Why is the visual side more compelling? In this episode, Simon Bowen, Creator of The Models Method, joins Michael Zipursky as they talk about improving sales and helping businesses communicate a winning strategy by using visual thinking and models. From a career in electronics to developing models, Simon shares his journey to becoming the Models guy who helps the primary buyer sell the solution to his organization. Learn how to win in the consulting sales games using visual thinking and models by taking complex ideas and concepts and articulating them in a powerful way that resonates instantly with your audience. Simon digs deeper into communicating profound thinking and ideas and the importance of correct choreography to elevate your influence.
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I have Simon Bowen joining me. Simon, welcome.
I’m pleased to be here.
Simon, all types of organizations from the Fortune 500 to the military hire you. You’re known for improving sales, helping people to communicate their strategy and their thinking visually. You’re considered to be one of the top authorities on visual-based thinking. With that being said, you’re known as the Models Guy. Let’s get very clear off the table, when people are now hearing visual-based thinking and models, what does that mean? Describe a little more about what it is that you do.
We use visual frameworks, certain models like circles, triangles, Venn diagrams, 2×2 matrices, and things like that to take complex ideas and concepts and articulate in a powerful way that resonates instantly. If you say something to somebody, it’s easily ignored. If you show something to somebody, it becomes interesting but if you put structure to that thing that you show them, it becomes unforgettable. People can’t unsee what they’ve seen.
We use these visual frameworks to not only represent complex ideas in a visual way, and there’s a solid reason for that, but in a structural way as well which is a part of the key piece that is often missed with clip art, stock images and stuff like that. The thing that’s most unique about what we do, we add to it a specific choreography for how you walk through that framework to explain to people what this complex idea is. Whether it’s leadership, sales or in any kind of communication of a complex idea, we know that the use of powerful visual models with great choreography dramatically elevate the rate and the level of influence that you get in communication.
Let’s talk about how you got into that because earlier on, you were an organizational development consultant, then you were a manager at a building materials company. I’m wondering was this you were having a pint of beer in Australia, took out a napkin, came up and thought, “I’m going to start drawing things for the rest of my life?” How did you get into developing models? Where did that originate from?
A model is just a blueprint of reality. Click To TweetMy early career was in electrics and electronics, and I modeled it. It’s a blueprint of reality. In electrics and electronics, you can’t solve a problem without then first looking at the circuit diagram on paper, which is a model of the reality of the circuit. That’s where this connection of a model on paper to the reality occurred in my mind. I always use models to explain things on whiteboards to teams and organizations that I was in. It took off when I became a management consultant some years ago and started my own management consultancy business in strategy, OD, marketing, strategic positioning, sales development.
One of the issues, and most consultants are familiar with this, is you’re in the conversation with the primary buyer who’s keen to use you and to do the thing around the project. The specter or the chief financial officer, the shadow of logic-based decision-making sits over the top of them. You have this buyer that’s buying on emotion because it’s going to solve a problem for them but they have to become a salesperson for you, take it back to the organization, and sell it to a logical thinker who isn’t connected deeply to the problem. I had to turn my first point of contact into a salesperson to go back into the organization. I started carrying a sketchpad with me. I realized that if I drew models for them and I’ll draw a quick example in the OD space. I don’t know how many millions of dollars’ worth of consulting business I’ve sold with one simple model.
I’d be having a meeting with a manager or an executive of the company and it might be about their team. Let’s say a sales director and they’re talking about their sales team. At some point in the meeting, I’d sit down and say, “If we think about how your sales team show up every day, there are two dimensions on this.” There’s the logical dimension, vertical on a 2×2 matrix where you’ve got certain people who are good at what they do. They can do the job and they can do it well. You’ve got people that are not good at what you need them to do. Two ends of a continuum in terms of logical scale, how they show up their ability.
