About

Welcome to Scale Your Sales Podcast Barnaby Wynter, a brand creation expert with a catalogue of over 557 brands to his name. After a fast track career, he became the youngest MD of a UK Top 200 integrated advertising agency. Where he spent 7 years undertaking a rank and file analysis of how to make your marketing really work in the digital knowledge economy. In today’s podcast, we will be finding out what we should be doing right now. What will hold you together is providing value to the people who buy from you, said Barnaby. The critical thing is you've got to nail where the value lies in what it is you're doing for people. Then you've got to translate that into everything you do so it's evident every time people interact with you that your value comes through everything you do. I often find businesses are not brilliant at communicating what the value is or what they do. The value can be from what you give what you deliver, or what the customers are receiving in the impact it's making on them and their customers. Thirty-five years ago, I thought the brand owners ruled the rule the roost, and they told you what value you were going to get from them. Today, in the knowledge economy in the digital economy, we have so much more choice. You have to convey your value in terms of what the buyer is going to get from you at all times. What you give is kind of irrelevant in the sense that it is all about what the buyer gets there we only buy from a self, point of view. We do not buy from your point of view, so it is critical that you are walking in the shoes of your buyers all the time. The brand bucket was created for SAAB in 1985. It has been used on over 4700 brands worldwide. I've only used it on the under 570 that we talked about earlier and it was a model that was created as a result of an 18-month piece of research and originated by a gentleman called Stuart Ball who was asked myself to define how people bought motor cars, and he ended up with a six-step engagement model which starts with creating awareness in the market. The way you do that you get people to have heard of you, so you create brand properties and famous names and all that sort of thing but then what you build around that is an image dimension. The second step is the image dimension but what you have to do is you have to match the image of your buyers not to the image of your image which again was distinctive way back in the mid-80s. So, you manifest and that what that means, people have heard of you, and then they say I like you. But the critical thing we found when we were doing the research, that changed the game and not only did we buy from people we like, but we buy from people like us so, we have to be really in the style of our buyers not in our style. That's again very difficult particularly use designers or web guys or whatever they often design today what they think might look cool but actually what you've got to do is design to recover what the buyers are looking for. Then once they do that, they work out I have heard you; I like you. Then what you need to do is the third step, is tell people what you do but again when people are asked what do they often list out all the features of their business well, of course, nobody's buying features anymore. Because we are just using those to compare with each other, so what you must do is convert those into benefits. so, you have got to tell your benefit story at that point that then gets everybody going, I have heard if you are lucky and I know how you are going to benefit me. Then you say well you're buying something I said well actually what I know you're not the only one, so I'll tell you what I'm going to go and see what else is in the market so what you have to do is the fourth step. You have to give them a test drive; you have to say well look, why don't you come and have a go, why don't you find out what and immerse people in your value. Now, of course, you can't do that forever. Eventually, you say look I'm sorry the test drivers come to an end, and I have to remove this. They go no you can't do that I've integrated you into my life and you go well I'm sorry we can not afford to keep giving units for nothing so that's the point where you say I really can't help I can't give you this. I do have one idea and then what is that you give us money and we will carry on with this like oh that is a good idea, here have as much as you want right. At that point most marketing people say job done took the suspect turned them into a prospect took them from cold to warm to hot and all this other rubbish that people talk about and now they bought and they said because we've done that we're going to lunch. That's what most marketing people do but actually what we found through the research is this is when the value is nailed because people are giving you money they've given you time they've invested in the relationship you've done the same with your product or service. You've got to do the then what's then the fifth step, which makes the experience of being a buyer truly amazing and you'll know instinctively when you take part in a purchase process, and people look after you, and you feel like you're getting extra value and all that sort of thing and you feel much better about it. If you get that the sixth step then is building loyalty which is making sure that you look after the people who buy from you, they'll a buy more stuff from you, which is critical. Still, secondly, they'll advocate the fact that you're brilliant and they'll tell other people how brilliant you are because you've made the whole experience amazing. The six steps we summarise those then to three sorts of sections which are the first two are about engaging people; the second two are about demonstrating your value. Hence, through facts match and the test drive, and the third one is delivering on that value through what we call usage