Your Buyers Have Changed, Here’s How Smart B2B Companies Are Adapting

Your Buyers Have Changed, Here’s How Smart B2B Companies Are Adapting

Tim Fitzpatrick
So you've built a solid business. You're investing in marketing, and you're doing the things you've been told should drive growth. Too often, results feel inconsistent. Buyer behaviors feel different from what they did even a year ago. And some of the most common sales advice that's out there sounds good, but quietly works against you. In this episode, we're breaking down what actually needs to be in place before you spend another dollar on marketing, how smart B2B teams are adapting to today's buyers without adding additional complexity, and which popular sales ideas might be costing you deals instead of closing them. Hi, I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today. I am super excited to have Matthew Whyatt from Tech Torque with me today. Matthew, welcome and thanks for being here.

Matthew Whyatt
Pleasure to be here, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I'm always happy to connect with other kindred spirits in the sales and marketing and growth space. So I know we're going to have a great conversation today. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions to help us get to know you. Are you ready to jump in?

Matthew Whyatt
Let's go.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Matthew Whyatt
Traveling. So I absolutely love to get out there and travel, as your audience could probably figure out. I've got an Australian accent because I moved to the US about five months ago. A few years before that, I lived for a year in Indonesia. And the great thing about having a laptop and an internet connection is I can literally be anywhere. So at the moment I'm in Princeton, New Jersey. So traveling is... Sorry. Would you like these to be rapid fire answers as well? Because I'll just carry on.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's okay. That was perfect, man. I love it.

Matthew Whyatt
Here's my life story. Ready? Yes. Let's go.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So what's your hidden talent?

Matthew Whyatt
A hidden talent. I tell my wife I can see more colors. I think that's to make up for the fact that she probably can see more colors. That's a bit of a joke internally. But a hidden talent really is the ability to hear how a person speaks and and relate to them through unconscious languaging, like that. And I took an NLP course, but I was doing an LP before an LP. So I had in my first sales job, back when I was 19, my name on the sales board was the Chamaeleon. People could figure out who I was speaking to by how I was speaking to them.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Matthew Whyatt
I don't know about the best piece of advice, but my dad did say that you either win or learn. So both are feedback, and you don't learn a lot through winning. So don't worry, I've learned a lot of things.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love that, man. The way I think about failure is it's an opportunity to begin again with more experience and wisdom, right? Very similar to that, right? You win or learn. It's a very positive, optimistic way to think about things. What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Matthew Whyatt
I think maybe it was the fact that I was a nightclub DJ back when I left high school. And that's one of my hidden, I guess not talent, certainly, but certainly one of the things that I absolutely love is music. I'll go to a live music as much as I possibly can. I was a nightclub DJ for a little while back in my late teens.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I can say that I've never had a former nightclub DJ on the podcast. So welcome, Matthew. What does success mean to you?

Matthew Whyatt
So in my early career, I did very, very well. And it used to be money. It used to be a number in the bank account that was the answer. And I would have given you that answer sub 30 years of age. I'm significantly older than that now. And so really being able to do what I want to do on my terms is success. So whether it be move to another country or go to Italy on a holiday or this weekend, taking a four or five day long weekend, essentially stopped having meetings. And we're going to go do some college visits with my with my older son here in the States.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Awesome. Where's your happy place?

Matthew Whyatt
My happy place is with my friends. So I have a small group of friends, but we hang out like we're brothers. So hanging out with my mates.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. What qualities do you How are you and the people you spend time with?

Matthew Whyatt
Probably... Not probably. Honesty and clarity. I think that people can be themselves. I don't expect everybody to be like me. Actually, I prefer them not to be. But there's common language, common experience. And also being interesting people to be around. I like conversations. Those are the things I really enjoy.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. So, Matthew, tell us more about what you're doing at Tech Torque. Who are you working with? How are you helping folks?

Matthew Whyatt
Okay. So my early career was running, starting a software and technology, a software business. We grew that pretty successfully and exited. And now what I do is I help B2B SaaS businesses of between one to $10 million scale their sales and marketing. And I come from a position of strategy first, map out the business, map out the vision, mission and values as far as the business and then we put in place the marketing execution layer inside the business. We also help people recruit and train their first salespeople or their first marketing people. Because marketing, as you know, Tim, is a multifaceted thing. You say, I'm a marketer. What does that mean? Are you a video? Are you a copy? Are you a content? Whatever the type of marketing flavor a person might be. So what we do is I do the strategy piece. I've got an incredible team that can do the execution. And so that's the businesses we work with now is the B2B SaaS, typically one to $10 million. And they've come from a position of I've grown it. I've got testimonials, I've got referrals. But now it's time to put the foot down on the accelerator of the revenue generation.

