Brand Shorthand

How Positioning Impacts Sales

• Mark Vandegrift and Lorraine Kessler • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Yes, this is a marketing podcast, but Mark and Lorraine decided to tackle the closely related topic of sales. How does positioning impact sales? Is there a framework under which both marketing and sales operate? Can positioning supercharge your sales team? These questions and others are answered on today's episode.

Spend 30-ish with Mark and Lorraine to learn more about advertising, marketing, and positioning ... AND sales.

Mark Vandegrift

Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift. And today we're going to touch on the topic of how positioning impacts your sales team. We know this is a marketing, advertising, and positioning podcast, but tightly related and integral is the sales team, of course. According to the CMO's agenda report, the Aberdeen group found that by successfully aligning the sales and marketing teams, you can generate 32% higher revenue, retain 36% more customers, and achieve 38% higher win rates. So, to discuss all this with me is the greatest salesperson known to positioning, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, what's on your mind today?

 

Lorraine Kessler

Well, first of all, hyperbole will get you nowhere, Mark. 

 

Mark Vandegrift

I know you love my introductions.

 

Lorraine Kessler

I'll tell you what's on my mind. I know, it's like you always catch me off guard and I'm like, I'm almost speechless, which I'm sure a lot of people, including my husband, will find ridiculously funny. 

I'll tell you what's on my mind. Up here in Michigan, while I was up here vacationing, I caught a commercial from a German company. I hadn't ever even heard of them before, but I'm sure a lot of our viewers and listeners might know them. I think you pronounce it “mee-lah” in German, but it's M-I-E-L-E. And they're an appliance maker, and of course they promote their German engineering, but they're at the super premium high quality position. 

They have lines in this commercial like “quality ahead of its time.” I think they have a heritage message that supports that, been around for 125 years or so, which of course, the longer you've been around, the more trust people give to you. They say they're the ultimate in reliability. Their slogan is, you speak German, so you'd say it better than I will. 

Immer besser, which is always better, I think. So, there's a striving to this idea, just great messages. But some of the strong points that support it too is they forge their own parts, right? So, they make equipment, appliances for kitchens, and also they make other equipment that is unparalleled in the super premium category. And so, #1, I just think the commercial... 

You can't leave without being intrigued by the position. And they're certainly going after a certain type of customer who wants ultimate reliability. But they did a really cool thing in the commercial. They connected ultimate reliability to ultimate sustainability. If it's reliable, it doesn't go in a dump site. It's not going in a landfill. So, they've been able to make ultimate reliability, take it from a personal benefit that the customer or consumer appreciates to one that fits the times of sustainability. Do you really want things obsolete? Because anybody who's purchased a refrigerator in the last 10 years knows they don't last forever. If they need a part, the repair man will say buy a new one because they don't make parts for it. They're designed for

obsolescence, but I don't feel good about that because now my refrigerator is in the landfill somewhere or whatever, if it can't be recycled. So ultimate reliability, ultimate sustainability, high quality, to me they're knocking it out in the park with this.

 

Mark Vandegrift

That's great. Yeah, I might have to look into that. It's funny because our parents got us a washer and dryer for our wedding and we're coming up on our 28th anniversary, so we still have those. And yet, when we bought a new home, we got new [kitchen] appliances and I think we were lucky to get 10 years out of them. 

So, when we went to an appliance store and it wasn't a big box shop, it was actually a local TV and appliance place. And in shopping for these, I said, “well, I hope these get me more than 10 years.” And he goes, “well, you shouldn't expect that because pretty much every appliance now is the end of life is about 10 years.” So, think about that in the course of, let's say 50 to 70 years of your adult life and you're owning a home, you're going to throw [away] five to seven sets of appliances. And that's just the kitchen. Imagine the dishwasher and such. You're going to throw that into the landfill. So yeah, I think that's a good message from them. We'll have to look that up and I'll attach it to the video portion of this podcast. 

 

Lorraine

I was just going to say, and like any great position, they're appealing to people who care a lot about that, but also people who are looking at a long-term purchase or want long-term. I mean, if you're 85 years old, you might not want a Miele, right?

 

Mark Vandegrift

Yeah, that's true. 