On the other scale, we have emotion. We have people who are showing up in your sales team and they’re selling out of fear. By that, “If I don’t hit my numbers, I won’t get the bonus. If I don’t hit my numbers, I might get the sack.” There are people that are selling out a desire. They’re thinking, “This is a fantastic product. I believe in it. I want to put it in the hands of the customer. I love the company I work for,” so on and so forth. If we look at the bottom left quadrant where it’s a combination of they’re not too good at what they do and they’re selling out of fear, you’ve got someone sitting down there who’s a prisoner.
Prisoners are interesting because if you release someone from prison, they’ll often re-offend to get back in again. Prisoners are there killing time. If you look at somebody who’s good at what they do but they’re selling out of fear, they’re selling because, “If I don’t get the sale, I might not get my bonus or I might lose my job,” these people are conscripts. The top left quadrant are good at what they do but still fear-based, and conscripts put on the uniform and fight the battle. They don’t do it because they believe in the cause, they do it because they deserve to get shot. At the bottom right corner, you’ve got someone who came full of desire on an emotional level, but not too good at what they do yet. These people are rookies.
The thing about a rookie is they are as keen as mustard but they make a lot of mistakes, and they forget to ask questions. You don’t want to dampen that enthusiasm. There are people up in this top right quadrant that volunteers. These people at the top right quadrant, they’re good at what they do and they are full of desire. They want to go out and sell, make sales and serve the company. My conversation would go if we think about the percentage of people in your team to the left of that line who are selling out of fear versus those to the right, they would often go it’s about 30% desire-based, 70% fear-based, the percentage that are good, and the percentage that are not too good. Interestingly enough, they often go about 50/50, which in itself tells me something about the organization. This is becoming a diagnostic of their sales team.
We’ve got about 35% of your organization in prisoners, 35% of your sales team in conscripts. We’ve got about 15% in volunteers and 15% in rookies on that basis. Does that feel about right? They’d go, “I feel like that’s exactly right.” I can have a conversation about, “First of all, we need to do something about the conscripts.” They would say to me, “What about the prisoners?” I go, “The problem with the prisoners is their major objective in life is to pull the rookies over to them because there’s safety in numbers. Your major objectives should be to make sure the rookie is attached to the volunteers and move up. The conscripts are where your nearest results potentially lie. Why don’t we run a project to change those numbers and push as many people as we can into the volunteer quadrant. Would that be a reasonable objective?”
In a heartbeat, they’ve seen the whole outcome laid out in front of them in a powerful way. I would say, “All we need to do is organize a meeting with the key people involved in the decision to do this. A two-hour complimentary project planning session that I’ll facilitate for you. You put them in the room for me. All you need to do is inside your organization, get the right people together that would want to see that change in the sales division.” I would imagine your chief financial officer would love to see a revenue shift consistent with this, and I’m sure the CEO would, and anyone else that might need to be involved. There’s a lot of seeding going on here. If you get those folks in the room, I’ll run a session and we’ll map out the project. Minimum, you’ll have a project plan at the end whether you use me or not. I always get the meeting.
Why do you think this is at the most fundamental deep level? What’s the reason that this is so much more effective than you having the conversation with them and asking them questions to try and pull out the same information that you did right now visually? If you compare those two, why do you think the visual side is so much more compelling?
If we look at how two people communicate, there’s me and then there’s the buyer. In an audio only communication, language is the most abstract concept we have. Words have to be perceived. We hear them and then we have to perceive what is meant by them and figure out our understanding. We’re not figuring out an accurate understanding, we’re figuring out our own understanding of it. Pictures are received. We see it, we get it. There’s far less interpretation required. For me to walk through that matrix that I’ve done in words only and even in a typed document would be pages of text and a lot of perception going on. For me to walk through it like I did to them with some clean choreography, that’s received. I look at it and go, “Look at those numbers.”