Starting a Podcast

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's awesome. I love it. So you said you started your podcast in 2022. What inspired you to start the podcast and how has it evolved into what it is today?

Steve Ramona
Wow, that's a fantastic... Oh, my God, Tim. That's a great question.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Loaded question.

Steve Ramona
It is. And I don't get asked a lot, pieces of this. The inspiration we're getting was the clients and very interested in learning something new. Of course, money. When I first started, I thought, Hey, sponsors, maybe make a little bit of money on the side, be a nice passive income. Then, like I said, I started interviewing people, and they started bringing me rock stars, and people started listening, and people started reaching out, Hey, that was a great podcast. Hey, Steve, you've become a great podcast host. I love listening to you. Hey, Steve, I heard this guest and you changed my life. I'm like, Holy mackereel. I'm making an impact with people. I'm really serving like I've always wanted to. Then I started reaching out to higher-profile people to really get the message out. But then I started building this network of very successful millionaires and billionaires that I could reach out to as I build a relationship and ask for things. Need funding for this project, 100 million. Yeah, let me get you a couple of people. Hey, I'm looking for this. I built this massive network. The great thing about that, yeah, it does help me, but like you, Tim, you can come to me and go, Hey, I'm looking for this, and I go through my network, Well, here, let me help you with that. Just had an email before this show happened. Hey, do you know somebody in this area? And I did an introduction for them. They're like, Oh, my God, that's great. What a great impact you could do impacting people.

What Needs to Be in Place Before Spending on Marketing

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. Strategy first, man, you're speaking my language. God, it's so easy to skip, but it's a critical mistake, and I'm sure we're going to get into some of that. So let's dig into marketing a little bit. What would you say is something that every small business owner has got to have in place before they spend another dollar on marketing, right? And why do most skip this step?

Matthew Whyatt
So a lot of really talented technical people out there, a lot of really talented, really anything people, they find themselves saying well, trying to cast a very, very wide net. And so they become generalists out the gate. And becoming a generalist, what happens is they really don't speak to anybody's core issues at a deep level to engage with the market because there are so many specialists out there in the world. If you just want a generalist, if you just want to find somebody who is generally good at doing whatever it is, maybe websites or construction or whatever it might be, whatever the thing that you do is what you put out there in marketplace, unless you actually start specializing and really identifying the core values, the core problems of your market, that's going to be a real issue. So I find that people go too broad. And the reason they don't want to go narrow is because they mistakenly, and I want to say mistakenly underlined, exclamation mark, bolded, mistakenly think that it's going to narrow the number of people they can sell to. Because the thing is, in reality, most people out there don't want 20 million users. If they took on any business listening to this podcast, if they took on five new customers this week, well, you get to... And the good thing is you get to choose who they are. And so if you are really, really clear about your target market, you're really, really clear on your messaging, you're really clear on the problems you solve, you can do less effort work for a narrower group of people and charge more money.

Tim Fitzpatrick
This goes back to strategy before tactics. When I think about marketing strategy, I think about three things. But the first thing is your target market and who your ideal clients are. Then it's messaging, like you said, you can't create a message to attract those people until you know who the hell they are. And then what are you offering? What's your service and your offer to that market? Is it something they want to buy? Is it something they're going to pay for? That, to me, is the fuel for the engine. And like you said, so many people skip it. I had this conversation yesterday with a managed service provider. He is not alone. This happens all the time, and I'm sure this happens to you, too, Matthew. Just got done with an 18-month contract with an agency. He was spending 4-5 grand a month, no new clients, and very few leads to speak up. And what happened? He was targeting too broadly. I want to go up market. I want to sell larger companies. He had never sold those companies before. I hadn't done the research. Again, it was any freaking company that was up market.

