00:00:00
Bryan Whittington
It's all jacked up. All right. Hey everyone, Brian Whittington, with this episode of hyper growth banter, all this is going to be fun, right? So if you have kids around, you might want to earmark, right? Because my guest today, Laura, born yeas, is that how you pronounce it correctly? Lauren? Yes. Born. Yes. Okay. We're from Pittsburgh. We're both of us from Pittsburgh. We got some good Pittsburgh accents, right? Shalla Roy is really show the Ray, but we say shallow Roy around here, right? Shallow water. So, anyway, we're going to be talking about today on this hyper growth banter. How do you sell something? That's brand new that the market doesn't even re maybe realize that they're, they have a problem and they're swearing about it. They're frustrated about it, but we're brand new to the market. They haven't even considered about it. That's going to be the hypergrowth banter topic of the day.

00:00:51
Bryan Whittington
How do we sell something that the market doesn't even know that they need? so with that said, welcome Laura.

00:00:58
Laura Bornyas
Hey, Brian, I'm glad to be here today. Thanks for having me on your show.

00:01:03
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. This should be a lot of fun because, what you don't know is Laura and I have had a number of different conversations in the past, and I could not keep up with my note taking. She has a lot of great ideas, comes with a lot of cool background. So let's jump right into this. Now, whenever were doing this lore, what I was thinking about whenever we're talking about, all right, how do we sell something brand new? Right. Nobody even realizes that there is an alternative way. In brainstorming this year, what I was thinking about is, okay, how do we make them aware that there is an alternative, but also make them aware that they have a problem, right? So that's going to be one thing, is that one aware of an alternative, but I guess even before that they have a problem. That's going to be an awareness stage.

00:01:50
Bryan Whittington
Two, how do we get them to admit that they have a problem? Because the biggest things that we do whenever we're on cold outreach, we hear things like, no, I'm fine. No, we're good. Now we have a great team. How do we get them to admit that? So that's going to be the other piece, the third piece, there's going to be overcoming status quo. Some of the biggest alternative, some of the biggest competitors to us is that status quo. How do we overcome the inertia, that status quo. Lastly getting them engaged in that process and having to educate the whole entire way, which we, especially for in startup mode, we don't have time to educate. We have to bring revenue through the door right now. How do we engage them, through that education with shortening of sales cycle the whole entire way. That's kind of the mind mapping that I had.

00:02:46
Bryan Whittington
Let me just pause there and get some feedback on those ideas, Laura.

00:02:52
Laura Bornyas
Yeah, you're exactly right. I think, what we're going to be seeing coming forward. I'm a big picture thinker. I like to think long term. I believe with all of the changes with technology, it's impossible for any one person to keep up with all of it. These changes in technology are creating opportunities every day. Everything that you knew yesterday, it's getting outdated, faster because of the technology curve. I think that's where, when you look historically and you look at like how things changed and what was possible, it was a much slower curve until now. If you go off of historical knowledge of what will new things come out so many years are so many things. I mean, when you look at the big picture, you have teenagers creating, a Bitcoin alternatives, Ethereum in there, I think it was in their parents' basement, in Canada or whatever that was.

00:03:47
Laura Bornyas
These things are popping up and, they're happening so fast that people can't keep track of them. One of the analogies that I like to use are everybody knows where the sharks are in the water, but have you ever heard of an ear conjure jellyfish? Do what that is?

00:04:05
Bryan Whittington
No idea, but I don't want to be stung by one. That's all I know.

00:04:09
Laura Bornyas
Beautiful deli fishes are like mainly in Australia and they're only like couple centimeters long and they send more people to the hospital than every species of shark every year. What I think of this analogy, I think of Airbnb. Okay. I don't do the story about how Airbnb got started.

