Do you focus on product stories or customer-hero stories?

Mike Bosworth has a simple way to frame the difference: “People love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most B2B marketing still makes the product the hero. The product does this. The platform does that. The solution improves this metric, reduces that cost, and helps your company do more with less.

But buyers do not usually see themselves in product claims.

They see themselves in other people like them.

That is why Mike argues for customer-hero stories. Not stories where the vendor saves the day. Stories where the customer becomes the hero by solving a real problem, achieving a meaningful goal, and creating a better future inside their own organization.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mike Bosworth, longtime sales thought leader and creator of customer-hero selling, about why stories work, why sales and marketing need agreement more than integration, and why a qualified lead should be based on curiosity, not just activity.

Mike also explains why many salespeople struggle with discovery. It is not always because the questions are bad. It is often because the seller asks them before the buyer feels enough trust.

We get into customer-hero marketing, peer stories, emotional connection, the trust gap between younger sellers and senior buyers, and why the best sales and marketing helps buyers picture themselves solving a problem.

If your team is still leading with product claims instead of customer proof, this conversation is worth your time.

Mike Bosworth is a longtime sales thought leader, speaker, author, and creator of customer-hero selling.

His work has influenced generations of B2B sales teams through solution selling, customer-centric selling, storytelling, and by helping sellers facilitate the buying journey rather than pressuring buyers through a selling process.

Connect with Mike:

00:00 Introduction to Mike Bosworth

“People love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.” — Mike Bosworth

“If sales and marketing can agree on a finite number of things, great things can happen.” — Mike Bosworth

“If they’re not curious, they’re not really a lead.” — Mike Bosworth

“Let’s not market the product as the hero. Let’s market our past customers as the hero.” — Mike Bosworth

“The key to bridging that 20 years is a story.” — Mike Bosworth

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Brian Carroll: Hi, everyone. I want to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Podcast. My name is Brian Carroll, and I’m excited to have Mike Bosworth with us today.

Mike is someone that I’ve followed for a long time. We got to be together a few weeks ago. I loved his comments and the work he’s doing.

If you don’t know Mike Bosworth already, he is a thought leader in the sales space. I’ve followed his work, and he’s had a profound influence on how we sell and market, especially those who are in B2B.

Mike, I want to thank you for being with us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Mike Bosworth: Well, it’s really interesting because I think today it’s incredible how cloud technology is forcing companies to be more empathic in their sales and marketing. It’s forcing them to.

Because with cloud, the conversation has to shift from the old “our solution” marketing. Our solution will do this, and our solution will do that.

Making that shift from that to how the customer uses our stuff marketing. Customer usage marketing, or what we in Story Seekers call customer hero marketing.

If we think about what are we really doing marketing for, well, I’m hoping we’re trying to create customers, and sales is also trying to create customers.

If we’re going to sell empathically, then ideally we won’t even be “selling.” We’ll be facilitating the buying journey of our customer and facilitating their customer experience because human beings love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.

Brian Carroll: You’ve been doing this and studying and being in the field a long time. What inspired you to start writing and talking about story and integrating with marketing and sales?

Mike Bosworth: Well, through my whole career as a sales productivity consultant and sales trainer, my stated mission was to help my client lift the bottom 80% of their sales force.

The top 20%, the ones who bring in 80% of the revenue, they’ve been doing well for years and continue to.

I figured I want to help my customers bump up at least the next 50%, because if you could get a 10% increase in productivity from that next 50%, do the math on that for most companies, it’s a lot of money.

Brian Carroll: It is.

As you’ve been working with companies and clients, something that’s existed longer than probably both of us have been doing our work: tell us the things most important for marketing and sales to agree on.

There’s a lot of talk about alignment. There’s a lot of talk about collaboration. But you use this word agreement. Especially, what are the things a CMO and CSO need to agree upon?

Mike Bosworth: Yeah. Well, it occurred to me just a couple of weeks ago because the AMA hired me and Tim Riester years and years ago to do integrating sales with marketing seminars.

And I tell you, I don’t think we’ve made much progress in doing that over the years.

Most companies I deal with, they’re really two different silos and they’re pointing fingers at each other.

