Why Change Selling Blog

We moved from our home of 5 years in Scotland last month as we are returning to Northern California after 7 years away, settling in the Carmel/Monterey area...(also a reason why this blog has been quiet for the last month). We were amazed by the amount of stuff that we had accumulated in that time, stuff we did not need.

This "Visual Confections that Sell" video below, defines what visual confections are, how to use them in sales situations and outlines our process to create them. 

The video requires no registration form to play and runs for about 14 minutes.

It will be of interest to a broad audience who want to communicate their ideas more effectively in a shorter space of time. It will be of particular interest to those interested in leading with an opinion, supported by a visual confection, to disrupt status-quo thinking.

If you would to download the visuals and script or discuss converting your PowerPoint presentation into a visual Confection, or give feedback on the video, please complete this Let's discuss Visual Confections form.

How Visual Confections Create Value in Selling

• Visual Confections help sales people convey their value creation story, creating confidence that leads to better buyer engagement. 
• Visual Confections combined with visual storytelling technique, help sales people get their big idea across more effectively in conversation.
• The process of of creating Visual Confections aligns sales and marketing messaging and brings value creation into clear focus.
• Visual confections when used in sales training can help reduce sales ramp time and foster stronger message ownership, leading to improved sales results.

To reach new B2B Buyers and connect via email is a low probability game, but the marginal cost of sending email is close to zero, so don't expect volume to decline.

Email is a science, with every element from the senders name to the signature analyzed and dissected for optimal performance. If you want to read the current research, follow this link to directly read the 2014 report.

This article is about the opening sentence and will be of interest to sales and marketing professionals.

Earlier this month, I immersed myself in two and a half days with Mike Bosworth in his Story Seekers workshop and was once again reminded of what makes great salespeople great - their ability to connect emotionally with buyers and to truly listen.

I cannot easily summarize the 2.5 days in 600 words, but I can give you a couple of core ideas.

I've been a Mike Bosworth fan since I read Customer-Centric Selling in January 2005, but I had not read his prior work, “Solution Selling” published nearly 30 years ago, based on his experiences at Xerox and involvement in the SPIN project. Mike was one of the most successful reps in Xerox history at the time and gained much experience in selling, managing and training salespeople before most of us started our sales careers.

While reading his latest book, co-authored with Ben Zoldan, entitled, "What Great Salespeople Do", I could feel myself nodding as I could either see myself in the stories, or agreed with his ideas and training philosophy.





One of Mike’s startling revelations in the opening of the training course is that after nearly 30 years of sales training in both Solution Selling and Customer-Centric Selling (and most of the other mainstream sales methodologies), not much has changed for the bottom 80% of the sales force, who sell 20% of the revenue.



The outcome of these training courses was that the best salespeople got better from using the techniques and processes, but the core group typically stopped using the techniques within a month or two of the training and reverted to prior behavior. Mike points out that in fact the old 80/20 rule is no longer true in fact it’s now 13% of salespeople selling 87% of the business. (Sales Benchmark Index)

Selling with Pictures and Emotion

What makes a great sales presentation and what's the difference between a good presenter and poor presenter?
Lets get crystal clear about the purpose of a sales presentation.

Here's my new definitiion, "the purpose of a sales presentation is to have the audience interact with both the presenter and the material to engage, transform and activate the audience to create change."

The best presenters successfully weave a story around the buyer's current condition... "what-is"; they engage emotions and lead the buyer to understand "what-could-be" as a result of using your products/services and conclude with a call to action or logical next steps.

Great presenters make the buyer the center of the story. Great presentations are delivered in a true dialogue with the audience....images and props serve as visual aids - where appropriate.  It's not about Powerpoint slideshow technique or bullets.

Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone announcement is continually referenced as an exemplar presentation. Steve uses emotion, humor and props as well as dramatic music.... his images are simple and powerful and add clarity and weight to the point he is making. His timing is perfect and he knows the material and this comes from rehearsing the presentation more than 20 times.

The Hero's Journey Story Structure

In the development phase of a whiteboard story or visual storytelling structure we loosely follow the Hero's Journey structure to create contrast between "what is" and "what could be" and engages the buyer in conversation around the challenges of the "now".

The Hero's Journey from Nancy Duarte's Resonate

If you are in sales or consulting, live in the USA or Canada and work most of the time from home, you might find the following article on setting up high quality sales communication system worth the time it takes to read.

The news is that the state of the union between sales and marketing is not all bad. Like President Obama's State of the Union message, we're doing well in some areas, but have a long way to go in others.


The state of the union between sales and marketing is imperfect, but growing stronger and the hard work and dedication of the pioneers is beginning to deliver quantifiable results. It is our unfinished task to ensure that both sales and marketing teams are served by the sales and marketing alignment process, not just a vocal few in sales.

The changes in buyer behavior are permanent and both sales and marketing must unite and adopt a new vocabulary, new methods and embrace new technologies to more effectively serve buyers, achieve revenue goals and to lower the cost of acquiring and servicing customers.

We need to recognize that for sales and marketing to best serve today's Internet savvy, socially connected buyer, we need to evolve one contiguous and tightly coupled revenue generation process. The outbound "hunter" B2B sales role as we knew it, is giving way to scientific methods of lead generation, lead nurturing and scoring, marketing automation, free trials and light-touch engagement across the IMPACT buying process.

Inbound Leads vs. Traditional Outbound Leads

Mark Roberge, VP Sales at HubSpot is a 10 on a scale of 1-10 of the smartest sales leaders I know. When he talks about sales and marketing alignment, I listen.

This article was publsihed in full, yesterday on Linkedin pulse, you can find it under "What not to do at Trade Shows".

The following is a true story. A few names have been changed to protect the identity of some of the people involved.