Matthew Whyatt
Anybody.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Right? So it was too broad. And guess what? The agency took the work because that's what agencies do. They're like, Yeah, sure, we can do that. But he did not approach the agency with the fuel that they needed to be successful. Would have been a totally different scenario had he said, Hey, these are my ideal clients. Here's what they look like. Here's my messaging playbook. Here's what I'm going to say to attract these people. Here's what I'm offering them. Can you help me do that through whatever? Paid ads or content. Much easier, right?

Matthew Whyatt
Way easier. Can you say what industry that business was in?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, he was a managed service provider. So IT.

Matthew Whyatt
Got it. Yeah, cool. I've dealt with a lot of MSPs, managed service providers in the past, and they probably can help everybody. This is the problem with having capability and skill and academic qualifications and a broad spectrum of ability is they probably could help everybody. But in the customers that I've worked with, it's always, well, you know what? We're going to be defense or we're going to be the best water bottle guys or whatever it might be, the more narrow you get. And so I think about marketing in terms of what you were just saying as the core for, which is for me, it's just, first of all, target marketing And it's not just targeting as in demographics, as in we help logistics companies out of the Midwest of $20 million or more. It's actually also the psychographics. How do they show up? How do they think? How do they speak about themselves? How do they speak about their clients? What values do they have aligned? And so I think about, first of all, target marketing. And then the cool thing is with CRMs and AI, and we've got all the tools we've got available to ourselves these days, is that you can continually look at who's hitting your page and who's responding to your lead magnets. And then from there, you can continue to refine it. Maybe it gets to a point where it's logistics companies in the Midwest who are doing $20 million or above, who are refrigerated transport, who have warehouses in two states, who have three layers of management. It gets more and more and more narrow. And then once you understand that business, then you can move to the next part, the second part, which is your circle of influence. So your circle of influence is essentially, who knows you, who can talk about you, and who would tell a third party about you? And so this is where influence of marketing in the B2C world exists is if Shaq decided to go into competition between you against you and me, Tim, we'd be cooked on day one, right? Shaq knows nothing about technology or marketing, but he's just got the reach. And so we've got to build a circle of influence. Mr. Beast, just recently, as of recording, I think it was only two days ago, when it comes out, it might be a little bit longer. He just bought a financial services business, a billion dollar financial services business, a YouTuber. Why? Because his circle of influence is so big that he could buy that 1 % of his market signs up to this, the team financial services product that he just bought. And that massively ratches up the value of that organization almost overnight. So then the third part of the four core is your relationships. I'm going into teaching mode now. Hope you're okay with this.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's all good. This is good. I love it.

Matthew Whyatt
So the fourth part is your relationship. And your relationship is how does a client think about you before they talk to you? And that is how your relationship to show up on podcast like this, emails that you send out, white papers, studies, testimonials, free giveaways, products before purchase. All of these things that you put out into the marketplace that can help somebody make a decision. And then the fourth part is your offer. And this is a part that really breaks down for a hell of a lot for most organizations, is the offer is book a call. Book a Call is like showing up to the nightclub seeing somebody cute and going, want to get married and have three kids? That's a lot. Maybe they do eventually, but that's a lot. So what can we do to ask the person to take the next logical low pain, low friction step? Because in the marketplace today, friction causes too much resistance. If you think about the most successful sales business at the moment in the world, it's Amazon, right? And what button do they have there in yellow? Buy now. Click, it's delivered tomorrow. You don't have to put your credit card details in, don't have to talk to... Or any other thing that knows you. Here's something we found for you, Matthew. Here's a blue long sleeve T-shirt. Buy now. It's over. So these are the four core areas. And I tell my clients all the time that you should be thinking about these four core every single month. There should be a meeting in the marketing, once a month marketing meeting. How are we addressing the four core every single month? And if you do that and you create momentum inside that, that's what's going to really move the dial.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, let me make sure. I want to summarize this for people and correct me wherever I get this wrong because there's some really good stuff in here. So core four, target market, circle of influence, who are all those people that influence that market?

Matthew Whyatt
Who talks about you? So at the moment, Tim, you know what I do and you know me now, so you're part of my circle of influence. It could be somebody who's a customer, and they go, Well, you've got to check out Matthew, or one of your customers. Hey, you're going to check out Tim. He's great. He's really solved X, Y, and Z problem for me. So people that can talk about you.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. Okay. Then we have relationships, which is all about how the prospect thinks about you before the actual purchase.

