In this episode, Rick Barrera shares his experiences as a consultant. He talks about his adventures getting into sales. He shares how he realized the importance of marketing strategies. He emphasizes that there is room for community-building and cooperation in a culture of independence. Join us and learn more about the art of collaborative selling.

Customers are people. But many sales professionals and marketers forget this. Many businesses need to take a step back and realize that they need to consider a client's values and beliefs. That’s where collaborative selling and marketing efforts come in.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode:

1. Learn how to ambitious but achievable goals for your clients.
2. Understand how to be transparent and honest with your clients about the challenges and opportunities they will face.
3. Discover tips and insights on how to go above and beyond in their efforts to help the client succeed.

Resources

• Rick Barrera’s Works on Amazon
• The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter by Meg Jay
• Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
• High Altitude Leadership: What the World's Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success by Chris Warner and Don Schmincke

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Episode Highlights

Rick’s Beginnings

• He grew up in Derek, Pennsylvania as the youngest of five kids.
• His hometown knows him as the boy who always has something to sell, such as seeds and Christmas cards.
• He applied for a job selling newspaper subscriptions as early as 16 years old.
• His career officially started in college while making sales.
• He found a sales training franchise and worked on finishing his degree.

Biggest Challenge in Sales

• The biggest problem Rick had was learning how to help people come to a decision without manipulating them.
• He says salespeople tend to sell products without learning about the client’s wants and needs.
• He believes that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. It’s important to implement marketing strategies.
• Retail and digital marketing in general is more than selling products. It entails becoming personal and relationship-focused. 

Collaborative Selling as a Solution

• Ask about the issues and context of a company before giving them suggestions on what to sell.
• Collaboration helps build trust and commitment with the clientele. In short, marketing consultants work.
• Do not start the collaboration process and marketing projects until the client asks for help.
• Collaboration phase: sitting side by side and co-creating a solution.
• Focus on someone willing to undergo collaboration and let go of those who don’t.

Implications on Company Services

• Does group effort with target audience impede the company’s ability to have a standard service offering? It depends on the business, social media strategy, and marketing expertise.
• You can opt to have products and services with multiple levels of customization.
• Prices vary based on the level of customization.
• Companies have multiple products that cater to different needs. It’s part of any company’s marketing efforts.

Collaborative Selling and Value-Building

• CS is not about finding facts known in a company organization. It's about aligning with your values, feelings, and goals.
• Goal: how can I bring value to this person?
• Value-building helps build a better long term relationship out of this person. There's just such a stable foundation to it. 

Cooperative and Supportive Entrepreneurial Community

• Rick experienced living in a supportive community that helped each other during winter and times of crisis.
• California is a place to be independent. The culture may be more selfish.
• There is a need for a change in pace. There is a need to create a community that is more cooperative and supportive of one another.

Being Good at Being Interested

• Interest helps build rapport and trust.
• Treat the person as a person and make them feel helped and understood.

How to Do More Collaborative Selling

• Start with questions. It's better to be prepared and have a checklist of things to ask when talking to clients.
• Ask follow up questions to understand their values, feelings, goals, beliefs, obstacles, and ideas.
• Work through personal thoughts that may be distracting them before you try to speak on the same level (about marketing). If you're not in sync, you are not going to get the sale.
• Set a time to sit side by side and co-create a solution through market research.
• It requires discipline, communication skills, and guts to do that.
• Practice! 

Internet Marketing versus Selling

• Online marketing is preferred since it takes away face-to-face interaction with clients. However, that isn’t where the money is.
• One is more likely to make a significant sale on the phone rather than the Internet.
• Marketing is a way to scale one-on-one sales presentations and replicate that to more customers.
• It's not about choosing one or the other; it’s about having the tools and utilizing them both.
• Even creating a standard sales letter would mean knocking on 100 doors to find out the context of the clients involved.
• Sales team - trying to get the best conversation with their ideal clients and do it with everyone. 

Community Building

• Incredibly successful people have built a community over time that aligns with their point of view

Marketing and Humanities

• Anthropologists are in the field of marketing study to understand human beings and how they behave.
• Marketing is a psychology experiment. It measures the difference between what people say and what they do.
• Everything is an experiment. We need more data about the industry trends to learn about our methods and refine it as we go along. 

About Rick

Rick Barrera is an acclaimed speaker and marketing strategy consultant. Fortune 500 companies know him because of his published works. They tackle his unique approach to brand building, such as "Non-Manipulative Selling.” He works with companies to redesign their systems and promotes a holistic approach to serving clients.

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