Episode 72!

Sales can be a complicated process and tiring if you go about it the wrong way. There’s the stigma of salespeople being annoying. For solopreneurs, consultants, fractional C-Suites, and entrepreneurs – how do you get your message across without being salesy? Through relationships with trusted advisors.

That’s what I discuss with Raffi Yardemian in this episode. Raffi is an executive-level sales leader and a serial entrepreneur. He has over 25 years of experience in sales leadership across Fortune 500 companies, growth phase organizations, private equity and venture capital backed firms as well as public and private companies.

To begin you don’t start with your clients in mind. Start by building relationships with people that know your clients. Educate them about what you do so they can share your message with their networks. If they understand your value proposition well enough to share with others, when their contacts come to you, they are already 60%-70% educated about your offering. That’s a much shorter sales cycle and you’re further along the know, like and trust spectrum.

This is a two-way street. You should be an evangelist and trusted advisor for the other person also. You do that by understanding their value proposition and what pain points they solve for their clients. It’s a value-based discussion and “serve first” is an important element. Learn about how they drive their business and the types of connections they’re looking for and help them before asking them to help you.

Three Tiers of Business Networking Relationships

Raffi explains his views on the three tiers.

The first one is networking partners. These are general relationships that you meet at conferences and networking events. You know them but you don’t know them intimately enough to help them grow their business.

Then you have referral partners. These are Centers of Influence that you know well and they know you well, but you haven’t had the opportunity to share a lot of clients.

Then you have the top tier, trusted advisors. At this stage you know each other extremely well and have shared clients. You also know them on a personal level as well, which helps create a bond of trust.

In this episode we also discuss:

How to create sales and marketing strategies through collaboration with your trusted advisors.
How to craft a powerful marketing message and collateral that can easily be shared by your trusted advisors.
Why focusing on how you solve pain points is more important than sharing why you’re great.
More ways to have conversations that will accelerate the process to increase the number of trusted advisors in your network.
…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea” here!

 

 

 

 

About The Guest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Raffi Yardemian is an executive-level sales leader and a serial entrepreneur. He has over 25 years of experience in sales leadership across Fortune 500 companies, growth phase organizations, PE/VC-backed firms as well as public and private companies. He currently serves as President of Boston Sales Solutions, a sales consulting firm that works with Small and medium-sized companies in creating their sales infrastructure and servings as an outsourced head of sales.

Connect with Raffi on LinkedIn