Well, it tells me that it's built right, so it's going to operate better. And I'm not going to have to call a repair person. So, there's a convenience factor and there's also a quality factor. Like I almost think my dishes will be cleaner. I think my refrigerator will cool better or whatever it may be. There's just, there's a lot of messaging in that, but at the same time, I know, oop, it's probably going to be high price. 

Yeah. So let's, uh, let's get down to the topic at hand: how positioning impacts the sales team. And I think we need to break down this paradigm a little bit because making that connection to marketing is just kind of automatic. It's one, positioning as a philosophical approach to marketing. We also know it's more importantly, a business strategy, but let's use a framework that we like to use. You're always to our clients about this principle, and it's the AIDA principle, the A-I-D-A principle. Thing 1, lay that out for us.

 

Lorraine

AIDA has been around a long time or AIDA and it's A for awareness. And then from awareness or familiarity, you create greater trust. And that greater trust of familiarity creates interest. 

And interest means, I want to learn more. I'm going to search maybe a little deeper on this brand. It's going to be on my consideration list, either mental or whether I make an actual list, to investigate further. And then, that part of the funnel, of this funnel, really relates. That's the marketer's job, is to get the A and the I stepped. 

Then what happens is from the interest comes some sort of action. I might reach out. I might search. I might call someone. So, we have those call to actions kind of attached to the interest phase. And now there's consideration and then decision. The sales team typically comes into play in the consideration and then ultimately the decision part of it. So, in the consideration part, they have to convert that interest to understand what really is the real problem that the customer is trying to solve, and then how does their product or service fit into that.

 

Mark Vandegrift

Yeah, and I think Bernbach had come up with that: Attention, Interest, Decision, and Action. So, it's evident that sales job is to garner a decision and trigger an action in most traditional selling methods.

 

Lorraine Kessler

The final action being the sale, you know, the close of the sale.

 

Mark Vandegrift

Okay, so it's evident that sales job is to garner a decision and trigger an action. And we know how positioning optimizes the attention and interest part of this framework, but how does it set up the sales team for getting that decision and closing with the action?

 

Lorraine Kessler

Well, when you have a position, you're building on the value that's been inherent in the brand position that the prospect has become aware of. Whether this tire lasts longer or this tire is for speed and performance and maneuverability, whatever that position is. And you are delivering on that. 

So, your first thing is you want to begin your narrative, your story with: this is why our company focuses on making tires that last longer. And you know our brand for being the longest lasting tires and here's why we believe that's so important. So, this is where kind of the Simon Sinek meets the position when you're from a customer, because you get a chance to elaborate on why the company has chosen to position itself on this attribute. We talked a lot about attributes or this particular aspect of the product, service, or what have you. And so now you get to talk about, we do this because we believe, right? Most people buy tires, want to get as most mileage out of them safely, and that this is a major expense on your pocketbook or wallet. So now my story just naturally flows from what I as a salesperson believe because that's what the company believes. 

Now the trick is a good salesperson has to turn that into, has to match that, with what the customer's aim is. And this is where I call, they have to shift from talking about what we offer and why we do what we do the way we do it, to the magic of why in terms of why are you looking for tires at this time? What do you consider to be important when considering tires? Is maneuverability is number one? Is this number one? Is that number one? Whatever. How can I help? How can we help solve that problem for you? So, you have to drill down and make that connection. And this is consultative selling, right?  

I always used to say to our client service team, it's often clients don't know what they really want, right? They might call you and say, “I want a website,” or “I want a new logo.” And someone who's not a consultative seller would say, “okay, well, what colors do you want the logo” or “how much do you want to spend?” or those kinds of things. 

And that is not what a consultative seller would do. A consultative seller job is to make the customer want what they really need. Right? So you ask these “why” questions. Why do you need a new logo? Or why do you think you need a new logo? I just want to understand what problem are you trying to solve? Is there an inherent problem with the current logo? Is it too complicated? You can't use it on merchandise. You really want to get to the whys of things before you start that selling.  

