Unfortunately, engaging our buyers emotionally takes time. So how do we speed up the relationship-building process in a way that adds value to our prospect’s lives?
To learn how to orchestrate the emotional journey of our prospects, we sat down with Ryan Staley, founder and CEO of Whale Boss, to learn more about how he’s creating an emotional journey for his prospects before the first conversation, and scaling it across his pipeline. During the conversation, Staley shared his insights into leveraging artificial intelligence, scripting great conversational questions and tracking how well we’re engaging our prospects on an emotional level.
Since we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it, and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: According to Staley, the first step to orchestrating the buyer journey is to switch our focus from ourselves and what we sell to our buyer. If we don’t know how they’re being judged and how they’re judging themselves, it will be tough to properly position our solution in an emotionally-engaging way.
We can leverage artificial intelligence platforms like Chat GPT to discover what KPIs our prospect is likely being held to, and what likely challenges they’re encountering along the way. This provides a lot of potential qualifying questions for our first call.
R – Repeatable: To make orchestrating an emotional journey a repeatable process, Staley says to take what you learned about your prospect in the trigger part of this system and put it to work on the phone.
Use your initial calls with your prospect to present the KPIs you’ve researched and ask which ones are top priorities for your prospect today? And what goals do they have this month and quarter to ensure those KPIs are met? At this point, you’ve shown up with solid intelligence, confirmed what you assumed, and can position your solution in a way that aligns perfectly with the emotional triggers your prospect cares about
But don’t stop there. Also determine what hobbies or personal priorities your prospect has so you can keep your eye out for any resources to send their way as part of your relationship-building process.
I – Improvable: To improve this system over time, Staley says to start with your largest win/loss deals. You’ll want to check and look at your ‘win’ reasons and ‘loss’ reasons to determine whether you confirmed the KPIs and challenges of each of your decision makers in those deals (keeping in mind that many deals have more than one decision maker!). That will show whether you’re properly orchestrating an emotional journey. From that point, track how well you matched up what you sell as a solution to help them reach their KPIs/overcome their challenges as well.
M – Measurable: Finally, we need to measure the effectiveness of this system, even if it deals with something as subjective as emotional connection. Staley says we need to start with measuring whether we identified and connected with all the key players across each sale (and their KPIs and challenges). While we may have connected with a single decision maker extremely well, if we didn’t also connect with our influencers, implementers and detractors (and their KPIs and challenges), we will struggle to leverage emotional connections.
Orchestrating an emotional connection doesn’t have to be fake or lengthy to be effective – but by systemizing it, we can scale it for a bigger impact and income!