Selling Results

Most of us start out selling deliverables—this report, that assessment, a new website. We focus on what we do, not the actual outcome of the thing that we’ve produced.

In this episode, Jonathan and I break down (with more than a few illustrative stories), how to think about selling results. Fair warning—once you see how awesome it is to sell this way, you’ll never want to go back.

Why a focus on outcomes naturally changes your sales conversations and how you think about delivery.

How becoming the client yourself helps crystallize the importance of outcomes vs. inputs.

Changing your mental model away from valuing time spent to the outcomes your clients are seeking.

Becoming the Mercedes option where your clients happily pay big premiums for your reliably transformative outcomes.

How using an outcomes focus in the sales process also weeds out undesirable clients.

Quotables

“You change the way that you talk to the client, so that you’re finding out more about what is the transformation they want instead of how much work is this going to be for me to execute.”—JS

“They (the billers of time) just have to invert their thinking. And it’s funny because once you really see it from the other side, it’s hard to unsee it.”—RM

“I fundamentally believe deep down that the majority of software projects go 2x over the initial estimate because nobody talks at the beginning about what the success metric is.”—JS

“It’s just all in what you want, what you value and what the person is going to deliver (when you’re hiring a consultant).”—RM

“You found someone who you considered to be a Mercedes option—like a premium luxury purchase—and you just believed that it would work and it did work and it didn’t need to take a lot of time. In fact, the less time it takes the better.”—JS

“There are some clients who really don’t want to be challenged. They don’t want to have those tough questions asked and those are not good clients.”—RM

“It’s like finding the mission for the project and then it’s all about everybody’s on the same mission—you’ve got something to align everybody around.”—JS

“Going from time spent to outcomes is messing with somebody’s mental model—it’s really hard to imagine that someone will value the outcome only and not care about the inputs.”—RM