And so, make the customer want what they really need, not what they think they want. And in order to do that, you have to build rapport. So asking the why questions is a great way because it shows you care about the client's problem. And you're not immediately selling to what they said they think they want. You are now really having a conversation with them about what are they trying to achieve, what problem are they trying to correct? And you create rapport doing that, and through that rapport, you can lead them, I think, to the right well versus the wrong well.

 

Mark Vandegrift

Good. Yeah, you're really, you know, the classic term is needs-based selling, right? And the benefit, I think, on positioning is you're giving me an organized sales pitch with which to answer those needs, and you give me a fluid organization in my presentation. We always say, I think from the standpoint of, okay, the marketing's generated the lead, so now you need to pick up the story where it's locked off and in the terms of Paul Harvey, tell the rest of the story. So, I think that's a really good way to understand it. It's not that the salesperson is stuck into a singular pitch. It's the idea that the position exists and it's our stake in the ground and those needs then ladder up underneath that position. Would you say that's a good way to state that?

 

Lorraine Kessler

I think part of it's a good way to state that, but part of it, one of the things, and I've attended some sales seminars where they were coaching salespeople apart from positioning, just getting to the needs of customers, needs and wants, like drilling into those. But the problem there is one, you're trying to sell the same product or proposition to customers who have wildly different needs. That's not your ideal customer. If I have one customer who thinks my need is to buy this product for as low as I possibly can, and you have a brand that's trying to build value so that you're desensitizing the customer's sensitivity to price, that doesn't help me. What you end up getting as a salesperson who defaults to price right away and cuts your margin and makes deals that aren't beneficial to the company. So, you have to start with hopefully the reason that the prospect called you in is they heard your advertising. Your advertising was around the brand message and they're calling you in because they value what you've, what you're offering. They value whatever that attribute or that promise ultimately… we just talked about me like, the ultimate reliability and sustainability. And they value that. If I got someone who thought I just want to buy an appliance in the last five years and I want to buy it as cheap as possible, and that's who I'm talking to. 

Understanding their needs and wants isn't going to help me. So, we have to make sure they're aligned. And I guess the way I found it, Mark, was this. When you walk in with your differentiated story, you're immediately setting yourself apart from competition and your selling list is not the same as all the competitors who are selling the same product or service. I remember early on in my agency career listening because I could hear through the wall the agency that went in before I had to go in for our company, going through their pitch, and it was: we're full-service and we have wonderful people to work with we're highly responsive we have an on-time schedule and guess what, we don't charge commission on media,  and I was like that's my list right. 

It was traumatizing to me, but once you have an idea… Look, we're a strategically focused agency that with a specialization and positioning, let me explain why that's important. And I'll go through that and then understand better what your needs are relative to how we can solve it through this particular philosophy. So, you're just stand a lot taller. So, it always has to be, the needs and wants can be commoditized and anybody can sell to them, but it's much better when you're having the conversation connecting needs and wants to the position. 

Now, if you get the, a bad lead, someone responded to your advertising or they heard in some strange way, someone told them to call you and you start asking, “well, why did you call in X, Y, Z? Why'd you call in my company? What prompted you to call us? What are you looking for? What, how would you define success?” And you're asking these questions and you realize it's a bad match. It's perfectly fine to say, “you know, I'm not sure we're a good match. Let me tell you why. Because we focus here and you seem to be more concerned about X and we tend to do Y.” That's great. A lot of times when we are candid that way, people want you all the more, right? They realize that what they said was a priority, isn't really a priority anymore. So, just a word to the wise on that one.

 

Mark Vandegrift

Yeah, you know what you just said, you touched on a lot of different things and it should all be music to the ears of a sales team. Because frankly, you've talked about the quality of lead generation and how do you qualify leads? Well, if you have a position and a particular point of view and the majority of people contacting you have already heard that, they're going to want you for that reason. So, it should make it, step number two, easier for the sales team to go in and say, this is our position and here's the rest of the story. And then learning the needs of the prospect and selling it to them in that particular point of view. So, I think everything you touched on there was amazing.  

And just to take this a little bit further, we like examples, right? So, here's how it impacts a lot of our clients. We do the Appreciative Discovery™ and we include the sales team. Why? Because one, they're the feet on the ground. So, they know, they hear the needs and wants of their customers. They know how their organization can deliver on those needs and they need the buy-in because if they're not going to sell it, then it's not a position that the organization is going to commit to. So, our Appreciative Discovery process… we have salespeople in there for those primarily those three reasons.  