00:04:28
Bryan Whittington
One you so not holistically. Once you hit on that real quick,

00:04:32
Laura Bornyas
A couple of college kids, they were creating an app for something. They ran out of money. They said, Hey, we're going to buy an air mattress and run it out in our room. They figured they could make money that way they started Airbnb. Do you think that Marriott was tracking them as a competitor? Do you think they even had, this was an idea. These they're not, this isn't like venture capital funding. Like these things are being created in people's houses without university funding, without venture capital, without all these things. How do you track those changes? How do you keep up and also, how do you evaluate the vendors that you've chosen? Because if you've outsourced something to a vendor and you're relying on them to keep up with the technology changes, you should know upfront that no one person can do this. I don't think that it's, either, or I think it's more of an strategy where the companies themselves need to keep a beat on what's going on while also partnering with vendors to help them.

00:05:29
Bryan Whittington
Help me tie that into how do you sell brand news? So put that in context to me, helped me understand how your brain went there.

00:05:38
Laura Bornyas
Okay. I think that this is part of the awareness part of it, right? So if, your potential clients think, Oh, we already have everything covered. Oh, how can you have everything covered when all of these changes are happening so fast?

00:05:54
Bryan Whittington
Okay. Really then it's not only just being so under, so that, I guess that would go under those alternatives that they don't even know they're blind to the alternatives and the speed of change, right.

00:06:09
Laura Bornyas
Change. Yeah. I would say the speed of change is a good one because I can't, sometimes I can't remember where I read something or saw something, but the human mind cannot process an exponential curve. Picture yourself walking out of your house. I know I got this from a book somewhere, and I apologize, I don't have the reference, but when you walk out of your house and you take a step, you can picture that. If it doubles, then two steps, then four steps, then eight steps, 1630, two 64, at some point, your mind can't process. How far away from your house you're going to because it's happening too fast. You can, you got the first couple down, but then once you get so far away, it's too far away. I think that this is that speed of change runs on an exponential curve. This is the thing that humans just, technology is, being created faster than humans can adapt.

00:07:04
Laura Bornyas
And that came from Thomas Friedman's book. Thank you for being late. That's a good one.

00:07:09
Bryan Whittington
Thank you for being late. Okay, cool. Let's think through this then for that awareness is this gets to, does this get to call to outreach to help them get that awareness? Is it creating curiosity statements? I call it with our quote outreach, we have three steps of cold outreach, right? So we do a trust building, curiosity statement and then call to action. Those are the three steps that we use for our cold outreach. Within that curiosity statement, the way that we couch that is you almost need to poke the bear, right. Make sure right. Oh, going to poke them and get them riled up and get them off of that center to get them out of that slumber. This awareness part of that alternatives, is that kind of where you're you want to do a poke the bear, anything that they're likely swearing about, that's where you're poking them and pouring some salt in the wound there and going, and just whacking them on that.

00:08:06
Bryan Whittington
Is that kinda what you're saying?

00:08:08
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. I think questions, I guess what I was saying was, one hand, it's our job to educate right. And, and find a path to do the education. I think on the other end, buyers, of the supply, people that are involved in the supply chain of procuring products and services, they should keep this kind of what I'm saying in the back of their mind, as they think that they already have everything covered.

00:08:35
Bryan Whittington
All right. Let some pack that because, okay. Those purchasing alternatives, right? And I have this cartoon in my mind. I don't know if you've seen it before, but there's a couple of different styles of this, right? One is the American Indians and they have the American generals and they're, arrows all through them. A salesman comes up with a machine gun, or, an alternative one is back in the Roman times, they have square wheels. Somebody shows up with, the round one, or I don't have time for the sales person. With those people, they're shutting off their cell phones. I can't get through to you now through Google and Apple, they're shutting off their email, everything's going into junk or spam. So I can't talk to you there. I can't, nobody's reading mail anymore. I can send you something, but what are you going to send? So I, everybody thinks that they can Google the solution.

00:09:29
Bryan Whittington
If they don't even know they one have a problem or two, there hasn't been a solution created yet, hence, a new market for this. How are they discovering this? What are you saying to those procurement people, those people making selection of vendors. What are you saying to them?

