Speaker 1: Welcome to SalesInfluence Podcast where we talk about finding the why in how people buy. I'm your host, Victor Antonio. Thank you for joining me today. I want to deal with another question. I get a lot of questions. I truly apologize if I haven't responded to you. I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not ignoring you. I just get too many. So I do my best to kind of go through either all my social media channels and find great questions or my email. So again, I apologize if I haven't gotten back to you. Don't take it personal. I'm doing my best. Anyway, this question comes from somebody called Ambitious Entrepreneur. Oh, you got to love that name. This I got off of YouTube. Ambitious Entrepreneur, and he has the following statement slash question. He says, Hi, Victor. Big fan of your content. Thank you, Ambitious Entrepreneur. Just a quick question. How would you sell? This is a really good one. How would you sell without giving them a free trial? We're a B2B advertising agency, and we're having trouble closing them in our first meeting. Some possible causes might be lack of trust and the risk of our success, even though we've shown them case studies. Is there any advice you could give us? Thank you, Victor. Now, Ambitious Entrepreneur was listening to my podcast called Three Keys to Selling. So again, you might want to listen to that. Now, what's interesting, Ambitious Entrepreneur, that I know where you're coming from. I've worked with several social media, i.e. marketing companies, and that's usually it. You're talking to the customer, and you can show them case study after case studies, use case studies, and still they don't buy it. You can even try to build your credibility, your trust, and they're just like, I don't know. Because it's something you can't touch. It's not a product. It's a service. And services aren't tangible. You can't grab onto them. And so we do our best in the presentation. So let's go through some basics. And I think I have a nice suggestion for you. Now, one of the things when we're selling a service is that we have to learn to quantify. And again, one of my programs in the Sales Mastery Academy is called Value-Centric Selling. Value-Centric Selling is all about how do you quantify, put a number to how much money I'm going to save you or how much money I'm going to help you make. That program shows you how to do that. And one of the things you have to do, ambitious entrepreneur, also known as AE, that's what I'll call you, AE, is that you have to find ways to quantify. I'm sure that in your case studies, you've arrived at some numbers. So one of the things I used to always do when I sold services, one of the things I used to do is I would show them the use case studies. And I would have a formula, right? And then what I would do for, by the way, a formula for calculating return on investment. And then I would do is say, Mr. Customer, now that you've seen this example, which relates to your industry, let's plug in your numbers. Let's walk through your numbers. Let's put in your numbers. And when you do that, this is suggestion number one. AE, when you do that, when you start using their numbers, you begin to engage them more. And this is important during the presentation because you're not just talking now, you're engaging them. You're asking them for data. For example, you can say, Mr. Customer, how much money are you spending this month? How much are you spending on pay-per-click, search engine marketing, right? How much are you spending for SEO development? Whatever it may be. If you have a model and you can start getting numbers from them, great. What usually happens, AE, is they don't really know their numbers. You know, in many cases, they don't even know what their close rate, their conversion rates are, their click-through rates. You know, they simply don't know. And so this is part of helping them understand. Remember what I've said in the past. You as a salesperson are more valuable than ever because what they're looking for is guidance. And what they're looking for is certainty. And they want you to give them some level of certainty that you could help them sell more effectively through advertising. So again, one strategy is to actually engage them in a conversation about numbers. I'm going to assume that you do that already. Now, building trust, again, I go back to this all the time. The only way to build trust is to really demonstrate that you know what you're talking about. But not only show them case studies, provide them insight. Now, if you've listened to my podcast in the past, you know the definition of insight. Information beyond the obvious. The best way to build trust, the best way to build credibility is to give them information beyond the obvious. Give them insight. Tell them things that makes them go, hmm, I didn't know that. Never thought about it that way. Really, I didn't think about it like that. That's when you know you're providing insight. That's how you build trust. So again, if we can engage them with numbers, if we can provide insight, then maybe now it's a matter of positioning it the right way. So how about this? Number three, try selling them instead of trying to give them a free trial. Because I hear what you're saying. You give people a free trial and they're not going to use it. Do you know what I mean? I'm with you, AE. They're not going to use it. And I'm not saying everybody, but the majority of people are not going to use the free trial. If there's no skin in the game, if they're not putting money on the table, they're not going to use it or use it to the extent that you would want them to use it. So here's what you can do. Here's a sneaky way of selling them one-month trial without telling them it's a one-month trial. So what you do is you try selling them on a three-month contract. Bear with me, AE. Here's what I want you to do. And I'm telling you this works. Again, I've worked with internet marketing companies and this is exactly what we did. What we did is that we came up with this offer. And the offer was a three-month contract. Now we said, you know, we just set it. We have a three-month contract, six-month contract, and we have a one-year contract. Mr. Customer, since we're just starting out, here's what I'd like to do. Let us go ahead and let's set up this three-month contract. It's a three-month contract and here's the cost per month. And here's the total, right? Now you say something like this. After one month, if after one month, Mr. Customer, you don't see the value, you simply just send us an email, don't see the value, just send us an email and we'll cancel the remaining two months. See what I did? It's a very sneaky way of selling them a one-month trial using what is known as the foot-in-the-door strategy. The foot-in-the-door strategy is basically you just want to get your foot in there. Now, here's how the brain thinks. I said three months, six months, 12 months. What do they think in AE? I'm not going to do 12 months. I definitely don't want to do six months. I don't even know if I trust these people, right? But when you get to the lowest one, which is a three-month, which is Mr. Customer, at least let's go ahead and start with the three-month. And what we'll do is we'll sign a contract and you'll read it. It's a simple one-page contract. And by the way, make the contract simple. Don't make it 50 pages. It's a simple one-page contract. And if after one month, you don't see the value, we'll cancel the contract immediately and it's terminated from there on. You don't have to make the next two payments. And there's how you can close a one-month deal. So again, keep this in mind that it's all about how do you position this? How do you quantify value? How do you build trust? Again, provide insight, quantify value, provide insight, and use this three-month contract strategy. And let me know, AE, how it works for you. Because I've seen it work and I know it can work for you if you position it right. That's it for this Sales Influence Podcast. Don't forget to leave me some feedback on iTunes, Stitcher, or YouTube. Let me know what you think. I'd greatly appreciate it. Also, check out my sales trading platform, the Sales Mastery Academy. Again, one of the programs on there that I'd recommend, AE, is the Value-Centric Selling and Inside the Customer Brain. Those are two great programs that can help you sell more effectively these type of deals. Anyway, if you're serious about increasing your sales ability, go to salesmasteryacademy.us. That's salesmasteryacademy.us. Lastly, I want to thank you for listening. This is Victor Antonio, always reminding you, selling ain't hard when you know how. Take care. Hi, I'm Victor Antonio. I'm an author, sales trainer, and keynote speaker. I'm often asked, what makes a great speaker? Is it someone who delivers real content that the audience can use? Is it someone who engages the audience so they're part of the learning experience? Or is it someone who can motivate an audience to push them beyond their comfort zone and discover new abilities? The answer is yes. But the most important thing to remember is that I'm not there to look good. I'm there to make my client look good. Simply put, it's never about me, and it's always about them.