1903 – P3 Selling with Greg Nutter of Soloquent Inc.

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, a thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now it's Greg Nutter. Greg, you are the founder of Soloquent and you're the author of the book P3 Selling the Essentials of B2B Sales Success.

Josh (00:01:17) - One of my favorite topics. Greg, thank you so much for joining us. Great to be.

Greg (00:01:21) - Here, Josh. Appreciate it.

Josh (00:01:23) - Absolutely. We'll share with us just a bit about what you do, the work you do, who you serve.

Greg (00:01:28) - Sure. I'm a management consultant. I work a lot with owners and your business leaders. Help them scale the revenue performance. most of my work is in the, you know, small and medium sized business space where you've got a founder or, you know, a leader who's really good at their craft, a lot of expertise and maybe not an expert in selling, and even some people who are experts in selling, we work with to help them scale their business.

Josh (00:01:57) - Yeah. All right. Well, I'm so excited. What is P-3 selling?

Greg (00:02:02) - P-3 selling is, Well, it's a book. It's, But the heart of it, it's a methodology that provides people and companies a framework. And as I mentioned earlier on, how to scale their business on the scale of revenue.

Greg (00:02:20) - It's a combination of, strategies, best practices, processes and tools that individuals can use to improve their business, to be more successful and companies can use to better manage, their sales pipelines and their sales salespeople.

Josh (00:02:40) - Yeah. Well, please share with us kind of those tentpole like, what are the fundamentals of P-3 selling.

Greg (00:02:45) - You first asked yourself what is P-3 stand for. And I would like to go back and say, well, you know what salespeople do, particularly in the, you know, the B2B arena, they do three things. They ask questions to understand the client's environment, their situation, their problems, their opportunities are looking for, the second thing is they do they try to implement influence perspectives, influence behaviors, influence people to change. And then the third thing they do is they message based on their understanding and what they've influenced, they message back in such a way that it aligns to that prospect perspective. So you say, okay, we understand, we influence, we message. Where do we do those things? We do those things in three areas which just happened to start with the letter P.

Greg (00:03:36) - we do it in problems. So we want to understand what problems people have, their sense of urgency and importance around it, the impact of them. And if they don't see certain things as important, we try to influence them so that they see them as more important and more urgent. And then when we come up with a proposal, we want a message back. That can be is people. So it's which people have those problems, which people have our interest in those opportunities. What's their perspectives? Not just on the problem but on how they might want to solve it. And the third P is protest. Now a lot of people will think processes around selling process. And I'll say no it's not. It's around buying decision processes. A mistake a lot of companies make sellers make is that they have a ingrain sales process. This is how we sell. We prospect and then we investigate and then we, you know, step step step. But instead we follow. We want to follow a buying decision process.

Greg (00:04:40) - So that's the third piece. So we have again tools context best practices around those three P's.

Josh (00:04:47) - I am certain that there are things that you have seen in B2B sales that make you do one of these kind of. Oh, and maybe just things that you see being done, you're like, I wish I could convince the world to stop doing this. And anything come to mind?

Greg (00:05:02) - Well, two things. I think one is just what I said is that following a sales process, not following a buying decision process, but probably the most egregious thing that sellers do is they act as if they're selling business to consumer, you know, B2B sale, B2C sale. it has a different, process. You give information normally about your product and your features, and then you ask for the order. And if you don't get the order, then you go back and you get more information and more details in after the order. So that I call it the the BDC two step. And we still have a whole lot of sellers that that sell in that manner, going back and forth between, giving information and then asking for the order.

Greg (00:05:48) - So if there's anything that people should do differently, it's really focusing on problems that they solve or opportunities that they enable rather than talking about their product.

Josh (00:06:00) - Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's so easy. And I think it's you know, I don't fault anyone. I mean, we are excited about how it works. Right. And we understand it. And especially I think for those of us that have that kind of that teaching persona, it's like, I know all the facts. So let me tell you all of them. And I think we end up just overwhelming, our, you know, our guest who just wants to know if we can fix their problem.