00:09:44
Laura Bornyas
I think that they need to pick up, they're typically very process oriented and I think that they need to dedicate X percent of their time, whatever that percentage looks like for them. They should set aside X percent of time to actually keep a beat of what's going on out there. Because if they have, let's say they have a very good vendor relationship with somebody and they rely on that person for everything. What I'm suggesting is that one trusted vendor, there's no way they can vet out everything that's coming. They can't, they can't vet out everything. That's come up to this point and they can't vet everything that's going to come because we're in that accelerated exponential curve where technology is being created faster than people can adapt.

00:10:29
Bryan Whittington
Part of that off of the innovation or extremely off of that awareness then is innovation and putting some time for innovation. Whether you target those innovation, because they're the one that are going to be seeking these out, these should be the ones that are going to be more open to those types of conversations to have time of brainstorming. If there isn't, if you're too small, right, you don't have an organization with an innovation department and innovation team, or, the chief innovation officer or whatever, they're calling them these days.

00:10:59
Laura Bornyas
Right. Well, I've actually done some research on that. It's funny because when you say chief innovation officer, it could be specific to it. Or it could also be chief innovation officer on like really the strategic leadership team, and I've been reading our, it's funny that you touched on this because I've been reading article I, one of the articles I read from Forbes said, companies shouldn't even have a chief innovation officer. It should be part of the culture where everybody is, innovative from top to bottom. So I I'm still exploring this topic. I haven't formed a solid opinion on it yet.

00:11:33
Bryan Whittington
There's a, there's a book I've not read it yet. I can't vouch for it, but I saw him speak, it's called the idea driven innovation, or I'm sorry, the idea driven organization. That's by Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder, S C H R O E D E R. Schroeder and Alan Robinson and what they're suggesting there. It's been a real challenge for me to bring this into our organization, being completely transparent because too many people me included. Sometimes we get so heads down that we don't take the time to think another great book or another idea off of this as an organization or a book called deep work, where you take the time to critically think you take the time to do the innovation. What they're talking about here is not innovation from technology, but it's identifying what the problem is and then fixing it. So that gets to that awareness stage.

00:12:30
Bryan Whittington
The, in the example that he gave was there was a hotel over in Europe and they have two bars, the one bars in the main lobby, and they would have three bartenders. Once an hour, they would see sales plummet. The reason sales plummeted is one of these bartenders would have to take all of the recycling, take it down to the basement, dump it out. The bar, the bartender was pissed because they're not getting yeah, because their sales are slumping. They're not getting tips. Their guests are getting frustrated because there's one less person to help them. So, you know, they're getting frustrated. They're having to wait longer, everybody's losing off of this. One day one of the bartenders goes down there and they hear clink right over top of their head. And they're going, wait a second. Talk to the building maintenance manager. The next day, they drilled three holes into the ground to drop stuff down into this, into the buckets.

00:13:34
Bryan Whittington
They no longer how to do that. They identify the problem, fix it for less than 500 bucks. It came from those on the front lines. What we started to do is try to take this idea. I have a spreadsheet, what's the problem? What do you think the root cause of that problem is? And if you want a copy of this, just ping me. What's the problem. What's the root cause of the problem. What's your suggested solution. That's a suggested solution. Might be, Hey, I need to brainstorm this cause I'm not a hundred percent sure yet. It's an ideation, exercise, or it might be, let's do this cost of that. Let's do this. If it's less than 500 bucks, everybody has carte blanche to be able to do it. That's, as we get, more and more revenue coming through the door, that number is going to go up, but it's less expensive to try a $500 exercise.

00:14:29
Bryan Whittington
That person feels more empowered to sit together, three people in a room to, ponder your knee, ponder your belly button as you're doing Naval exercises. Right. Trying to think about Bosch shouldn't we do this. I don't know. There might be a better way, just 500 bucks. Do it, try it out. You're going to learn from it. Then, who owns that thing and what action are going to be, and then what's the date that it's going to be done by. That's kind of the columns of that innovation.

00:14:58
Laura Bornyas
I think what the story that you just told it made me think of something. The problems don't necessarily have to be not working or totally broken. Like they didn't shut down because of this problem. It was a bottleneck, right? So I wonder how many organizations are identifying the bottlenecks and tackling those because it's the system didn't shut down. They were so open. Everything was still moving.

