May 5, 2019
Success story from reader Jim Thornton
Sent by Jonathan Stark on May 6th, 2019
Longtime reader and group coaching member Jim Thornton wrote in with a success story that I think you’ll find instructive and inspiring (shared with permission, bold mine):
Jonathan, I literally pulled up the why conversation questions on a discovery call today with someone I thought was a tire kicker. They reached out looking for someone to help them change their wordpress theme. The call didn’t start much better, he had already gotten quotes from $1k to $15k and seemed to say it as if $15k was completely out of the question. To have the “why not this” part of the conversation, I actually started the call by explaining he could have someone clean up the current site’s CSS to get it to look like the sites he liked with even less effort. I think I really did want to talk him out of wanting to work with us in that moment. Anyway short-ish version, on the call we basically figured out that getting someone to come in for a demo was worth about $10k to them at their close rate and with a well optimized site and ad funnel, they could significantly increase the number of demos. Their ability to raise revenue using the web is important because they’d be in big trouble if a whale client ever left. Having a better way to generate demos online would help mitigate their risk while adding a couple hundred thousand in profit a year. I told him if that was the outcome then they were looking more in the $15k to $25k range. He said, “when you put it that way it really doesn’t seem like that much.” Will let you know what happens. I just really appreciate everything I’ve learned from group coaching and thought I’d share. —Jim
Thanks, Jim!
So... Jim hasn’t closed the deal yet but I still count this as a success story because he successfully turned the sales interview around.
This is a huge accomplishment, even if he doesn’t land this particular deal. Once you make this mindset shift, you’ll wonder how you ever landed a deal before.
Yours,
—J