Unpacking the What Now Question, Understanding Referrals and Evaluating Buyer Needs

This episode provides advice on evaluating the source of a referral, understanding the buyer's needs, and identifying key indicators of a potential sale. It also looks at how to ask the right questions to gain an understanding of the buyer's needs and use the buyer's language to establish a baseline understanding. By following these steps, businesses can ensure they engage in meaningful conversations and make the most of referral opportunities.Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services. To solve this Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time.Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:Evaluate the source of a referral to understand its accuracyLook for indicators that the buyer is in need of your product or serviceUse the buyer's lingo to establish a baseline understandingMake a referral if you are not the ideal fitEvaluate if you are the person that can helpResources:Podcast ChefConnecting with Sean Boyce:LinkedInConnecting with the host:Brian Mattocks on LinkedInBrian Mattocks by emailQuotables:01:02 -  “I think you have to evaluate where it comes from because it could be someone new in your network, it could be somebody that you have a long relationship with. So as you better understand the source, you may also better understand the accuracy because of where it's coming from and how well they know what you do.”03:27 - ”If they understand the specialized vocabulary that your business represents or that your industry you're working in, if they don't understand the specialized vocabulary, chances are you have to do a ton of buyer education, which means they're earlier in their life cycle in terms of even the referral.”07:07 - “Problem is, there could be multiple variables in the beginning, and in this case, there are because they're selling it to multiple different verticals and industries and all these other combinations. So $100 to one industry is not necessarily $100 to the other, especially given size and phase and all that kind of stuff of the potential clients.”09:13 - “It's very much like you've got a medical symptom and the doctor gives you Medicine A, and you go, okay, well, I tried Medicine A. It didn't work. But that's because I only gave the doctor this much information on the symptoms I had, or this is the way I viewed the problem. Whereas a good doctor is going to ask you enough diagnostic questions to understand the nature of the underlying illness, right? They're not going to stop with like, oh, it looks like you're having an allergic reaction. It's going to be like, so what did you do yesterday?” Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:LinkedInEmailSchedule a Free Podcast Consult