To him that was a drama, lazy sales people, specifically lazy Gen Z. Now our hunch was this wasn't going to be the case. So after a few days observing the team that became apparent it wasn't. In fact they were making more calls than ever. They weren't lazy, they were demotivated and the reason was simple, the sales approach was broken and they hadn't been supported enough or given enough high quality training.

Benjamin: 03:15

So what would happen on calls, they would quite literally call up somebody and we're making twenty third of these calls now to say, hi, it's so and so calling from X, we've not actually ever spent for a year and we just wondered what's going on. That was it. Now, if they didn't have the phone slammed down and then we're told they were too busy and actually got to speak to them, they were normally quite sure and the average call lasted forty seven seconds and we had the data on that. So we asked for full freedom to try Pilot, we took half the team and we said look forget about call targets, your primary target is to have a high quality conversation. And what we did was we helped them rewrite a new intro to be more authentic, to use humour, to be super humble, to be really genuinely sincerely curious to ask thoughtful questions and if they got to talk about the products which wasn't therefore going to be the primary objective of the call but if they did get a chance to talk about products to tell stories about products rather than talk about features and benefits.

Benjamin: 04:07

So what happened is their new introduction went something like this they said I'm calling from company X, I'm sure you're busy, but I just want to let you know that we've noticed you haven't spent for a year and normally that means we've probably done something wrong and we're not aware of what we did wrong. Would it be okay if we could speak for a couple of minutes a day? And what would happen more than nine times out of 10 was the customer would laugh because they weren't expecting that, they don't want a cold call. They would laugh and say yeah actually you did do something wrong, like you didn't deliver on time or you messed up on order or I had a bad experience here or the pricing is too much. And so what Mealy did was built this bridge and they built rapport and they could get into a conversation and if they're opened up they would say look, it'd be great to spend a few minutes with you, have you got the time today?

Benjamin: 04:50

And often the customers say no I haven't but do know what give me a call back tomorrow at 02:00 or if they did have the time, they then went into just asking great questions, thoughtful questions, being humble to what had happened. And here's what happened. The average call in went from forty seven seconds to fifteen minutes and sounds went up by over 140%, attrition basically plummeted, they all started hitting their bonus, motivation went through the roof and it really became the harbinger of something fantastic. The sales manager thought the drama was Gen Zed are lazy, But the real drama was an outdated methodology and the team were not having enough support. And that's what the micro lesson is today.

Benjamin: 05:27

Your job in sales isn't just to fix the drama, it's to spot what the drama really is. Because if you're solving the wrong drama, you won't deliver the real value the customer needs. And that brings us to today's exercise. Firstly, down all the dramas you've solved for your customers in the last year. Next, write down the times your customer thought it was one drama, but it turned out to be something else.

Benjamin: 05:48

And finally write down how you solved those dramas, and how you can turn each one those into a story worth telling to prospective and the current customers. And that's how you become the person who doesn't just sell products, but who sees the drama clearly and makes it go away. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to Very Good Sales brought to you by Showing Up. And I hope today's micro lesson gave you something of great value.

Benjamin: 06:21

If you'd like to go deeper, head over to showinguplearning.com. That's showinguplearning.com. You can get free access to experience our video learning platform built for anybody that wants to be brilliant at selling. Whether you're learning solo as a team, every module is practical, scenario based, and designed to help you build trust, bring value, and grow sales of integrity. And what's cool is, for every person that becomes a member of our video platform, we fund a free scholarship to a young person facing social barriers to enter the workplace.

Benjamin: 06:50

So by investing in yourself, you're also giving someone else the first step into the workplace. Visit showinguplearning.com to get started. Thanks again for listening. Good luck out there. Take care and see you next time.