Better To Create Demand Than Fulfill Demand

[0:04] This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, I will I'll be sharing ideas and insights around why it's better to create demand than fulfill demand.

[0:35] The Full Funnel of Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary. Are you tired of consultants and coaches only telling you what you need to do to scale, but don't stick around to help you with the how to do it? Sandler Calgary supports clients in scaling not only with the what, but they also stick around and help you with the how. Wow. Next episode will be episode number 50. We've got Jen Franklin from Medallia. I'm massively excited to have you listen to that conversation that she and I had. It was amazing. Shared a lot of great ideas and insights, but I also want to thank all of you for supporting us ever since we launched last October.

[1:17] Really, really excited about the guests that we've got upcoming. We've We've already had one guest from overseas and we've got another one coming up. So very much appreciate your support, especially those of you who have left ratings and or reviews. I certainly look forward to reading more of your reviews on the podcast as we roll forward. We are looking for sponsors and supporters as well as guests. So if you are curious about what it might look like to be a sponsor of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast, email podcast at fullfunnelfreedom.com and someone will be in touch. So let's talk about demand creation versus demand fulfillment. Demand fulfillment is safe and easy. In demand fulfillment, we sit around and aggressively wait for the phone to ring, or we go out and quote unquote network or make connections. And you can't see the air quotes that I'm making, but you can probably hear them in my voice. And then we hope that people are going to buy from us. And there are certain industries where demand fulfillment can seem pretty easy.

[2:31] Things like marketing, where marketing, everybody thinks that they need marketing, but they also think they know how to do marketing. So the marketing organizations that I've spoken with often find that they get into a race to zero because when they bring forward their proposal and share the price, the prospect's like, what, how can you ask me for this much money for a website or for a rebrand or for whatever? And it's because...

[2:58] That organization hasn't spent the time actually creating the demand for their services. They're simply providing a fulfillment to a request for a quote or a proposal. A lot of startup entrepreneurs run into this because they build a thing. Someone says, I'll buy that thing. Someone else says, I'll buy that thing. And all of a sudden, the founder is sitting on top of a 75-person company looking down going, I have no idea how I got here. And I hope that I can keep running hard enough and fast enough and long enough to keep this thing scaling. Cause I feel like if I stop, I'm going to fall apart. In fact, a CEO of a scaling tech company once shared with me that they were having 300% annual growth and they were adding 30 people a month. And when they finally took a breath and stopped beating their chest, I said, do you feel like you're running up a set of stairs that's falling apart behind you? And they said, Oh, God, yes. And I said, Well, you want to put some concrete under those stairs? And they said, Can you help? And I said, Well, probably, but it's going to be really expensive. And it's not going to happen overnight.

[4:05] So when we're looking at demand creation, we're looking at actually getting our prospects and coaching our salespeople to get their prospects to a point where they're asking the salesperson to work with them. And that sounds simple. It's certainly not easy. One of the other challenges that we have in this demand creation strategy is our salespeople will often fall into the seasons of prospecting fallacy. And so the seasons of prospecting fallacy is the excuses our salespeople give us for why they can't prospect or why they aren't able to open up expansion opportunities with current clients. So if we look at a calendar year and break that into quarters, season one is the first quarter where our salespeople say, boss, no time to prospect, can't connect with the clients because everybody's implementing. Fast forward into season two, which is in Q2, our salespeople say, boss, can't prospect, everybody's still implementing, or boss, nobody's got any money anymore because they spent it all on implementation in Q1. Fast forward into Season 3 in Q3, Boss... Can't get a hold of any of the decision makers that are big clients to talk about expansion because they're all on holiday and then rolling into season four, which is Q4. And there's actually a little half season in here as well.

[5:32] But the big season of prospecting fallacy for Q4 is everybody's planning for next year. So boss, no one's buying anything between now and the end of the year because they're all budgeting for next year. So we got to get into their budget cycle for next year. And the half season, of course, comes in around December when it's back to everybody's on holiday. So when we're looking at demand creation, number one, we have to win the battle of beliefs with our salespeople because the seasons of prospecting fallacy is a fallacy for a reason. It just isn't true. Not everybody is implementing in Q1 because not everyone runs a fiscal year off of the calendar. Also, there are problems that our clients and prospects have that need to be solved, whether it is Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4. It does not matter. So respectfully challenging our salespeople's beliefs by asking questions like, so have you talked to literally all of the clients in your book, and they're literally all on holiday? day. And of course, sheepishly, our salesperson will be like, well, yeah, you know, I haven't have, you know, I've just talked to the five that I talked to on a weekly basis. Okay, well, how about we find the people who are maybe getting a little bit less love from us and start exploring opportunities there.

[6:52] When I first got into sales, I, of course, was given the dead or dying accounts list as most first time salespeople are. And when I called the people on this list, some of them said, oh, I didn't know you guys were still in business. And at the time, I was working for the organization that had the single largest market share in our industry. And some of them said, oh, I never knew you did that service when the service that we were talking about had been a core part of our offering for decades, but no one had ever brought it up to them. So when we're looking at demand creation, it is, first of all, winning the battle of beliefs with our salespeople about the time of the year or I'm not allowed to talk to that prospect or we've got nothing that we can offer them or they're so in love with our competitor that they'll never shift. But then when we look at demand creation, it's coaching our salespeople to...