Marketing thinks they’re sending these great leads to sales, and sales thinks they go into a black hole and there’s no follow-up. Sales thinks the leads from marketing are coming from the janitorial staff of the company that they’re selling to.

Quite a while ago, it occurred to me that if we can find the touchpoint in integrating sales and marketing, we could really help things out.

So Tim Riester and I dove into it, and we made the touchpoint the definition of a lead.

If both the chief sales officer and the chief marketing officer can specifically agree on the definition of a qualified lead, then the “integration” really starts getting a lot easier.

That word integration is messing people up in this day and age. If you think about it, it gets most people thinking about IT issues. APIs, and what plugs into this and what feeds into that. That’s disabling the integration.

A couple of weeks ago, I just swapped out the word integration for agreement. Golly, does it seem to simplify things.

If sales and marketing can agree on a finite number of things, great things can happen.

Brian Carroll: I really love the word agreement, and I think that’s the challenge. Without agreement, we don’t have common ground.

I’d love to hear from you. I think a lot of people have lead definitions. I wrote about universal lead definition in my book. People have leads going.

What have you found as the best definition of a qualified lead that sales and marketing should agree upon?

Mike Bosworth: Well, there’s a prerequisite to that.

The prerequisite for even defining the qualified lead is sales and marketing first have to agree on what buyer personas are we selling to.

Who do we envision our best customers to be where we can help them be a hero, where we can help them achieve a goal or solve a problem?

Back in my Xerox days, we were selling manufacturing productivity-improving software, so we were selling to buyer personas.

One buyer persona would be a VP of manufacturing who’s missing his shipment schedule. Another one would be a materials manager who had shortages. Another one would be a CSO who’s missing his sales forecast.

Once you have those buyer personas targeted, now we go in and think what psychological process would they go through in their organization, and when would they start bringing in other people, and how would they share information and all that stuff.

We actually want to ideally help our customer buy so they never feel any pressure from us.

My philosophy has always been, all the way back through solution selling, is we’re trying to facilitate the buying.

I missed a couple of big things in solution selling and customer-centric selling.

Now in 2008, I discovered that over the past 30-some years, where solution selling and customer-centric selling and Miller Heiman and Power Base and Sandler and all these methodologies were out in the marketplace, all this technology started coming, all these sales force automation systems evolving into CRM systems and stuff like that.

All that money spent on training and technology, and the 80/20 rule got worse.

A study by Sales Benchmark Index of 1,100 B2B sales forces came back in 2008, and they found in their case study base that 13% of the salespeople brought in 87% of the revenue.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach because my whole mission was to help the bottom 80% get better, and it had gotten worse.

That caused me to go into a breakdown of a bit, and I had to figure out, all right, I’m not as smart as I thought I was, and I haven’t really figured this thing out yet.

I started studying the problem, and the problem in most cases is that 80% of the people in sales aren’t very good at building an emotional connection and building trust with a stranger in a short amount of time.

They’re just not very good at it.

They end up diving into their solution or their technology or their knowledge or their discovery questions before the buyer trusts them enough to allow themselves to be questioned.

Over the years, the number one complaint I have from solution selling and customer-centric selling clients of mine would be the VP of Sales would say, “Mike, the top 20% love solution selling, but the bottom 80% quit using it within two weeks of the workshop.”

If you think about why they quit using it, my intellectual arrogance caused me to not really study it as well as I should have.

But it’s that inability to intuitively connect and know when you’ve built enough trust and connection that you can get out your list of discovery questions.

With solution selling, the bottom 80% lacked the intuition. They went to their discovery questions too soon, prematurely, and the buyer said, “You don’t know me well enough to ask me all these questions,” and pushed them away.

And so if you’re pushed away for two weeks, you quit using it.

Brian Carroll: As we’re talking about the definition, this brings us into talking a little bit about empathy and what you want sellers and marketers to do more in this respect.

I wanted to go back just real quickly. In your words, what would be the best definition of a lead?

Mike Bosworth: I went off on a tangent because it was the prerequisite of a qualified lead.

Brian Carroll: We have to know it. I agree.

