Bob Moesta
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- Bob Moesta is a lifelong innovator and co-architect of the “Jobs to be Done” theory who has developed & launched over 3,500 products and sold everything from design services, software, houses, consumer electronics, and investment services as well as launching seven startups.
- He’s also an adjunct lecturer at Kellogg School at Northwestern University, and lectures on innovation at Harvard and MIT.
- In his new book, Demand-Side Sales 101, he details his success by flipping the lens on sales.
- Instead of reciting a product’s benefits and features and pressuring customers to close, Bob advocates for salespeople to be a steward for their customers and help people in their purchases to make progress in their lives, finding their “struggling moment” and the outcome they seek.
- Enjoy this conversation with Bob about how to be a more effective and innovative salesperson by really seeing what your customers see, hearing what they hear, and understanding what they mean.
- Uses Scribe Media to break down his ideas to write his books, which he needs because he's dyslexic and cannot read due to several head injuries before he was seven
- Intern for W. Edwards Deming
- Great at math, but reading and writing remains difficult
- Has a small design firm
- Helps people innovate but sales is never taught
- His challenges have made him more empathetic and great salespeople have great empathy
- He learns through questions
- Listen to what and how they answer
- You need to understand the context
- He has been breaking things for 50 years, fixing them for 45 years
- People hire people to help them make progress, not to solve things
- "Why is today the day?"
- The prospect has all the energy to make the progress
- What is going on? Why now? What are the changes they're willing to make to bring about the results they seek?
- What makes you trust someone?
- Good questions
- Present valid options
- They admitted their limitations
- Trust is an effect, not a cause
- We're supposed to mistrust one another, but when you make them better they'll trust you
- Be responsive, but not too responsive, which makes you appear desperate
- People buy for a set of reasons, not just one
- Criminal and interrogation-type questioning
- Find the context
- Chris Voss, "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It"
- Set them up for a bad question...
- We're all in sales...teachers must sell their students on why to pay attention
- We must understand the demand side
- If you build it...they don't come
- A persona is just a soulless person
- Correlation is not causation
- He had "big trash day" in Detroit growing up
- He learned by doing and building
- His mom was a teacher and helped him learn how to learn
- Has great pattern recognition
- Learned through questions
- Without questions, you have no theory
- Think of the dominoes that have to fall for a customer to buy
- People don't buy because of a deal
- They'll pick you
- Two frameworks
- Push
- Pull
- Anxiety that holds them back
- Habit
- The timeline
- First thought, without it you can't even hear what they're saying. Questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into
- Passive looking, learning about the problem and the solution language. People often search for problems, first.
- Active looking,
- Decide, more about tradeoffs vs. the deal, so give people three options
- First use,
- Ongoing use, when you solve one thing you create new problems so there are always struggling moments
- He looks at the last 10 sales to help his clients find the patterns
- Be genuinely curious
- The customer usually doesn't know what they want
- Have them unpack the language
- You have to help them make progress
- Ethics come into play
- Follow the patterns to find great prospects
- Great salespeople at new, small companies can be the most well-connected person in the company
- No sale is made that is random. Every purchase is caused.
- Active, passive, or deciding?
- "Why do people buy?" What happened in their lives and what were they hoping for?
- Technology-agnostic requirements of the customer
- What outcome are they seeking?
- Take the product out of the picture
- Patterns help you sell easier and faster
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