How to Turn Strangers Into Customers: Jason Bay

Sales Leader Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting started his sales career selling house painting services - and that is where he realized his passion for sales and customer-centric selling.

Jason Bay first started in the sales industry while at college. He was offered a sales rep job going door-to-door selling house painting services to customers and was told he could make up to $10,000 in a single Summer. When he first took the job, he didn’t plan to get into sales at all.

“I didn't plan on getting into sales at all, and I sold about $100,000 worth of house painting services in the summer and paid $30,000 for school!” stated Jason.

The following year he returned to the job, began to love selling, and spent the rest of his time during college hiring college students and teaching them how to run a house painting business.

Bay says that a lot of what he did was teach these students to sell properly; showing them the basics around how to build rapport with consumers, how to figure out what the customer needs, focus on the customer journey, how to handle objections or rejection, and how to close, and more. From that humble beginning, he now successfully focuses on customer-centric B2B sales training and coaching.

“I'm working with software companies typically, companies like Zoom, Gong, and my big focus is on outbound sales. I help companies find a balance between mass email blasts to customers and being quality-centric and customer-centric,” Jason explains.

What is Customer-Centred Selling?

One of Bay's key focus areas is getting sales leaders and reps to move from me-centric to customer-centric messaging from the very first cold call or cold email.

Customer-centric selling is a sales technique and business model focusing on the needs and challenges of the prospect, not on the product being sold. It is the switch from product-centric selling to customer-centered selling.

Bay teaches sales reps and sales leaders how their sales teams can be more effective by focusing on the customer. The key is to avoid being product-centric by talking less about themselves and their product, focusing more on the other person, and being customer-oriented.

There are multiple examples of sales reps never once mentioning their product during initial sales prospecting conversations and winning huge deals. Instead of pitching, these sales reps are having an honest discussion about real problems, challenges, or successes that that prospect is having. By giving a prospect a positive customer experience from the very first conversation, your sales rep will stick in the mind of the prospect, and while your prospect might not need your solution this quarter, they may need it later. Sometimes the long game pays off.

To start and maintain a successful sales conversation, sales teams must ensure that they create the pattern for the consumer conversation by offering to share something insightful, relevant, or valuable. Another great tactic is to have something to invite the prospect to, perhaps a relevant webinar.

Instead of the ‘always be closing’ mentality, today's sales teams need to understand that the reason for the meeting is not to demo their product. The reason for the meeting is to share insight on the challenges and successes of other clients they work with.

“My client Landon; he's in our Outbound Squad, which helps individual sales reps with outbound sales. Landon sells creative services to marketing teams. It's a pretty competitive space. He was having trouble selling his product. He got five meetings in his first five months on the job. He would reach out to people and say, ‘Hey, we have a solution for your creative services; We can create campaigns for you. We can help you measure them better to get better results'. One of the shifts that we helped him make was instead of talking about what you do, and yourself, how do we talk about and be more about the prospect?” shared Jason.

To fix Landon’s selling challenges, Jason encouraged him to be customer-centric, not focus on his product and solutions. Landon shifted his approach from ‘let's talk about our solution’ to more about the problems that his company fixes and how it can help prospects with their goals.

An example of this tactic for marketing prospects would be finding a marketing challenge. For example, it's hard to develop creative assets, especially with small teams and limited resources to manage that and the A/B test, and use that to get the prospect’s attention and buy-in to the conversation.

Within two weeks of Landon changing his selling approach from me-centric to customer-centric, he sold more in two weeks than he did in his first five months on the job.

“I'm super proud of him for getting meetings without pitching. That's the key, especially with cold calling and cold emails - you don't have to pitch to get a meeting. If I talk to the prospect and talk to things that they care about and talk more about them instead of talking about ourselves, that’s the key,” noted Jason.

What Matters to Your Sales Prospect?

Modern sellers have had more success by holding meetings not pitching their product or service, than by going in for the kill with stats and figures showcasing how fantastic their product is.

So, how do we turn complete strangers into paying customers? By starting a real conversation that addresses the challenges and successes of that company and focusing on their needs. It's that simple.

Sales reps must abandon the old approach of pushy hard-sell and focus instead on proving and providing value. To do this, sales reps must personalize their initial outreach, whether that is a call or an email. They need to do the research and find out a little about the person they are talking to (favorite sports team, personal wins) or wins the company they are prospecting has recently had.

A word of caution, though! If you are researching your prospect as an individual, stick to what is available on their LinkedIn, no one wants to hear a sales rep discuss their family's beach holiday or their kids! That's just creepy.

This sounds great in theory, but how do you do this type of customer-centric research practically, especially when most sales reps are on a time crunch?

Owler Max provides sales teams with reasons to reach out delivered directly to their inbox, Slack, Hubspot, or Salesforce CRM. It slashes research time, boosting the chance of sales success, and dramatically reducing the time spent creating a customer-centric outreach strategy