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What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
RACHEL ELSTS DOWNEY (00:00):
In today's B2B landscape, flashy demos, and bold claims, they just don't cut it. The real secret to closing deals and building lasting partnerships, it really isn't about selling at all. It's not about flash, it's about building trust, and no one gets that better than Mike Genstil.
Mike has flipped the traditional sales script. His approach proves value first, turning customers into your biggest champions. So when I wanted to know how to prove ROI and win customer trust, here's who I asked. And his answer? He left it in a voicemail.
MIKE GENSTIL (00:51):
Thanks, Rachel. It's great to hear that you are interested in ROI for your customers and everyone should be. My company, ValueCore, has been helping sales, marketing, and customer success leaders to create ROI and value stories for their customers for the past 10 plus years. Creating trust around ROI is complicated in a few ways, but the good news is there's a good way to do this that really does raise that trust, which then converts into higher win rates and bigger deals. So the way to think about providing trust in this process is to kind of startdoing what we're doing today, but just with a little bit more structure.
(01:33):
Sales methodology always starts with identifying the challenges that your customer has today, getting the customer to confirm those challenges, and then ultimately provide estimates around how much you can make their world better once they have your solution and what that new world translates to in terms of improved metrics, KPIs, and ultimately operational savings and ROI.
(01:59):
Once we've established a set of problems or challenge areas that they'd like to improve, we need to quantify the size of that problem or what it's costing them today. Most customer success leaders don't really take this step very seriously, or they skip it. What you wanna do to provide credibility and trust is to say, "Listen, you said you have a problem with getting invoices out to your customers on time, and sometimes you even have invoices that are going out that are not correct." Wouldn't it be nice to then take the conversation to the next level and say, "Well, let's figure out what that's costing you."
(02:59):
You might then go down a path, which is: "How many invoices are you sending per month? What's the average value of those invoices? What's the error rate on those invoices?" With that information, you can quickly establish the fact that, out of 200 invoices they're sending per month, two to five of them are late or wrong, and it's costing them five to $10,000 in either payments coming in on time or payments coming in correctly at all.
(03:25):
Now let's talk about how much will we likely save and how much will we likely improve your process? This is where trust and credibility can break down, if when we create the ROI or the business case for the customer, we give them just one number and we don't let them change the number. To provide the best credibility and trust, we might want to give the customer a range of benefit, and then allow the customer to make changes to those assumptions if they want.
[03:54]
Back to the invoice automation problem, if the company is sending 200 invoices per month and the number of problem invoices is two to five, you might say, "According to my case studies as the vendor, I'm able to reduce the invoice error rate by anywhere between 50% and a hundred percent, which can then convert to X thousand dollars in savings." The customer might want to change the assumptions and say, "Well, they're promising me an 80 to 90% improvement in my invoice error rate. I wanna dial that down to something that I'm more comfortable with because I may wanna be more conservative or I might not get the best possible result.
[04:32]
I have to have some notion of value quantification. I'm asking you for $10,000. Onus is on me, the vendor, to say your $10,000 is very well spent with me because I'm going to get you some non-zero value.
(05:07):
So if I'm able to deliver my customer these three things: Number one, the current state of what the problem is based on information we can learn from the customer and industry statistics. Number two, roughly how much I can improve their situation based on my best estimates for my own case studies and other industry reports. Number three, if I can give the customer the chance to update those assumptions in a dynamic, engaging, visually appealing way, not just a spreadsheet perhaps, then I've set myself up to have a very collaborative conversation with my customers around value and ROI that builds trust and helps me win the deal and expand that relationship. Hope that makes sense, Rachel. Love to catch up with you further about this. You can always call me back. You've got my number, talk soon.