Matthew Whyatt
Correct.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What are we doing to get in front of those people to impact how they think.

Matthew Whyatt
Correct.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Which really translates to a lot of the tactics. What tactics are we going to do to get in front of those people to build that relationship? And then it's your offer. What are you offering them? And in your case, it was really the initial focus on what's the initial offer, right?

Matthew Whyatt
What's the next logical step? Because if you think It's not a marketing funnel, it is wide at the top and now at the bottom. For everybody who's listening to this, I'm making a wide at the top and now at the bottom with my hands. At the top, people are unaware that they've got a problem. And this is marketing 101. Anybody listeining to this is going to start rolling their eyes, but just stick with me. So at the top of the funnel, they're the least engaged, they're the least interested. So providing somebody with the least level of interest in you or your problem or the problem that they might have, don't send them a white paper because that takes effort. Don't send them a checklist because that requires an effort. Send them something that's very, very small. Maybe it's a video, maybe it's a clip from this podcast. Whatever it is, it is something that's very consumable, that has them at least understand that they might have a problem and they can step down to the next one. So many businesses, as I said, the first call to action on their website is, Book a call, and I don't know anything about you. I don't know what you represent. I don't know who you work with. I don't know anything. It's now just buy from me. So what we do is we go, what's the next logical step? It's next logical step might be download a free guide, do this particular quiz that allows them to understand exactly where they sit in the marketplace, watch the podcast, we talk, watch Tim's podcast, whatever it might be, do the next easy thing that requires me not to be harassed by a salesperson. And then as we move through, and then, of course, that also takes into account when you're selling my customers who are selling enterprise software, we don't just go, right, well, it's a million dollar bit of kit, a million dollar bit of software or hardware or whatever it might be. It's buy or don't buy. It's yes or no. It becomes a binary thing. So what I do is I smooth that out. So what's the first logical step? Well, maybe it's consulting that exists in that piece between, I haven't bought from you and I've implemented your million dollar software solution. There's a piece in there that exists that might be a consulting piece because businesses will buy consulting far more than they will ever buy software, because software is difficult. And it's 2026 now, and everybody, most of the world has been burned by some piece of oversold under delivered software. And there's whole teams of technical people and change advisory boards and all of this layer of infrastructure inside an organization that stops people from just buying random bits of software now, but they will buy consulting. So then we'll break that sales down. And what's the next piece? So we actually do sales in a number of easy steps that look like the next logical step rather than creating do or die points.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I really want to highlight this because one of my mentors said this, too, what's the next measurable step? So I love the fact that This can be applied to so many different things, not just what we're talking about, but I bring it up all the time from an outreach standpoint. People are doing cold outreach, and they're asking for the call in the first email. It's like, no, that's not the next logical step. That is too much, as you pointed out, it's too much friction. I don't even know you. Why the hell am I going to jump on a call with you and take my time? What is the next logical step? I love that. Like I said, it can be applied to sales, marketing, anything. Frankly, I tell people, look, if you're overwhelmed, take a step back and say, what is the next measurable step? What's the next logical step I can take? Not the next five, the next one that you can do right now. That's it. So that is awesome advice. People just take that one thing from this call, in this interview.

Matthew Whyatt
But also it's not just... So it's next... I apply that next logical, what's the next easy, logical, smallest possible step I could take for everything? So for example, I am still sticking to my New Year's resolution, which is an absolute surprise being at this point in the year. And so I downloaded a fitness app and I wanted to track my workouts. I've been working out for many years. So it's time to get serious again, not just roll roll up and move some heavy things around. Now it's time to actually get serious and do it properly. And so I got a free app. And for the last month and a half or so, I've been logging my workouts in there. Okay, I'm now committed in doing that. I'm now going to buy a better app to actually log it properly, which talks to my health thing, which talks to my Apple Watch, which talks to my food. And then it starts to see together, because so many times over the course of the last couple of years, I've bought a hundred dollar all singing, all dancing, gold-played thing, and I've used it three times. So everything. What's the smallest viable... In software development, we call it minimum viable products. So what's the minimum viable effort? What's the minimum viable thing to do?

How Smart B2B Teams are Adapting to Today's Buyers Without Additional Complexity

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. So let's talk about buyer behavior a little bit. The market's always changing. Buyer behavior is changing. What are the biggest shifts in buyer behavior you're seeing right now? And how should businesses adapt without overcomplicating things?