Mike Bosworth: My definition of a qualified lead: a named John Doe at the ABC company, targeted buyer persona, is curious how we helped a peer job title at another company achieve a goal or solve a problem.

If we have somebody curious how we helped their peer, that’s a qualified lead.

Brian Carroll: In and of itself, for those listening that are in marketing, I was just talking with a salesperson today who was struggling trying to build his own pipeline.

He talked about his experience of a lead, and Mike, I tested your definition with him, and he said yes, I would love that.

He reiterated his experience of getting a lead of someone who didn’t actually want to talk with him. They weren’t curious. They were someone who had agreed to a meeting, but they didn’t know why.

Mike Bosworth: Agreeing to a meeting, they might have been curious, but we didn’t capture that curiosity.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, exactly.

You earlier talked a bit about the problem with product marketing, and you brought up hero marketing.

Why should we in marketing start focusing on making our customer the hero instead of what we’re doing right now, which is the product or what we do or what we sell?

What is hero marketing and why should we focus on it now?

Mike Bosworth: First of all, is it going to be the mission of the company to do customer hero selling and customer hero marketing? Because it really has to come from the top. It’s really a paradigm.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, the publisher of Selling Power magazine, said years ago that the CEO’s definition of selling is the DNA of the customer’s experience.

It’s still a small number of companies that once you figure out how, if you really believe in your heart that people love to buy and hate to be sold, then why wouldn’t we make it our mission as a company to facilitate, to architect our customer’s experience?

To really think about how they would go through a natural buying process and feel comfortable and let us facilitate that buying, using storytelling and story tending and writing them good letters.

Making story the foundation, because stories allow people with problems to visualize seeing themselves solve that problem.

What happens is we create a little story in their brain, and the story involves themselves seeing themselves responding to that painful once-a-month problem they have differently, if they had somebody’s help or technology or capability.

The customer is a hero by using the product.

So let’s not market the product as the hero. Let’s market our past customers as the hero, and we’re looking to help new prospects become heroes via customer hero selling.

If we really agreed on the definition of a qualified lead, now customer hero marketing feeds right into the customer hero selling.

Brian Carroll: I love the definition and distinction because from the customer’s side, they’re curious about someone like me who’s had a problem like me.

I think that is the challenge we have, bridging that gap of trust, to know someone like me is dealing with this and to see themselves in that.

Mike Bosworth: The other issue is the millennial selling to someone 20 years their senior.

Brian Carroll: Yeah.

Mike Bosworth: I remember going out as a 28-year-old salesperson for Xerox, and I was calling on 48-year-old materials managers.

When we’d meet for the first time, and the materials manager realizes he’s booked a little bit of his time for this guy who’s wet behind the ears, you can kind of tell the look on their face.

The key to bridging that 20 years is a story, because a story allows the 28-year-old salesperson to tell his 48-year-old prospect a story about the prospect’s 50-year-old peer who’s already been smart enough to solve a problem or achieve a goal.

That peer curiosity, the better the story is, melts into peer envy.

And if you can develop some peer envy in a buyer, they go diving into that buying process pretty quickly.

Brian Carroll: You have an example. I’d love to just help it be tangible for listeners out there. What might an example of customer hero marketing or selling look like?

Mike Bosworth: How about a 90-second story that I used to use as a 28-year-old at Xerox selling to 48-year-olds that allowed me to sell more in my first five months on quota than anybody in the history of the company sold in the full year?

Brian Carroll: That’d be perfect.

Mike Bosworth: I had this story in my pocket, and it was a true story.

Back then, Xerox wanted us to cold call by walking into buildings. Now they cold call on the phone.

So I’d walk into a lobby of a $15 million manufacturing company, 28-year-old salesperson. I’d go up to the receptionist and say, “My name is Mike Bosworth, and I’m with Xerox Computer Services, and I’d like to speak with your materials manager.”

Eighty percent of the time, the materials manager would come out. I don’t think we have the time to talk about all those curious reasons, but when they would come out, I’d look at their eyes and they’d give me the disdainful look that said, gosh, I’ve just committed some of my valuable time to this young kid.

So I’d shake hands. I’d confirm. I’d say, “So you’re the materials manager here?” He’d say yes.