and loyalty. Those are so six steps down into three now if you apply that strategy to everything you do, and you make those sort of almost titles of your marketing plan. You make sure you're always doing something along that journey people will effectively become part of your business and in our terms fill your brand bucket. I must say to listeners you need to get the book, the Brand Bucket. There are lots of examples in there to help you apply the six steps, and, interestingly, this was developed a while ago, and there are lots of use cases. Still, it's so relevant now when we're talking about the knowledge economy and customer experience. There's the what we call the swear word in our business the F word so I'll only use it at once because I don't like to swear on these things. The funnel mindset what that is, of course, people the way the media industry is set up is it's trying to pour people into the top of your F word and then on the assumptions it's all going to pour out over the floor which is your job. The way the marketing industry the sales industry is all about pouring people in the top so what happens is business leaders getting hung up on the fact they've got to keep pouring people in the top rather than think on the basis it's a numbers game. I mean how many times have you heard that is a numbers game right it is a numbers game it is not about getting every tom dick and harry to come into the top of your F word. It is about finding the right people to go into your bucket and then look after them knowing you are going to lose a few along the way. The reason why it is shaped like a bucket is that we have a mathematic, we mathematically analyse the drop-off rates between everything. Hence, what's happened is there's been a disconnect between sales and marketing and after-sales customer service. This is the way that we need to go forward and to service their customers in the way their customers want to be serviced is important. I think you're right about that; the big corporates need to wake up and smell the coffee and realise the power base has shifted away from them and into the bias and buyers are now actively scanning the marketplace for alternatives to them and over time they would. I find it very frustrating that I can't get through to these big organisations because of covid because they put everybody on furlough. Therefore they cut the number of people in the call centres which I am paying for with my taxes so I'm paying for them to put their teams on furlough so that I can't now get any service. I think they need to believe we should focus now on how we deliver experiences that are second to none that are state-of-the-art. They must sit down and say we have a rule that nobody waits online for longer than five minutes and if we need to bring people in to answer the phones. Actually, in times of trouble, people have more need not less need. You're right I think everybody's short-term, If you look at the rate of change, it is getting faster and faster. If you look at the brands that have emerged from nowhere whether it's the Just Eats or the Amazons; the Googles or the Airbnb or the Ubers. These brands have emerged from nowhere in the last five years. They've all got one thing that's consistent about them, and it's not that they're online which is what everybody says, they don't make the product or the service they have just created businesses that are about the experience of getting those products and services. 88 %of all buying decisions start online, so as a business now you are going to have a sales process it has got to start online. You've got to nurture people into your bucket all of the time because they're looking for you right now for all of us everything we need to satisfy a business person and probably people online right now looking for us. We've got to get found, and when they find us we're just going to look we've got to wrap big cuddly arms around them and say come with us it's going to be amazing from beginning to end, and that's what the bucket is just brilliant for doing that, and you're right it's much more powerful today than it was when it was even created originally. What one tried and tested strategy would you offer listeners to Scale their sales? I think there are a number of things that you really you need to nail your value proposition you've got to do that and you've got to be able to convey what your value is very quickly you also need to identify the mindset of your prospect based so and we call this psychographic profiling so not their demographic not who they are what they are and where they live or that's all nonsense actually what's their mindset and then what you need to do is you need to go where those people go and it's once you've got the mindset it's actually very easy to do because they're not going to be in that place they're going to be in this place and when you're in that place what you've got to do is make sense of a confusing world for them because what's happened with the knowledge economy. What you're doing to scale your sales is you're owning that journey at the top of the bucket and the really clever trick is to make sense in such a way that you're the only solution and if you can do that then what's going to happen is they're going to go actually do what every time I interact with you make sense and now I'm asking you can we pay you to help us on a permanent basis and you go yes, of course, you can and so the way to score your sales is to now take your expertise as a business leader why what how you benefit people and keep feeding that out into the places where your ideal prospect goes and you'll be amazed people go oh thank goodness somebody here is helping me understand a what I need they've identified things I hadn't thought of and they're the place to go to and you become a go-to brand. https://www.linkedin.com/in/barnabywynter www.barnabywynter.com