6 How Customer-Hero Stories Help You Connect Better with Mike Bosworth, CEO Story Seekers

Summary: Do you focus on capturing product stories or customer-hero stories? The answer can make a huge difference in your sales and marketing results.<br> Let me explain.<br> Despite all the time, money, resources spent on improving sales productivity, just 13% of sales people produce 87% of revenue in a typical organization according to the Sales Benchmark Index.<br> So, what do the 13% high achievers have that others don’t? They connect emotionally with their buyers.<br> That’s why I interviewed <a href="https://www.customerheroselling.com/">Mike Bosworth</a>. If you don’t know Mike Bosworth already, he is a thought leader in the sales space. And he’s had a profound influence on how we sell and market, especially those who are in B2B.<br> In this interview, we talk about the power of customer-hero stories to connect emotionally with buyers to facilitate their buying journey.<br> Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication.<br> <br> Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?<br> Mike: Well, it’s interesting because, I think today, it’s incredible how cloud technology is forcing companies to be more empathic in their sales and marketing. It’s forcing them to. Because with the cloud, the conversation has to shift from the old “our-solution” marketing: our solution will do this, and our solution will do that.<br> So, making that shift from that to how-the-customer-uses-our-stuff marketing: customer usage marketing or what we in Story Seekers call customer hero marketing. I want marketing to think about what are we really doing marketing for– I’m hoping we’re trying to create customers and sales is also trying to create customers.<br> If we’re going to sell empathically then, ideally, we won’t even be “selling”. We’ll be facilitating the buying journey of our customer and facilitating their customer experience because human beings love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.<br> What inspired you to talk about integrating with marketing and sales?<br> Well, for my whole career as a sales productivity consultant and sales trainer, my stated mission was to help my client lift the bottom 80% of their sales force. The top 20%, the ones who bring in 80% of the revenue, they’ve been doing well for years and continue to. I figured I want to help my customers bump up at least the next 50% because if you could get a 10% increase in productivity from that next 50%. Do the math on that for most companies: it’s a lot of money.<br> Brian: It is. As you’ve been working with companies and clients, there’s something that’s existed longer than probably both of us have been doing our work.<br> Tell us the things most important for marketing and sales to agree on?<br> In most companies I deal with, they’re really two different silos and they’re pointing fingers at each other.  Marketing thinks they’re sending these great leads to sales, and sales, they go into a black hole and then there’s no follow-up. Sales thinks that the leads from marketing are coming from the janitorial staff of the company that they’re selling to.<br> Quite a while ago, it occurred to me that if we can find the touch point in integrating sales and marketing, we could really help things out and so Tim Riester and I, we dove into it, and we’ve made the touchpoint, the definition of a lead.<br> If both the chief sales officer and the chief marketing officer can specifically agree on the definition of a qualified lead then the “integration” really starts getting a lot easier.<br> That word integration is messing people up in this day and age, and, if you think about it, it gets most people thinking about IT issues. APIs, and what plugs into this and what feeds into that, and that’s disabling true integration.