Matthew Whyatt
Well, story time. So as I said, I started my first business in 1999 in technology. And back in those days, we put an advert in the newspaper, once again, also dating myself terribly, and a free call number. People would phone the free call number, and then the salesperson got to do a whole range of things. The salesperson would explain who the company was and what we did, and provide a documentation and brochures, and introduce to clients, and provide a demonstration and built rapport over the course of some four, five, six phone calls. And then at the end, they would ask them to buy. Great. Today, how it looks and it's getting more and more. And if everybody here just thinks about the last time they bought something, whether it be going to a restaurant, a pair of shoes, a set of headphones, it doesn't matter. Well, most people are doing exactly this process. They become product, problem, or company aware, and they give it to Google, and they look for reviews. They go, well, what does this look like? And Google reviews. So last time, there's a restaurant. We're relatively new to town here in Princeton. And so we looked up best pizza, best this, best that. There's a Chinese restaurant just around the corner from us. Super convenient. But the reviews are absolutely woeful. So we haven't been there. It's the most convenient restaurant in town. Literally, it's 200 yards from our front door. Read the reviews, not going there, not going to waste my time. So translate that to how business operates. And so really, the speed in which you can grow your business is the speed in which you can build and transfer trust. And so that's the bit there, that the building of trust is the most important thing that a business can do right now. And so how do we do that? And this is what business owners should be thinking about right now, is how do I build trust in the marketplace? And what does that look like? Well, to build trust is you've got to be seen. We see that in recent... I'm not being political. I'm not talking about any particular side, but which side was more visible for a greater amount of time in the marketplace? That's side one. Being more visible in the marketplace for a great amount of time gives the public the opportunity to really understand what you stand for. And so that is for business people. It's publishing, it's communicating, it's talking about wins. It's actually being, I guess, self-aware enough to admit your failures, because if you only present a perfect facade, then people are not going to trust that either, because they know that nobody's perfect. They know themselves. They know everybody they deal with. So publishing content at scale across multiple platforms every single week or every single day that actually sounds a bit sounds like you. And so that's the big thing. And also, just to give you a bit more info, with the new algorithm on products and platforms like LinkedIn, it's moved away from this is how you should be doing it to this is how I'm experiencing it. Because this is how you should be doing it, it can be used by a five minute prompt on ChatGPT. But this is how I experience it. This is how Matthew experiences it. This is how Tim experiences it. This is Tim's 23 years of doing this, this, and this. And I've seen these number of failures. And I've seen these number of wins. And here's my guide to achieving A, B, and C based on this. That's going to get pick up. So building a personal brand and then talking about it is the one thing that most business owners don't want to do. They go, I'm a great technician. We run a very successful MSP, whatever it might be. And the technical people are extremely reluctant to get themselves out there. But the thing is that then they look how they buy things. They're always going to follow the CEO. They're always going to follow the influencer, whether it be the owner or the CFO or CEO or the founder. The people just need to be self-aware of how they buy things, and they'll figure out how they should sell things.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's not rocket science, right?

Matthew Whyatt
It's not rocket science.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I mean, this is not difficult. I'm trying to remember the exact statistic, but on the B2B side, it's something like the majority of B2B buyers have gotten 80% of the way through the buying process before they even reach out and contact you.

Matthew Whyatt
A hundred %.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So if they have gotten 80% of the way there, how in the world are they doing that before they even talk to you? It's content.

Matthew Whyatt
It's all content.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Most people don't like creating content because it's work, it takes consistency, it's time. But that's the reality of it. How are you going to get picked up in AI chats if you're not creating content? That's how all these LLMs are getting all the data. It's all content. If you don't produce any content, how are they ever going to find it?

Matthew Whyatt
They're not going to find. You can't sell a secret. You can go ahead and all the people that know you and like you and trust you, that's fine. And that's where businesses come to businesses like you and me, Tim. They go, well, we've got here. How do we get there? Well, what got you here, which is having a good product and getting referrals, you can't just go, Well, I'm going to have a gooder product and get gooder referrals. There's no dial to switch that up.