What happens is when you have two people in conversation face-to-face, it has tension. Particularly, in the sales process, the customer always feels under pressure. It’s only humans that create pressure in the sales process. When two people are face-to-face in a conversation, the buyer is feeling some pressure because there’s a decision that they know they’re going to have to make. You get attack and retreat in this face-to-face conversation. We all know that the facilitation triad is to put a mediator between two people, and that mediator can facilitate conversation. You can’t take a mediator with you into a sales conversation or into a conversation with your team. We did realize that if we put a model in between two people, the model acts as the mediator. People will share information with you to fill in a model and that gives you intel.
Everyone always tells me their percentages. That gives me intel that I can now start to use in the conversation. It allows me to share insight back to them which gives them education. It gives them a physical blueprint for the brain. It’s exactly the same, Michael, as going to an architect saying, “Can you build me a house?” The architect will say, “I’ve got to draw your floor plan first so you can picture it.” When we put a model into the conversation, it elevates the conversation. If you imagine these two people across the baseline of a triangle having a chat, and you’ll put the model at the top peak of the triangle, that model pulls the conversation up. In fact, it’s not two people face-to-face. It’s you and me side-by-side looking at this model together and it changes the dynamic.
Let me ask you the question before we move on, Simon. In this case, how important is it for the consultant to be drawing the visual with the buyer in front of them compared to them coming with the model already pre-defined that’s already filled in? Talk about that a little bit.
Language is the most abstract concept people have and words have to be perceived. Click To TweetWe’ve done lots of testing on this but the simplest explanation is when you draw, you draw people in. In a simple way for people to assess this is what are people more interested in? Someone clicking through a set of PowerPoint slides on a video, on YouTube or one of those hand-drawn whiteboard videos on YouTube? That answers the question. There’s something organic about it being drawn in front of you. Humans are analog, not digital.
We’d like to see the shades of things unfolding. When you hand-draw from a blank sheet of paper, there are a few other subtle subconscious things going on. When you sit in front of somebody and you bring a premade model or you’re using PowerPoint and you’re clicking through it, they’re looking at it and they’re going, “That’s an interesting model but somebody else could have built it, you’ve learned it or you’re using that model of the PowerPoint to give you cues so you remember what you want to go through with them.”
It also still almost seems like one-sided. It’s not done in collaboration which is what the whole conversation should be about.
A few things are going on, when you hand-draw from a blank screen or blank sheet of paper, there’s no doubt you know what you’re doing because you’ve created this blank. I quite often will let people label the sections of the model. I might say, “If someone is not great at what they do and they’re fear-driven, what would you call that quadrant?” They might give me a name. If they give me a name that works, I’ll use it. It’s hard for someone to disagree with a model that they’ve partially built. They’ll sell it more effectively back into the organization.
For everyone reading, when you think about models, what are some elements that are key? If people want to start thinking, “How can I apply this to my own business and to what I do?” what would you say are some of the key building blocks for having an effective model?
I think of models in the three keys. If you imagine a triangle and the three key components I keep talking about down one side of the triangle is geometry. Geometry gives you the dynamic of the model side. Triangle is a holistic dynamic. You need all three sides or it collapses. The moment you draw a triangle, you’re assigned to them. Without saying a word, you need all three in these things that we’re laying out. If you draw a circle, you’re creating a continuous loop. A Venn diagram means you could have two of the three circles but you miss something if you don’t have the third, but you could have two. A 2×2 matrix is a comparative dynamic. There’s the bottom left corner and the top right. A straight line is a continuum. It’s still a model and it’s a comparison one side to the other. The geometry usually gives you the dimensions as well.
In my corporate life, I was used by the government to facilitate highly-contentious public policy issues. They’d say to me, “Simon, we’re going to put 200 people into a room who are at war over this issue. You’ve got two hours to get them to agree.” I had a simple facilitation strategy. Frustrate them for three-quarters of the available time and frustrate the conversation, “What do you think?” Until there are enough willingness and energy in the room to get to an outcome by the end of that two-hour block, it’s me versus them. I want all of us in this together. I discovered that at the three-quarter mark, when people are frustrated, if I would walk to a whiteboard and go, “I think I can draw this,” everyone goes, “Okay.” I always started with the geometry. I’d been forming a view at that point, “What shape is going to help me with this?” I pick the geometry.
