Balance HR
How do you develop your sales story as a company? The question sounds obvious, but the answer is anything but, according to Michael Humblet of B2B content agency Chaomatic most companies get it wrong. How so must, he likes to explain himself. But because the proof still into the pudding is, he uses Balance HR as use case, who gratefully used the insights and tools of Chaomatic. “Making trust digitally as scalable as possible: that is what sales comes down to.”
“When companies make their sales pitch, they do it in a very traditional way: us, our product, our story,” begins Chaomatic CEO Michael Humblet. “By that I mean that it is a story that may interest the audience, but that does not immediately lead to the next step of effective sales. So the question is: how do you build your sales story in a way that reduces the time to close a deal closen? That was a question we received from several customers.”
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In love and not in love
“What do most companies do when they pitch somewhere?” continues Humblet. “They introduce themselves, present their services or products, tell them how good they are in their field and possibly involve one use case bee. It is, in short, no more than a circle stew. Mind you, that is not abnormal, since most entrepreneurs are simply in love with their business baby and want to show it to everyone – only the rest is usually there not in love with (laughs).”
“I’ve seen that self-talk pattern literally across all 350 companies Chaomatic has worked with. And striking: the bigger the company, the harder they stick to that structure. While the potential customers who listen to it have nothing to do with it. As a result, there is often no deal, or at least not quickly enough.”
Five components
What you need as a company to do that closing time is another architecture of the sales pitch. One consisting of five components, which Humblet described extensively in his book Why Now? – a nod to the fact that prospects should have become customers yesterday.
“Where you always to start with is the customer’s problem”, Humblet explains the first step. “Find it and then make it bigger. And open with it because you only have the customer’s full attention in those first few minutes – after that it inevitably drops. So you have little time to solve the problem and therefore a sense of urgency to create.”
What helps to get attention is to visualize the problem so that the customer thinks: if I don’t take action now, it will be too late and a problem will arise
“Attention is the second component. You need to instantly anchor customers in your story by talking about them and not yourself. This involves a lot of sales technique, which I will explore in more detail in my book. What helps to get that attention is to represent the problem visually, so that it is very visible and creates a disturbance and the customer thinks: if I don’t take action now, it will be too late and a problem will arise .”
“For example, because someone else is occupying market share, because as a business manager you have not yet taken any action to tackle a future challenge… That is the moment when you can profile yourself as the party with the concrete solution and calm that unrest.”
“They don’t have to be complex visuals either”, emphasizes Michael Humblet. “With arrows alone you can achieve very targeted results, because people are conditioned to follow them – for example in traffic. I have also been teaching for several years now and I am known in the environment as ‘the one with his arrows’ (laughs).”
Balls in the air
One of the companies struggling with that problem was Balance HR, a service provider specializing in HR interim management, helping clients fill temporary HR missions through its network of freelance HR consultants.
“Together with Chaomatic, we took a closer look at our story, and found that we didn’t start by clarifying the problem”, says founder Edward Vanhoutte. “We then defined a number of recognizable situations from the service sector – for example, the fact that HR teams have to keep more and more balls in the air, which throws teams off balance. We have grafted our solution on that, our intellectual property that makes us unique. This is how we obtained their maximum attention, the key to getting the prospect fully focused on the why now.”
“And as far as the visual aspect is concerned, we have provided much more variation there”, continues Edward Vanhoutte. “Not only with arrows, but also colors, depths, quotes, better spread logos, and so on. Until we felt we had a sales storyline for that peace of mind took care. For example, our solution is divided into four very clear quadrants.”
Subtle and subliminal
The third component in the sales storyline is trust, and that too seems to be the wrong approach for most companies. “Companies usually have a Powerpoint slide where they bring together all of their customers’ logos,” says Michael Humblet. “But that is not a story, that is a hope social proofing thrown together.”
“That way, the prospect doesn’t care. That social proof must be interwoven throughout the presentation Real generate trust – in a subtle, subliminal way, popping up at the problem you’re describing, the solution you’re proposing… It’s there and people see it, without you having to say it.”
Textbook example
The fourth component is structure, because this brings peace. “I saw a lot of CEOs give a presentation and were convinced that a deal would come out, which in the end didn’t happen,” says Michael Humblet. “Why? Because too much was simply told, which was ultimately perceived as obstruction.”
I literally never find the concrete ‘this is how we will solve this for you’ part in sales storylines. While it could and should be a textbook example of cause and effect
“Each presentation must therefore contain a concrete step-by-step plan: how will the solution be integrated? That structure will accelerate sales deals because after the turmoil you created in the why now-part brings peace and removes obstacles. I literally never find that structure that concrete ‘this is how we will solve it for you’ part in sales storylines. While it could and should be a textbook example of cause and effect.”
Make trust scalable
“That is how we arrived at our step-by-step model with Balance HR, which concretely consists of ‘scan’, ‘do’, ‘develop‘ in ‘sustain‘” says Edward Vanhoutte. “This has really been developed from that problem thinking: it doesn’t say what our services are isbut what they do and delivers for the customer, with sustainable results – hence sustain.”
“You can even offer that model to your customers in downloadable content and so on lead generation do,” adds Humblet. “A very contemporary, value based interpretation of sales, whereby you make trust digitally as scalable as possible based on your own model.”
Death Eater
The fifth and final step, which should conclude the presentation, is that of the next actions, or a very concrete follow-up. “After you’ve created calm by offering structure, you need to get your prospects to take action”, says Michael Humblet about it. “So never end with the clincher ‘are there any questions?’, because then the second attention peak – after the one at the beginning – will immediately disappear.”
So never end with the clincher: “are there any questions?”
“Therefore, offer the next step of the sales process, for example a customized demo, a webinar or a free trial. In short, something that the customer can work with and that can lead to the next step.”
“How do we do that concretely?”, Edward Vanhoutte adds. “By two next steps to offer: either a free scan, in the expectation that the companies will then also knock on our door to work together on the solution. Or a free workshop, in which we evidence-based Share HR content. Prospects like being given the choice between those two options.”
“Also the next steps help build that trust”, concludes Michael Humblet. “It takes a while and it takes some work to get to that confidence, but once you get there, you have something heel valuables in your hands. Then you can really start pushing proactively, by focusing on both quality and quantity and in the picture to stay. Provided that the content remains valuable.”
