December 02, 2020

Jason Cutter: The Key to Channel Selling with Authentic Persuasion

42 minutes

Channel Management is more of a sales game than you may think. As a channel manager, you constantly have to persuade. You have to sell your company, your products, and your channel program to your partners. You continuously have to convince your sales teams and your management why you need the channel. That’s why the topic of this episode is so interesting to me. Jason Cutter, host of The Sales Experience Podcast and author of Selling With Authentic Persuasion, shares how channel sales and partner managers can gain influence and success by selling with authentic persuasion. Learn how to grow from an order taker to a quota breaker.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

What is authentic persuasion and how do you use it? Here are my key takeaways from Jason:

Being authentic is based on self awareness and understanding who you are, what you bring to the table, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. What drives you? What what are you going to get up every day and be excited to work towards?

Being authentic is understanding your strengths in your sales style and your approach, and then bringing that with you into the conversation and not trying to be something or someone else.

Many sales reps end up being order takers. They may be good at giving a good demo presentation, but then their strategy is hope. They’re hoping the other person is going to see the value for themselves and go, yes, I would like that. Here’s my money. But that only works a small percentage of the time. The rest of the time it requires persuasion and action. And that’s just the line sales reps don’t want to cross because they think to do that requires manipulation and tricks.

Your partners and customers don’t really care about you, your products, your company. What they care about is what’s in it for them. How can you help them?

Authentic persuasion is about taking the time to find out what what matters and then talking about what’s most important to them, not to you.

One of the telltale signs of an order taker, somebody who’s not operating like a sales professional, is when you listen to them talk and they pause. The problem is that nature hates a vacuum and wants to fill it. Your prospect is scared. And so they’re going to fill that vacuum with another question. And then you answer and you pause, and then another question. Sales professionals who are in control keep moving the conversation forward by answering the question and then going back to whatever they were talking about, or asking the prospect a follow up question.

Find out what’s behind your prospects questions. Why is that topic so important? Get to the heart of the matter so you can have a meaningful conversation.

Another big key to authenticity making sure that what marketing is saying is not different from what sales is saying. Too often there’s a disconnect, almost a marketing vs. sales culture. Remember, it’s one prospect to one client, that started in marketing, passed through sales, going to fulfillment or account management, and on to service, whatever that looks like. Everyone should be telling the same story throughout that journey.