00:15:26
Bryan Whittington
Well, and that goes again, awareness. Not only innovation, so innovation, but then also awareness is going to go off of, root cause, right? The root cause, because how many times do we solve the wrong problem? We put a band, duct tape.

00:15:44
Laura Bornyas
I love that. I love that. I get so irritated with like people that do band-aided things, because I feel like that's my mindset when I was 20, not now. Right. My mindset when I was 20 was how do I fix this immediate thing? And the older I get, the more I realize, like, if you don't fix the root cause it's going to cause many more issues further down the line, it's better to just fix it the right way then to keep slapping, because here's the other thing, the more band-aids you slap on something, you're going to need a damn razorblade to get those things off. By the time you do need to overhaul their, you can only let them stack up so much before everything just kind of hits that point of no return. If you want to call it that.

00:16:25
Bryan Whittington
It's funny, right? Because I say you have duct tape, twine and rubber bands, right. Or band-aid, it's Franken business. It's like, it looks like a business as it rides walking around as a living dead. So it's you. Right? So we have to identify that root cause that this is really going to come off of that innovation is going to then identify that problem, or I guess the root cause problem. I guess it goes to, how do we get people to admit that are alternatives that they're blind to and because of the speed of change, how do we get them to admit that?

00:17:04
Laura Bornyas
I think I have a good, I think I have a fairly good, answer for the admitting part. Right? Go for it. So I think curiosity, right. Curiosity is going to drive change or innovation and curiosity comes from questions. One thing that I like to do is ask questions around the objections that I usually see. In the event, if I can anticipate that my objection is going to be, let's say you're a company with data analytics and you're like, Oh, we have these great data analytics. Right? Well, the differentiator between company and company B, it's not necessarily, they both may have data analytics. Right. The difference is going to be in the, it's going to be in the people, strategizing how to use those numbers or deciding which numbers to use before you even get your dashboard. Right now, we're getting into what you're talking about, the awareness and the root cause and the differentiators.

00:18:03
Laura Bornyas
If procurement people or people in charge of making decisions, if they're like, yeah, we've checked the box, we have analytics, that's an objection. What if I, like on our website, I just kind of give you a little thing. I actually know that in the health insurance industry, they get, carrier reports, data analytics, and dashboards and reports and tools from the insurance companies. On the website I actually put, what are your carrier reports missing? I already know it's going to be an objection. I already know. They think they know everything. I'm trying to handle them through education, through questions.

00:18:44
Bryan Whittington
A couple of things off of that. Off of that, how do you get them to admit curiosity statements or generating curiosity through your questioning strategy, proactive objection, handling. How do you questions? So you lay out that question again.

00:19:01
Laura Bornyas
What are your insurance carrier reports missing?

00:19:05
Bryan Whittington
Okay. What are your, insurance carrier reports missing? So that's a, so not only how do you, but what, so how do, what are, yeah. How do you do this? What are you missing? What, because really what we're doing is that it goes back to the poke, the bear to get them to realize, Oh, something hurts.

00:19:31
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. I, and so here's like another couple other notes I was jotting down. It's like part of my brainstorms for this. The other thing that I think, we can do to get our, because a lot of people have really great ideas, solutions, products, services that just aren't making their way, to pass this awareness point. If you're targeting certain job titles, if you will, have you ever heard of like Myers-Briggs or those types of personality tests.

00:20:00
Bryan Whittington
Myers-Briggs we use this profile a lot.

00:20:02
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. Disk any of those. It's, what I like to use? I like to use those tools as an estimation, not as like an end all be all right. You can estimate some things like if somebody is introverted versus extroverted, they prefer to communicate in different ways, right? Like you can kind of create some general buckets if you will, if you know that CEOs, for example, are the number one personality type is an EMTJ. You can then reverse. Well, how do they like to communicate? How do ENT J's like to communicate? Most of them are big picture. They like to get to the point quick they're process oriented. They're strategic, they like to delegate. They want to know what's coming. They want to know what they're missing. Like, if you put these things together for each, I don't know what I've never actually created personas, but I think this is that to the next level,