Greg (00:06:26) - Absolutely. I I've, a name that I often use, which is I don't know what I'm selling until I know what you're buying.

Speaker 3 (00:06:35) - so.

Greg (00:06:36) - you know, at the heart of that, exactly what you said. We drone on around our products and our features and our companies. But in the absence of a problem that somebody wants to solve or an opportunity somebody wants to capture, that makes no sense.

Greg (00:06:49) - Who cares, right? But you're excited, but the prospect doesn't care. It's like, talk to me about me, not not about you. And that's and we see that in email messages. We see that in prospecting calls. We see it in people trying to link up with you on LinkedIn. Hey, can I tell you about my my offering? And it just doesn't make sense.

Josh (00:07:12) - Yeah. You know, lead gen for me in the B2B world is probably the area that I get most. I don't know, perturbed is the right word. Annoyed is the right word. Something some word in that territory, because I see a lot of it done very badly. And to me, I'll just share from my perspective. To me, I feel really ripped off when people treat me like a lead rather than a human right. And unfortunately, I think a lot of the the lead gen language is, it just feels very transactional. And again, it could just be my personality. But yeah, like I said, I think, you know, when it comes to two people, especially if they're two leaders, that we're both pretty good at what we do.

Josh (00:07:55) - you know, let's, let's find a better way to, to to start that conversation. I'm sure you've got some thoughts on that.

Greg (00:08:01) - Yeah. we in, selling we talk a lot about, prospecting and, the mistake that a lot of people make is they think prospecting is, selling, and it's not telling. It's marketing. Right. So while you're trying to do in prospecting and get someone to say, that's an interesting idea, can I learn more about it? Right. So you're just throwing something out there, you're suggesting a problem or an opportunity that this prospect might be interested in solving, and then all you're asking for is, hey, would you like to learn more about how people are solving it? And that's it, right. and so there's no I don't have that problem. Then stop droning on. Find another problem. Right?

Josh (00:08:45) - Yeah, yeah. Don't waste your breath or, you know, don't don't. You're just making things uncomfortable.

Greg (00:08:51) - Yeah, yeah. So the message the message is really important.

Greg (00:08:54) - There's two other aspects to it, which is the delivery and the cadence. So it's how do you deliver that message. And secondly, how often do you do it with your weekly monthly process or prospecting to have it be effective? But the key the most important thing is the message. And it needs to be, short to the point. On an analogy, I like to use it, like a billboard on the highway you're driving down. You see a billboard, that billboard in about five to 10s. You need to say four things. who are we? What do we want? Why should you care? What should you do? And a prospecting message has to do exactly the same thing in the same, but the same amount of time. Write one short message, and if it goes on and on about how you great, you know, you probably seen it. You get an email and you scroll and scroll and you go, oh, delete. Right. Yeah. It's got to be got to catch your attention right away.

Greg (00:09:55) - And the the catch is. A problem or an opportunity, but particularly why it's important. It's that important piece that really catches people's attention. Yeah.

Josh (00:10:07) - Yeah. So your book, by the way, congratulations. I got about 105 star reviews on it. So evidently what you're talking about is resonating with folks. that's available, by the way, P3 selling the essentials of B2B sales success. It's on Amazon, but you can also go to your website, Greg. And you can you can get that book through there. Do you mind maybe just sharing it again? The website is P3 selling.com. Would you mind maybe just sharing a little bit more about who you work with and what that looks like?

Greg (00:10:39) - Yeah. Great question.

Josh (00:10:40) - Are you speaking or are you consulting?

Greg (00:10:43) - So over the course of my my consulting career, which is coming up to 20 years, I worked with some very large companies, both in direct sales and in channel sales that worked with, you know, Microsoft, SAP, Hewlett-Packard, NCR to name a few.