A model obviously holds content. We know that context gives everything meaning. As an example, I said to people, “Is a speed bump to slow the traffic valuable?” Most people go, “Yes.” Not on the Autobahn in Europe. It’s dangerous. Outside of school zone, it’s valuable. Context gives everything meaning and then concept. A great model always carries both context and concept. A big tip for everyone. The number one thing that gets lost in the sale first every single time is context. Why is this critical? If we think about levels, imagine a vertical column of levels. At the highest level is context. Why do we need to do this? Let’s take a basic idea.
I’m going to draw three concentric circles to explain. A lady came up to me in a conference and said, “What model will work for my business?” I said, “What’s the business?” She said, “I sell expensive baby giftware and it’s retail.” I normally work in the realm of complex products and services. “I don’t know but a model has popped into my head. I’d love for you to give it a try. Let’s see if it works. I’d like you to organize all the products in the store into three circles and paint the floor if you have to, and have three circles like these three concentric circles that I’m drawing, light blue on the outside, light green in the middle, and then red right at the center. Organize all your gifts according to a certain structure because what’s the first question a customer asks when they come into the store? The question is, ‘I’ve got to go to a christening. Do you have any suggestions for a gift I could buy?’”
I said, “When they come to the counter and ask, ‘Do you have any questions?’ I’d love the people on the counter have a laminated version of these three concentric circles under the counter. Have them pull it out from under the counter and say, ‘You’ll notice the store’s organized according to colors, light blue on the outside, light green in the middle, red in the center.’ On the outside of the blue circle, you’ll find gifts out there that acquaintances, distant family and friends would buy. I write that on the circle and those gifts are between $50 and $150. In the light green circle, you will find gifts that close friends and family would buy. They range in price from $150 to $250.
Right in the center of the store, in the red circle, we call that the heart circle and they draw a heart onto the piece of paper. They’re the gifts that the people are most important in this child’s life would buy for them and they’re $250-plus.’” Here’s the punchline, “Tell me, what is your relationship to the child?” What’s in this model is context. The context is why are people buying a gift for a child? Why do they want to know what should I buy? That’s the context of the sale. Why would they even ask, “What should I buy?” When people are buying a gift for a couple or for a child, the context is ego, “I want them to remember my gift. I don’t want to buy a gift that’s crappy. I don’t want to buy a gift that is the cheapest gift on the table.” The context is ego.
Without even talking about it, we’ve got contexts smack bang in the middle of the model. The concept is you buy a gift according to your relationship with the child. After she started using it, I said, “How has it going?” She said, “It’s funny. My staff would say, ‘What’s your relationship with a child?’” They’d say, “I went to the university with the mother.” “You’re in the blue circle. You’re in the outer circle where acquaintances and distant friends would buy,” and they go, “No. I’ve got a much closer relationship with the mother. I’m in the green circle. I’m not in the $50 to $150 circle. I’m in the $150 to $250 circle. I should buy something from there.”
The model carries context, “Why are they buying this?” embedded into the model and concept. This could be consultancy. This is a quick throw away. This could be, “What are you looking for in this solution you’re trying to find for your sales team? Are you looking for an off the shelf solution? Are you looking for a hybrid between a standard training package and some customization? Are you looking for a bespoke solution that’s going to double down on exactly what you need and turn your sales team into the best performing sales team in the industry? What solution are you looking for?” Most people will go, “I want the center.” I said, “The only conversation then is whether the budget is going to stretch that far.” They go, “That’s true.”