Tim Fitzpatrick
No. Well, you, Matthew, you were talking about health. I'm going through the same thing with health and fitness right now, right? I've gotten to a certain place. I've got a strong diet. I've been exercising consistently. But there's one more thing that I want to do, and what I've been doing up until this point is not going to get me there. I need to start tracking my workouts more. I need to start doing slightly different workouts to get to that next place. What got me here is not going to get me where I want to go. So we can't think that we can just keep doing the same thing, and it's going to get us there. It's not. It's stair steps. It's not this linear path.

Matthew Whyatt
Yeah. And anybody go, oh, I know that. Well, that's cool. But the Seahawks who won the Super Bowl, they got a coach. Actually, they probably got seven or eight coaches. So it doesn't make any sense to go, I know this. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a coach. Roger Federer had a coach. And so it's not just necessarily knowing, but then it's also being pushed and it's being driven and being tracked. And so there's nobody who's ever been successful. Maybe there's a couple of oddities, but there's still mentors out there. Zuckerberg still had mentors and people he talks to. So there's people out there who can bounce ideas off. So nobody is an island. And if they don't believe they can get better with other people's input, then they're not going to get better. 

Popular Sales Ideas That Might Be Costing You Deals

Tim Fitzpatrick
This has been a great conversation, man. I want to finish off talking a little bit of sales, right? We've talked a lot about marketing. Tons of sales advice out there, no shortage of it. What is one popular piece of sales advice that sounds good but actually hurts businesses? What's your thought?

Matthew Whyatt
It's the thinking around it's a numbers game. It is just make more calls. And what happens is sales is a performance as well as an activity. And so I would guarantee you that give two people the same 10 calls they can do, the more talented salesperson with better training, better answers, better understanding of the marketplace will make more sales. And that sounds like a really obvious thing to say, but so many businesses out there, they come to me after they've hired their first salesperson. It's been a bit of an ordinary result because they go, well, we hired a salesperson. They should just go sell. So what's the sales culture? What's the sales process? What's the playbook? How do we move person from qualified to prospect? How do we move them from prospect to proposal? How do we measure that? And where are the drop offs there? So they're not measuring things. They think that it's just about picking up and smiling and dialing. And really, they spend no time actually doing the performance work, the training work. I could excite the lines from Hamlet. I'm not getting the gig on Broadway. So it's not going to happen. So it is about being good at your craft and treating it like a craft, treating it like a skill, and hiring the cheapest person or hiring a commission-only person is fraught with danger, because those people who are willing to do the job for less, you're probably going to get less.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You know this? We've gone full circle, because the other thing that I see a lot of people jump into with salespeople is they don't have... The strategy portion is not there. So they hire a salesperson. They're targeting too broadly. So the salesperson is dialing for dollars for anybody that's got a heartbeat that will pick up a phone. They have no messaging playbook. So the salesperson has no idea how to communicate the challenges that they might be coming up against, the results that they can help people achieve. They don't understand the psychographics, none of it. So again, you're telling them to go drive the car down the road and there's no fuel for the vehicle. So the salesperson is pushing this freaking car down the road, trying to get results. It happens. I see it every day, and I'm sure you see the same thing.