Greg (00:10:59) - Discover card, Michelin. But these days I work more with small and medium sized businesses. And actually I enjoy it more because the interesting thing about small and medium sized businesses that you can move the needle, you can have a conversation and you can work with a small number of people. And if they do it, you're suggesting it had real impact. If I run a workshop or a big fortune 100 company, you know. Hey, Greg, thanks for coming in. Really good information. And now we're going to get back to doing what we normally do. So a lot of my companies, some are highly technical. I've worked with a company that, my services making robotic equipment or stumbling robotic equipment for the automotive industry. A really interesting one. You know, you think, do these people have to sell? I ran a workshop in the summer for a law firm, owner of a law firm, reached out to me and said he read the book. Wanted his attorneys understand the more about selling, you think about that as attorneys don't have to sell, right? but the reality is, is that whether you've got the word sales in your title, or even your job description, if you have to influence people on decisions, compare contrast point of view, differentiate between you and another service, or even get a client to think, hey, you know, right, this is the right approach, then you need B2B influencing skills, which I call B2B selling skills.

Greg (00:12:34) - So most of my work is with, start up from one sales person up to ten.

Josh (00:12:43) - I love it, I love it. so your website and by the way, your, your company is when you go to P-3 selling.com, it's going to redirect you to a page on sola.com. And is that where you do more of the consulting approach work. Yeah. Wonderful.

Greg (00:13:00) - Solar describes our our consulting services. We used to do and have done a lot in fractional, scaled leadership for companies internationally. doing a little less of that now, mainly because I'm a bit of a perfectionist there. I care to care too much. And, it's hard to be to run a sales team, part time. Yeah. And, and I get passionate and I get drawn on it, and I'm. And I'm working full time on it rather than a couple days a week. So, but there we, we do, certainly sales training. I do leadership mentoring. I've had a number of clients where we've just met with the leaders and talk about sales management processes, which are really critical.

Greg (00:13:47) - It's not just how do people sell, but how do sales managers manage. And that's actually an area that woefully under resourced right, is first line sales managers.

Speaker 4 (00:14:00) - Yeah. Agreed.

Josh (00:14:04) - this is fantastic. And P3 selling the book The Essentials of B2B Sales Success. I'm a huge fan. I mean, anyone that's doing great work and and humanizing the process. I'm a big fan of Greg, someone that's been listening to us. What would you recommend that they do at this? Now, having listened to our conversation.

Greg (00:14:26) - Well, you have to ask yourself, like you know where you are from a business standpoint. If you stand back a bit and you say. What are the ingredients of building a scalable, revenue generating capability, which should probably a lot of your, of your listeners write small businesses and entrepreneurs. How do I get my business up and going? Right? A lot of, entrepreneurial businesses are started by two people who really know their trade. They've got some good relationships and they get a few deals going.

Greg (00:14:57) - But how do you scale that? So there's three ingredients. One is we talked about earlier, you need very sound sales processes. So what does the seller do from prospecting to deal management to pipeline management? what do they call management? The second ingredient is sales management processes. I could talk to it. So how do you do a quarterly business review? A, opportunity review. a one on one. all those kinds of things. How do you screen good sellers? Right. And then the last thing, which is kind of less than obvious, but, you consistent execution of number one and number two. Right. So to go back to your your question. Leaders should look at themselves and say, do I have a sound sales management sales management process in place, a sound selling process in place that everyone's using? And do we consistently do it? And if you don't, whether you use three selling or another methodology, I'd encourage you to to try and put one in place and follow it religiously.

Greg (00:16:06) - Because without those three things, you just you just can't scale.

Speaker 4 (00:16:09) - Yeah, yeah.

Josh (00:16:11) - Again P three selling. Com the book three selling the essentials of B2B sales Success Greg Nutter thank you so much for the conversation.

Greg (00:16:19) - Thanks, Josh. Appreciate the opportunity. Thank you again.

Josh (00:16:28) - Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales.

Josh (00:17:26) - What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning. That's right, seven days a week you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur movement.