It's only humans that create pressure in the sales process. Click To Tweet“Why don’t we design a solution that’s bespoke and then see how that matches up with your budget?” That’s a healthy place for a consulting conversation to start. What’s embedded in that is context, “I want the best sales team. I want the best solution. We deserve to bespoke.” The concept is you can have off the shelf. We’ve got that but you’re going to want a customized bespoke consulting solution here. Three concentric circles can change the entire conversation. It’s a target of course. The geometry says you can float around the outside or you can be right in the middle of this thing. The geometry paints a clear picture.
What’s the third part, Simon? There’s so much good stuff that you have. I know we could keep going over and over. I want to respect your time here, so what’s the third part of the triangle?
The third part is what we’ve become known for is the choreography of the model. It’s how you walk through it. Choreography is two things, the pathway. A model should have a clear direction. The direction of this model is from geometry to content to choreography. We consciously build these punchlines into the model. I’ve studied stage magic and comedy as well because they are two of the most engaging forms of entertainment. It’s all about the punchline. Everything is a setup for the punchline. This mic drop moment where you simply say to them, “What are you looking for?” “Off the shelf solution, a hybrid that’s somewhere in the middle or a bespoke solution where we create a strategy that’s going to give you the highest performing sales team in your industry.” “I’ll leave that with you. You choose. It’s your call. Tell me what’s the relationship with the child?”
A punchline moment is this complete shift of paradigm that instantly highlights this blind spot the person has had or this unseen but obvious thing once it’s shown and once exposed, it can’t be forgotten. We work hard at thinking about how we walked through a visual framework. In the sales process itself, we’ve created an entire sales system with models. Both is a robust process with models placed all the way through. We have a set of models that we now work and tested. The flagship model is that genius model sitting between vision, mission and delivery is organizational genius. We can capture the genius of an entire organization in one framework that takes about 7 to 11 minutes to walk through. We’ve got people selling $100 million, $200 million ship construction and people selling a $2,000 advisory service off a genius model. The thinking needs to go into the model beforehand and that allows you to be adaptable in the choreography. It’s pre-thought.
Simon, we’re going to make sure that people can learn more about you, your company and there’s a lot of stuff they can dive into. I want to take us back to your story a little bit here. Once you started to build this, you went from running your own consulting business to doubling down and focusing on the Model’s Method and your company right now, which is what you do exclusively with different types of businesses helping them to develop these models, the choreography and all that. How did you go about getting clients for that business? Even more specifically, what are you doing now? When we spoke before, speaking was a big part of how you got clients. With everything happening, you’re not traveling as much as you typically would. Walk everyone through what has been working best for you from a lead generation perspective in terms of bringing new people into your world to learn about your offering?
We’re discovering that we’re a bit of an anomaly. I don’t use any paid advertising. We use LinkedIn reactively and not the private messaging but posts specifically. I post every Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning.
Are you posting or your team helps with that? How does that approach work?
I would have created the post. My team will help with that. I draft a whole series of comments that would be appropriate for the posts that members of the team can use. If I’m tied up on something, then the members of the team can also post to that. We’ll typically put that post into Facebook on the same day, and we use our list proactively. We communicate with that list every week. It’s a good question, “Is it me or is it the team?” Two things are working. One is the models themselves. I don’t put any content out that doesn’t have a visual component to it. If I’m doing the post last minute, it might be stock image that I’ll put a quote over the top of. For the most part, I draw a little model.
I thought long and hard about how I create video content. I built a glass board so that I can draw the model in the air in front of me. When people go to my website, they’ll see a bunch of those videos. I’ve become known for that type of video. I’m standing in front of camera drawing a model in the air in front of me speaking to it. People are captivated by it. We regularly get comments from people that it’s one of the best video formats they view on LinkedIn. We get multiple leads every day from LinkedIn, depending on the day of the week and what we’ve put out.
What do you think drives that, Simon? A lot of people put content on LinkedIn. When you and I spoke, you said something that resonated with me which is that you’re not just putting content on LinkedIn that’s topical or information. You think at a deeper level about how that content can have meaning or connects with. Can you share a little bit more about what your thought process is around the content that you’re sharing?