And then it turns around after the Appreciative Discovery is done, we develop the marketing and we go through the process of dramatizing all that to begin getting leads, the sales team wants. But what has happened in many cases is because the Appreciative Discovery, once that process is done, you literally can walk out and say, this is what we're going to stand for, a salesperson can take that and use it in the marketplace immediately.  

And there was one in particular I remember where we did the Appreciative Discovery. The next day we got a call that one of their salespeople closed a huge deal in Chicago utilizing the new messaging we gave him. And he specifically stated, “I used that message or that position and it got me the work.” You recall that story, Lorraine?

 

Lorraine

Yes, I do. And a matter of fact, I think that client was in the hydraulic space and their position was “comprehensive hydraulics” because they did everything from the huge hydraulics used on freighters to servicing hydraulics mobilely. And they just hadn't pulled their story together. They had these pieces of the business kind of disparately organized. And we gave them a holistic story.  

And, you know, simply what you give someone, a great salesperson who catches on, is a refrain. It's like in a song. It's the thing that always, you can begin with, you can end with, it's in the middle. It ties everything together. That's what the positioning strategy does. And salespeople love having a story to tell that holds together. And so now there's a story and it has a value and a benefit, and of course it's relevant to the audience and you're just really putting a bow on them so they don't tend to go off in all different directions. As long as they can come back to that home base – here I am with mixed metaphors again – but if they can come back to that home base and touch it, it actually helps focus them so they become better communicators and therefore their clients find it easier to follow what they're really selling.

 

Mark Vandegrift

Yeah, you know, organizations that get that single story, they love it because so many salespeople are schizophrenic and they go out with multiple personalities and they come back and you don't know what they told the customer. The great thing is this actually gives a sales director kind of a filter through which they can say, well, did you tell them what we stand for and did you sell to our organized sales pitch? And if they haven't, it's kind of a measure of, “well, you're not doing your job well, let's go retrain.” And if after so many attempts, they can say, bye bye. If the salesperson doesn't want to get on board with the company position. So it really does change a sales organization. 

It's funny. I hear ads for sales optimization webinars and seminars and books and systems. And really pretty much everything you can imagine, but I never hear anyone sell a consultation that gives your sales team a single messaging platform organized around your position.  

So, I don't know, maybe we should package that up and sell it. Oh wait, we did! It's called the Appreciative Discovery.  

Anyhow, I heard a podcast the other day … this might interest you, Lorraine. They interviewed an author. I think the book was called, The Jeweled Effect. Have you heard of that? Anyhow, he was talking about sales techniques, and it had to do with a study about how much a salesperson talks versus the prospect talking, and the chance for closing a sale based on that balance. It turned out though, what they discovered, and you're going to go, “duh,” but they turned out that when a bad salesperson talked more, he lost more business. But when a consultative salesperson talked more, she won more business.  

To me, that just screams value. And what has more value than knowing your business and having a position no other competitor can speak to? It's like what you were saying. If your sales pitch can have five different competitors do the same sales pitch like your early agency days, I mean, what value does that have? 

So, I don't know, you've probably heard a few tips and tricks out there that just make you shake your head. I’m just throwing it out there, but you know, what's your thought on that?

 

Lorraine Kessler

Yeah, it's not, well, it's not the amount of talking the salesperson does, right? It's the kind of talking they do. If you start with the questions, like I said, you'll be talking a lot, but you're also creating rapport and trust because you're asking questions that are extremely important to understanding the customer and the customer's need and what they value. 

That's where you start. You don't start with your position right away. You start with things like, “why did you call Innis Maggiore today? I mean, there's a lot of agencies out there. What did you see or hear about Innis Maggiore that made you call us? And so, you'll find out where they are. Well, I had clients who worked with you, and they loved the Appreciative Discovery or whatever they're gonna say. And then you can build on that. So, do you value positioning? Is that something you feel? Do you understand what that is? So, you'll be talking a lot, but what's happening is you end up controlling the conversation with the permission of the customer because the answers they know benefit how you're going to help them. 