Matthew Whyatt
And there's no marketing assets to back it up? There's no understanding of the buying committee. If we want to go deep on this, there's always more than one person involved in a sale for anything over a certain dollar amount in most businesses. Even if it's $10,000, that's not a line item. That's not a walking around cash that businesses will spend. So you've got to have a multiple... Even in my house, you want to sell something to me, I'm going to get it past the wife. And it's because she's also my sanity check. I've certainly bought a lot of random crap over the years that they go, well, it does make sense so we have to check with Terry. And so there's always hidden buyers. And so you need to be bold enough to ask the question. And the questions are not that hard. It's, hey, Tim, other than yourself, is there anybody else involved in decisions like this? Or the last time you purchased something like this, what was the process you went through? And if they go, well, we're buying an ERP system for a million the last time they bought it was in 1995.] Cool. Now your job as a salesperson is to provide them guidance, because you've sold maybe 10 of these things. They've bought zero of these things. Now you need to provide guidance. You need to say, well, typically customers go through a six-part process to evaluate the product, ensure that it's going to provide ROI, make sure it's going to be implemented by the business. And then they look at the ongoing relationship and how you can create ongoing value from your purchase, not just today, but also in the next 5 to 10 years. We're going to map that out for you. And then you, once again, you're building the process and how a customer can buy, because not every customer has experience in buying your thing. So just saying, where would you like to do next? It's crazy stuff. So salespeople need to be able to ask hard questions. What are hard questions? Easy questions, but bold questions. They need to be trained in how to ask those questions. So I train my salespeople, and I train my customer salespeople on using a script. And most people in sales or most people go, oh, it's a script. I sound terrible. I don't want to sound robotic, blah, blah, blah. I don't like scripts. That's because you're bad at it, not because it's a bad script. If once again, back to me doing Hamlet at Broadway, I'm bad at that. You know why? I've done no practice. I've made no effort to learn it. I'm not very good at it. But with enough time, energy, and effort, anybody can be taught a script. So it sounds like a naturally flowing conversation that fully explores the qualification of the customer, provides a diagnosis of the issue. And then the prescription that comes back that says, hey, buy my thing is actually rooted in the validation of the qualification and diagnosis. But most sales people show up and throw up. They show up and go, hey, and Somebody might look at me. Imagine if a salesperson walked into my office. Oh, Matthew, they do a quick qualification. Person 50, slightly overweight, 6 feet 3. Okay, cool. Hey, Matthew, many of our clients have got wonderful benefit out of this particular heart medication. And the value of the heart medication is this, this, and I'm like, wait a minute, I'm here for a I'm here for a haircut. I'm here because I got my broken finger. Now you're pitching me this stuff. So it's about asking questions. And the scripts that I provide that I train for my clients in the B2B SaaS world will be two pages of questions, but it's guided questions. So how often does that happen? When does that work? What has happened in the past when you've tried that? What has happened when you've tried that? Why didn't that work? And that stack of questions provides significant amount of more information than, hey, let me tell you about my cool scheduling widget.

Tim Fitzpatrick
When you go on, well, one, somebody said to me once, professionals are scripted. That always stuck with me from a sales standpoint. The best salespeople are scripted. But just because they're scripted doesn't mean they come across as robots. Like you said, you're outlining the list of questions that you need to make sure you ask, and that leads you down a very clear path. But when you ask questions, you're not talking very much. You're not going to sound scripted. It's just, what are the questions I need to get answered? Yeah.

Matthew Whyatt
70-30. First phone call should be 70-30. 70 % the customer is speaking, 30 % you're asking questions. No time for pitching.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's it.

Matthew Whyatt
It should be, well, I understand what you've got there, Mr. Jones. And then we bam, bam, book a meeting from a meeting. Obviously, we understand what they've got. We understand their issues. We understand that we can solve the problem. Be honest, whether or not you can solve the problem. If you can't solve the problem, inject. You'll get far more. I've actually got referrals from businesses. I've said I can't help. If you are clear about the value you provide, then you'll be providing that value to the right people people who are willing to pay for it.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's awesome, man. Any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with before we wrap things up?

Matthew Whyatt
Not in particular, no. It's been a great conversation, Tim. Thank you very much. I think we've covered a lot of ground. We did. So I'm more than happy for people to ask me any questions or anything like that. One of the things that's just coming across the screen there, obviously, we've got my website there, the authorityrevup. Com. That is the product that we help clients to publish at scale. So if people want to get their name and their sales out there, build that personal brand, go to authorityrevup.com, authorityrevup.com. As an Australian, I run my sentences together, so I need to articulate and slow down. And what that is a training program and backed by AI that helps you actually publish content in your name. And the last one there is scorecard. Techtalk.co. And that is a little bit of AI driven app that if you go through and answer about 15, 20 questions, it'll give you exactly where you sit with each one of those four core areas that we discussed. And what that will do is show you, okay, this is where you score in each one of these four areas. And here is the next best step for you to take. And let me know, that is a full gift. There is no selling in that. The next best step is not engage tech talk to do your marketing for you. But what it is, it's Say, This is where you score. This is what you should be looking at next over the course of the next 90 days. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. I love it. We'll make sure all that stuff goes in the show notes. Matthew, I really appreciate you taking the time. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you as well. You want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com. The other resource we've got for you is at marketingenginescorecard.com. When you've seen a theme, we both have these scorecards here. Marketingenginescorecard.com, right? If you feel like you're stuck in the marketing maze and you're not sure what the heck you should do next, head over there. It'll outline which of the core components of building a marketing engine are holding you back and what to do next. So thank you so much, Matthew. I appreciate you. And until next time, take care.