The old adage is that sex sells or sexy sells. I believe that profound wisdom will outsell sexy every day of the week. People know when they’ve bumped into profound wisdom. I’ve done that. I consciously think about an issue and then try and drop two levels down into a profound level of understanding. In my mind, I’ve got this thing, I want to go two levels down into profound deeper than everybody else. I think about what’s a model that would explain that.
Can you give us a quick example of that? I want to extract the genius from within you to the benefit of everyone reading, and maybe an example of what would be the typical level that someone would be at in terms of one of your post and where you could have stopped and instead you went deeper to that profound level.
I did a post where I was talking about this idea of business. I drew a circle and divided it into two, 1/2 on the left-hand side and 1/2on the right-hand side. I was talking about business is two things. We sell stuff to people and then we deliver stuff to people. The money is paid on the exchange from sale to delivery. If you think about how people deliver to customers, there are three levels that a customer will typically experience. Unfortunately, at the lowest level, people might be disappointed by their experience of the company in terms of being delivered to them. Most are going to have delivered what was promised. Nothing spectacular but it’s delivered.
When you put a model into the conversation, it lifts and elevates the conversation. Click To TweetPeople are in the market talking about you need to delight the customer. That’s level one in terms of thinking. I would then go on and say, “In my mind, those three levels are still below what I call the ‘I should hope so’ line.” The ‘I should hope so’ line is the customer is saying, “Why should I hope so? That’s not special.” If you say, “We delight the customer.” “I should hope so, for goodness sake.” There’s a level above delight and that level is when we defend the customer. That’s level two in terms of profound. What we specifically must defend about the customer is their dignity. The customer should never be made to feel less important, less respected or less dignified as a result of anything we’ve done to them if we are the company delivering to them.
The moment the customer knows you will defend their dignity at all costs even when they’re in the wrong, that customer becomes a loyal referrer for life. On the sales side, the same thing plays out. If the service side is about defending the customer, what is the sales side about? On the sales side, a lot of people resort to ‘70s style pressure-based, foot in the door selling. That’s not working anymore now. You can’t use pressure to sell to somebody who’s already under pressure with a problem. That’s level one. I want to go to level two now. A lot of people then will move from pressure-based selling and they’ll move into a consultative selling. When we get into a conversation with a customer, find out what they want, work out how we can work with them and help them.
That’s okay too. That also falls below the ‘I should hope so’ line. “I should hope you’d consult with me and work with me.” In Australia, we say, “I should bloody hope so.” What’s above that? What’s the highest value of your sales process? The highest value that I can think of for a sales process is buyer safety. If a customer feels safe with you all the way through the sales process, and the only time a customer doesn’t feel safe is when they’re interacting with a human. That’s when they feel under pressure. If a customer feels safe with you and your company all the way through the sales process, they’re more likely to buy from you. If on the delivery side, they experienced this real defense of their dignity, they’re never leaving and they’re bringing everyone else to you.
Buyer safety and defending dignity is a level two profound. I know that when I put that model up on social media, people will go, “Buyer safety of my good to defend their dignity. No one else was talking about that. Where did that come from? What do you mean? Tell us more. How do we create buyer safety?” “Let me show you. We use a highly transparent sales process and models to make the process more transparent.” Let the customer see it all the way through. People feel safer when they can see it. People are only scared of the dark because of what they can’t see.
What I’m hearing from you, Simon, is you go beyond what the typical person in your industry would be talking about, which gets people to think and to see things that they haven’t necessarily seen before, which increases the perception of value and is a higher level of value. What you’re doing is you’re tying it to your offering or your area of expertise but not in a persuasive pushy way. It seems like that is the logical next step. That makes complete sense. That’s what gets them to reach out to you. Would that be accurate?