[7:45] Stop going in and saying to our prospect, or at least implying, hopefully they're not directly saying it, I got something that you need, or I got something to fix your problems. Because no one likes to be told that they have a problem. No one likes to be told not only that they have a problem, but that someone else has a solution, which in code words means they're going to have to pay for it in some way, whether it's time, money, or effort. So we want our salespeople to go out and find people, you know, who are happy. One of the strange things that when I got in the sales, everybody I talked to was happy. You know, you look at all the data out there about figures for mental health and for divorce rates and things like that, except when you're in sales, everybody's happy. So coaching our salespeople to go out and find people who think they're happy or who might say things like, hey, we're always open to new ideas, which is by the way, a code for please come in and do some free consulting for me.

[8:43] Now, once they find someone like that, and this could be a current client, right? This current client might have us pigeonholed in a box where they just see us as a vendor for one service, even though we have three, four or five other services that their organization could use. And we're pretty sure of that because they're buying those things from other organizations, not from us. Our prospects and clients, even though they're sophisticated, they don't buy the stuff that our salespeople are selling on a regular basis, or at least they don't explore it as often as our salespeople are going out and prospecting, at least ideally.

[9:19] So we want to coach our clients to start asking questions around the future. You know, what happens if, so you're on this path, what happens if, or if we have a client, like when we talked with Mark Kukopanen, the president of Extended to this North America talking about how certain individuals are very future focused, right? They're focused on the future, but they're so focused on the future that they don't notice that there's a problem in their present. The analogy I often use is they're so focused on getting to the top of the mountain, they don't notice that the bridge is out in front of them and that they're going to fall into the river. And so coaching our salespeople to start adapting our questions to the communication style of the client that we're speaking with so that we can help pull their eyes down and show them that the bridge is out and that.

[10:09] They are so thankful that they want to work with us because we've raised our credibility, not by going in and dumping information on them, but asking them questions that caused them to understand that there was going to be a major issue with their achieving their vision if they didn't fix this problem. On the flip side, we've got individuals, prospects who are very, very present focused. They're just focused on executing in the present, coaching our salespeople to adapt their questioning to focus on the future. What happens if we stay on this path? What are the potential unseen consequences of staying on this path, even though it may be massively detrimental in the future?

[10:50] Oftentimes when we're talking with sales leaders and coaching them to coach their people, we use the analogy of a manufacturing organization that's got this one machine that is potentially literally held together by duct tape and bailing wire. And they've got the one person in the whole organization who's been there for decades who actually knows how to hit it properly with a wrench so that the thing actually works on a regular basis, but that's working for them in the present. However, they're not seeing that when that machine fails, because it will, or when that one individual moves on, because they will, that is going to be massively detrimental to the business in terms of lost productivity time, lost orders, angry customers, et cetera, et cetera.

[11:36] So once we find a prospect or a client and who we, who admits the, okay, yeah, I could see how that, you know, probably going to affect me, et cetera, et cetera. Now let's dig a little deeper in that coaching our salespeople to not just think that there's a magic question that they can ask where all of a sudden the prospect's going to say, oh, the scales have fallen off my eyes, and now I can see again, and I absolutely should work with you. We need to follow a line of questioning after that and really get down to the truth with that prospect and have them self discover what the challenges are and say that to our prospect. Because if a salesperson says something to a client about, well, it's probably costing you this much money every month, right? Now they're a pushy, aggressive salesperson. But when the client comes to that conclusion on their own, then they own that.

[12:27] And it becomes much more emotional and much more compelling for them. Now, once we actually get our prospect all the way from I'm happy to, okay, maybe there's a bit of a challenge here to, oh, yeah, you know what? That actually could be materially impactful to my organization. You know, what can you do? Well, now we want our salesperson to co-build the future with the prospect. And what would that look like to you? you and lay it out with them. Because one of the other dangers that our salespeople have, or one of the risks that they run is they get to the point where the prospect is saying, you know, how can you help me? And they go, let me get back to you. I'll get a proposal. I'll work with my engineering team. And how about we come back next week? And that's kind of like the scene in the movie where the two people are drawing closer and closer and closer together. and you know that they're going to kiss and then something interrupts them and the whole moment's broken. When we coach our salespeople to stay in the moment with a prospect, especially one who is emotionally engaged in wanting to get their problem solved, they may end up shortening their sales cycle significantly.

[13:38] Because they kept their prospect in that moment as opposed to breaking it by, let me get your proposal and I'll get back to you. Now, even if they stay in that moment, certainly we might have to come back to sign an agreement or do a demo or something like that. But by coaching our salespeople to stay present, not get nervous on their own or not get excited about, oh, I got one. They are going to be more likely to close more often and shorten the sales cycle. And best way to double sales is to shorten sales cycles. And that may seem impossible, especially for those of us who are in enterprise type environments. But even pulling a sales cycle back from eight months to seven and a half months, that is going to create more momentum and keep our funnel consistently reliably full. This has been the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast.

[14:29] I've been your host, Hamish Knox, today sharing with you ideas and insights around why it's better to create demand than fulfill demand and how we might run into beliefs that our sales people have like the seasons of prospecting fallacy. The Full Funnel of Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary. If you're tired of coaches and consultants only telling you what you need to do to scale and not supporting you with the how, Sandler Calgary supports their clients not only with the what they need to do to scale, but also they support them with how to do it. Go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler for more details. Thanks for listening. Find us on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for leaving a rating and or review.

[15:17] Excited to have been with you for 50 episodes and looking forward to many, many more. If you're looking for transcripts of every episode, go to full fullfunnelfreedom.com. Until we connect with you on the next episode, go create Full Funnel Freedom. Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.

[15:42] Music.