And so that's, you know, that to me is really the trick of the consultative seller. They're critically thinking about the business. And, you know, there's an old thing Dick Maggiore always says, right? “People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.” 

Asking questions about a prospect that has taken time out to meet with you, to understand better the problem they're trying to solve, that's how you show care. And that's also how you show listening. It's also how you show listening. Listening isn't a passive thing. You just sit and kind of let the client rant on. It's an active process by which you're directing the conversation in a way that benefits the customer. 

And so, you're active in asking questions.

 

Mark Vandegrift

Yeah, it was interesting. The author talked about, they did a little study about, what they called interrupting the prospect. And they said when a consultative salesperson interrupted a prospect, it was almost like a friend's conversation. In other words, the prospect allowed for the interruption because it was a conversation about achieving a goal. They called it more overlap rather than interruption because one of the things that most salespeople fear is silence. Well, when you have silence, that probably means that it's not very consultative. That consultative selling is so important that if you have your position established, and you know what it really means in terms of your prospect, and how it can change their organization, then it really becomes very easy to sell. 

I'm a good example of that. I am not a natural salesperson. Anybody that's heard me on this podcast for the last 10 episodes or so, realizes I'm not natural with words, I'm not natural with just thinking off the cuff. But once we found positioning, it's very easy for me to go on a new business call because I'm listening for that nugget in a question that allows me to say, “well, this is how positioning is going to impact that” or “this is how the way we think about marketing is going to impact what it is how we solve your problem that you have right now or why you called in Innis Maggiore. 

To me, positioning has impacted maybe sales for me more so than the way I think about just going about marketing itself. I mean. it's the whole continuum, but it really has helped me personally in a way that I couldn't have ever fathomed. I couldn't have gone out and bought a book on how to do sales better. I couldn't have gone out and attended a webinar to become a better salesperson. Literally, positioning has changed that for me personally.

 

Lorraine Kessler

Yeah, and in our business, you know, when I started, a lot of it was, you know, you heard a lot about relationship-building with clients and build relationship. And what that got translated to, particularly in the Mad Men era of the agency world that I stepped into, was meeting for drinks and cocktails either at lunch or after work or golfing together. Look, that's the dessert. Entertainment is the dessert. 

What clients really want is you to help them achieve their sales goals and their profit goals. They want to know that what you're coming... I mean, serious clients want serious interaction and consultation. If they could do it by themselves, they would. They obviously need a consultant. I always would say that sometimes I'll say this to a client and they kind of laugh, I say, “A consultant is someone you hire to tell you things you don't want to hear.” Right? 

All right, and that's a good icebreaker because that's the difference between I'm trying to sell you what we make or do, versus I'm trying to help your business with the way we think and what we do. Very different. Two different worlds… one to me requires integrity. Integrity to the client's business and their cause and you're not just trying to sell something because you're getting a bonus on that or a spiff or whatever it is. You're doing it out of the true interest. And clients, they know when you're sincere and they know when you're being a flim-flam, in my opinion.  

Now, I think one of the most difficult things, and it's a message I would have for CEOs and higher level management… they often will buy into a position, believe in a position until it becomes tough and then they want to abandon it.  

By this, what I mean is, a salesperson goes out and meets a bad prospect. Not a good prospect. They don't really value the same things. And what they do value is price, price, price. And I've often had CEOs and leadership want to sell those people anyway. And that just demoralizes your sales team because they believe in the position. And what I've learned is a bad prospect becomes a bad client. You're going to have that battle over price the entire history of that client. And is that really a battle? All that energy and all that time is opportunity lost in finding a really good client who values what you value, just believes you should be paid what your brand is worth, and the value-add to their business. Isn't that a much better way? That to me is a better relationship.  

And certainly again, I'll say entertainment is the dessert. If you have clients who want to be entertained, that's the dessert, the meat of the relationship is how you help their business.

 

Mark Vandegrift

Very well stated. And I think that's a good way to wrap this one up.  

To our loyal listeners, just remember to like, share, and tell others about the Brand Shorthand podcast. And just want to thank you again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode when we do our deep dive on support positioning concepts. Until then, have an amazing day.