And I’d say, “Can I share a quick story with you about another materials manager who’s less than a mile from here who I’ve been working with for the last 18 months?”

Guess how many times that story got turned down?

Brian Carroll: Very few times, because I’m sure people…

Mike Bosworth: Zero.

I never had someone turn it down. In 10 seconds, you offer somebody a story about their peer.

So now instead of some 28-year-old telling this guy how my solution will fix his manufacturing plant, think about that versus telling him a story about how his peer, Ed Blackman, who’s a materials manager at a specific company less than a mile from him, has already figured out how to solve his shortage problem.

Do you want to hear the story, just how I delivered it?

Brian Carroll: I would.

Mike Bosworth: I’ll give you the 30-second version of it quickly.

I’d say, first of all, the setting, the green card: “Ed Blackman is the materials manager over at OPEC Electronics. You know where it is, it’s less than a mile from here.

I met Ed almost two years ago at an Orange County APICS meeting, American Production Inventory Control Society, and Ed was the new president. Ed was obsessive about educating himself about material requirements planning, MRP.

He wanted to be a leader, and the reason he wanted to be a leader is materials manager was a really difficult job.

Ed Blackman, his boss, the VP of Manufacturing, was mad at him because he was missing his shipment schedule because Ed had shortages.

He had the VP of Finance mad at him because he was carrying too much inventory because he needed all the safety stock to try to not have the shortages impact schedule.

Eighteen months ago, Ed discovered that Xerox now had a way to replan his entire manufacturing plant overnight. Instead of a three-week process, it was an overnight process.

He decided 18 months ago to be an innovator and to be our first customer here in Orange County.

Over 18 months, his $8 million inventory is now $2.1 million. Their on-time shipments are now 97.5%. Ed is about to be promoted to be the new VP of Manufacturing.

But enough about me, what’s going on here?”

Brian Carroll: I love the story. If I were on that materials side, I’m sure it would compel me because I can relate.

Mike Bosworth: You can relate.

He’s dying. He has the same problem. His CFO is mad at him. His VP of Manufacturing is mad at him. The odds were so high.

And so now even though I’m 28, I told him a story about a 48-year-old guy or a 50-year-old guy.

The insight that I wanted to pass to him, or if I’m a challenger salesperson, I want to give him an insight, which means something he hadn’t thought about before.

But you can’t do that without a little credibility. And when you’re 28, you don’t have that credibility.

So the insight comes from the peer story instead of the looks of the salesperson talking about his solution.

Brian Carroll: You and I have talked about empathy. We were together out at CEB, now Gartner.

Mike Bosworth: Yeah.

Brian Carroll: What do you wish marketers and sellers would do more in this respect of applying their empathy and being able to connect with their customers?

Mike Bosworth: It’s such a paradigm shift, this product marketing business.

Technology has been wondrous over the last 40, 50 years, no doubt about it.

Always, I believe the best way to sell it was to help somebody have the vision of how he would use it.

The vision, this new prospect I had at Xerox, the vision I wanted him to come to was how he could be a hero in his company by fixing the shortages, just like Ed Blackman did at his company.

Brian Carroll: You’re helping.

Mike Bosworth: That’s a buying vision.

What we’re trying to do is teach salespeople to create a big, juicy buying vision. A customer hero vision where this guy sees himself as a hero in his own company, saving money, making money, solving a problem, achieving a goal that he hasn’t been able to do before.

If it’s too good to be true, certainly if there’s a 10- or 20-year gap between the seller and the buyer, I’ll tell you, when I was 28, after I told that story, they’d usually invite me in.

I’d get the next 45 minutes now to ask my discovery questions because my story covered that initial connection and trust.

Now I could go to my solution selling pain sheet if he lets me in the door. Now I can go to the list of discovery questions that my company has given me for a materials manager who’s got shortages.

You can go to it if he likes the story.

How do you know if he likes the story? After 90 seconds max, you say, “Enough about me, what’s going on here?”

And they’re going to do one of two things. They’re going to say, “Well, what do you want to know?” and they’re going to cross their arms, or they’re going to open up and start talking freely.