It’s very accurate. There’s one little piece in the middle that might help people think through how they can use this for themselves. I consciously think about things at the deepest level I can possibly push it. That might mean I’ve got to read some stuff, but what it means is I observe a lot. I spent a lot of time thinking about the stuff I do. Everyone gets busy. The consulting world, particularly the independent consultant world is this up and down cycle of selling and working. I take a lot of effort into noticing things and observing particularly in the middle of consulting projects and things like that. I think deeply about what I do, but then I try and capture that profound thinking in the framework of a model. What it does is it gives that profound thinking credibility and people will go, “That makes sense,” just like I’ve drawn in front of you, a circle divided into selling on one side, delivery on the other side. There are four levels of delivery on the right-hand side and there are three kinds of selling on the left-hand.
People look at it and go, “That makes sense. I want to be at the top part of that model without me saying anything.” People are saying, “I want to be at the top part of that model. I was at the top deliberately. I didn’t go from the top down. I went from the bottom up because I want to be at the top of that model. How do I do that? The very fact that Simon is the one that put it in front of me must mean he has the answer to getting there. I want to engage with him on this stuff.” I anchor the profound thinking into the visual framework because then I can carry that with them. What happens, Michael, psychologically is whether they work with me or not, they have a framework. I didn’t realize this until I started doing it.
My clients started to use my models as a way of assessing other potential candidates for the work. In this case, my clients would be saying, “How do you do buyer safety into your sales processes that you teach?” Other people are going, “What do you mean buyer safety? We need to get the conversion and close the deal.” They’re going, “We want our customers to feel safe in the process with us. How is that built into your sales process?” I’m very involved in our marketing and our selling. A part of the problem with automation is it’s removed the level of safety for people because they aren’t dealing with the person who’s initiated the thought, product or service. They can’t meet who they’re going to be dealing with. It’s exactly like you said, the only thing is I consciously attach it to a framework in the middle so the framework becomes the carrier of the message. Because I built the framework, obviously I know how to get them there.
They’re able to choreograph. That’s where the whole choreography part comes in, you know how to move them to get the result or to have them see what you want them to see in the strategic world.
I’ve also very quickly sold the next project too, by the way. If the first project is the sales team and all of a sudden, they want to pursue this buyer safety thing, the next logical project after that is delivery. How do we defend dignity into that process? Let’s talk about that after we’ve done the sales work. There are multiple projects in this thing.
Simon, let’s make sure that people can find out where they can learn more about you and your work and see some of this. It’s CreateMyModels.com/EOI, is that correct?
Correct. That’s a gift that people can grab a hold of. Price is something that a lot of people struggle with and particularly consultants. I’ve lived in that world for a quarter of a century. I know the world well. I’ve been using the simple bell curve to completely reposition on price early in projects and have the client eliminate the lowest prices in option for themselves as a part of the scoping conversation using a bell curve. If people go to CreateMyModels.com/EOI, as in Expression of Interest, they can get a video of me walking through the bell curve with the choreography and a little seven-point checklist so they can set up the bell curve for themselves to use in their own sales conversations to take the lowest price off the table.
It will take the lowest price off the table instantly based on the customer’s ego saying to them, “We want a better solution than cheap.” The way you show up particularly in social media, in today’s world, you’ve got to show up differently. The greatest innovation potentially in most companies is how we market and sell. If they go to ModelsMethod.com, there’s also a useful download on the homepage, but there’s a bunch of quick videos on there where they can see that glass board in action and get a bunch of other models, value model and that sort of thing on the website. If people want to reach out to us from the website, they can and we can let them know more about what we do as well.
Simon, thank you again so much for coming on. As always, I enjoy these conversations. It’s a fresh perspective that many people are not familiar with. I definitely want to encourage everyone to check this out and learn more about Simon and his work.
It’s a pleasure, Michael. It was lovely spending the time with you. I’ve followed your stuff for a while. I appreciate what you’re doing. Particularly, for an industry that’s important to both our hearts, I’m sure. I’m thrilled to have been able to help in this way.
Thanks so much, Simon.
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