The better your story, the better the odds that after 90 seconds you say, “Enough about me, tell me about what’s going on here,” and they start talking freely.

That’s the purpose of the story.

The next piece, we’re doing our workshops and it’s off of this, but we teach people how to do connective listening.

Once the buyer starts talking freely, we teach the salespeople how to tend the buyer story and then send that buyer a written version of his customer hero story.

Are you with me?

After I tend your story, the new materials manager that I just met, and he admits that he’s got terrible shortages, and he takes me through the plant, then I start telling him the things that Ed was doing on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly basis to use our system to eliminate the shortages.

He still wanted proof.

I was 28, he was 48. The vision was fantastic. He would have loved to be able to work off of one bill of material and not have to have all that safety stock and replan his whole plant overnight.

It sounded too good to be true, and I was 28 and he was 48, so he wanted proof.

The bigger the gap of age or experience between the seller and the buyer, the more we encourage the young sellers to say to the buyer, “I know this sounds too good to be true, so don’t take my word for it. Make me prove it.”

That’s another little piece that boosts the trust of the seller. They offer proof.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, it sounds like you’re building a relationship by helping someone else relate to the story, see themselves in it, and then also starting to bridge the trust gap because you’re connecting with something that they can identify with and how they’re likely feeling. Is that what I’m hearing?

Mike Bosworth: Well, if you had a problem that was causing you to work 40 hours a week, Brian, and then some young guy came in and over the course of 30 to 45 minutes caused you to have a vision of finally having a way to fix that big irritating problem, what’s your state of mind going to be?

It’s going to be, you’re going to want to know more. You’re going to be curious.

Brian Carroll: I’ll be curious and I might even have some hope that things could get better.

Mike Bosworth: Let’s see. The curiosity isn’t about me. My curiosity isn’t about your solution. My curiosity is how I can make my shortages go away.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mike Bosworth: It’s the usage.

That’s why customer hero stories bridge the cloud gap now too.

The cloud is forcing all these technology companies that have all these high-powered product marketing talent, and most of the product collateral ends up being IT-based or our solution-based.

It will do this. It will do that. Or our solution will do this or our solution will do that.

That’s making the product hero.

It’s disabling the buying process because now the buyer is going to feel the pressure of somebody wanting to sell them some piece of technology.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening, I’m just wondering if you could share any tips or advice with those that want to start learning how they can apply and work on customer hero selling and marketing.

Mike Bosworth: There is a win-win way a good customer of mine tried.

They were struggling with hiring these young millennial people to come in and gain enough expertise that their customers would take them seriously.

The old way of putting them through six weeks of technical training and all these features, advantages, and benefits of all the technology, it’s a huge learning curve.

Instead, we want them to learn how the customers use our product.

The idea was they had some customers that this company spent a lot of money on because these customers were always willing to open up their shops and let other prospective customers come in. There were these premier customers.

They said, “Will you help us train some of our new people?” They agreed.

So the new people were trained to go out and learn the story of the premier customer’s use of the product.

We had to teach those young people how to go out and tend that story with a happy, willing customer.

They would say, “My company wants me to come out and document how you guys are using our product. Tell me what you’re doing with it, and how you use it, and when you use it.”

Get them talking about their usage of the product.

We’re starting off in a positive way. This is the piece of a story: how they use it.

After a little bit of time there, we say, “Well, I think I understand how you use it now. What did you use to do before you had it?”

Now we take them back thinking about how much more difficult it used to be without the product than it is now with the product.

If we send our young people out on that information-gathering mission with a willing customer, they come back and they not only write up a customer hero story that the whole organization can use, but equally important to them is they can now go out face to face or be on the telephone and tell customer hero stories and see how well they work.

Brian Carroll: I love it. And so with that, I know you have resources and tools. What is the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you and find out more about this?

Mike Bosworth: Go to MikeBosworth.com and read some of the stuff we have out there. Listen to some of the testimonials, and if you have any questions, call me.

Brian Carroll: Mike, thank you again. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.

And for all of you listening, I hope you found value today. I know that I found a lot.

Thank you again, Mike, for joining us.

Mike Bosworth: Thank you, Brian. I enjoyed it too.