00:21:00
Bryan Whittington
A hundred percent, we started using an organization. Really cool guy, Rob, Charlie with organization called white rabbit. I can share with you more about that. If you have any questions and what he does is it's all about targeting. How do you identify who would be the right person for this? And if you're trying to inject change to allow that organization to have a better competitive advantage, you're likely not going to want to target those with a high risk aversion stereotypically here using that aligning communication styles, whether Meyer-Briggs desk or you name the assessment of choice, right. You're likely not going to want to go after the CFO because they are stereotypically, not the most risk seeking people. They're usually the highest risk aversion. Whenever I'm speaking to a CEO, I'm going to want to bring in some curiosity statements of what money are you leaving on the table? How are you losing competitive vantage here? Whereas if I'm talking to a CFO, how are you ensuring that you're right, because a CFO wants to be right.

00:22:06
Bryan Whittington
There's a high risk.

00:22:07
Laura Bornyas
That's a great,

00:22:10
Bryan Whittington
It it's, it might be the same problem that you're bringing, but they're looking at it from a different perspective and I have to couch it in terms of that different perspective to get them to admit it.

00:22:26
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. I think you're onto something with that. How do you ensure that your rights? Okay.

00:22:31
Bryan Whittington
Yeah, because they're funny. It's when we use the term tactical, I want to be right. Or I want to win. A CFO that high analytical really super detailed person, if you throw out to them a statement that you want to be right, or when on, then they're going to prove you wrong. If I said so for something example, Hey, I'm guessing that you're a hundred percent confident that your cost of healthcare is as low as possible B.

00:23:09
Laura Bornyas
Oh my God. That's a beautiful question.

00:23:12
Bryan Whittington
And of course it is. I was right. Now I'm going to have to figure out a way of getting this person to admit that they're wrong off of that.

00:23:21
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. So then that's actually a perfect opportunity. As we're walking through this conversation to present evidence,

00:23:32
Bryan Whittington
It might not go to evidence yet because I'm going to get into a pissing match. Hey, let me show you how you're wrong. Here's 17 reasons why I'm now in a, an intellectual, bantering or argument with a person that wants to be right in this protecting ego.

00:23:49
Laura Bornyas
Okay. What's your idea as an alternative to that.

00:23:54
Bryan Whittington
Whereas I go, okay, got it. So you're a hundred percent confident. Hey, I'm not sure I'm kinda in, you're likely right. I'm going to agree with them. I always agree with my adversary that way I don't have any, they don't have any ammunition. Oh, you're likely right. I'm curious other people now I'm third party. Other people are typically questioning, what are we missing in our health care report data that should be there. Things like blank, and blank. How are you doing that today? And that's what we're looking them to say, huh?

00:24:43
Laura Bornyas
I fell right into your trap. Right. I love you guys. Brian's leading me right down the path. He's leaving the breadcrumbs. I'm taking the bait thinker because it's,

00:24:58
Bryan Whittington
It's putting them in a position where they can admit to being wrong with protecting the Rigo. Yeah. Or I'm curious, how have you find, how have you found the way to do this? Because I'm really struggling. Or a lot of my other clients are struggling with that. That's allowing them to show off and third-party story, Hey, how are you handling this? Because a lot of our clients have not been able to uncover that, how are you doing that today? And it's not a yes, no question and say, how are you doing that today? And then they explain the process. As they start to explain the process, there's going to be holes in that process. Okay. You're doing that, help me understand when this happens, how are you handling it? And w w there, well, not a lot. Not, not really well,

00:25:55
Laura Bornyas
Well, what's what, there's a way to measure that, right? Exactly what we want to do. Say,

00:26:02
Bryan Whittington
We really haven't figured out how to measure that, or we don't know how it's feeling. All right. Well, would you be terribly opposed as this goes back to a curiosity statement and questioning strategy, would you be terribly opposed to maybe learning about a lesser known approach that can reduce risk and identify some key measurements there? So you can tell whether or not you should be a hundred percent confident in your current practices, or maybe if you're like so many others, they didn't even know that there was a better way, but I don't know. Is that a terrible idea?

00:26:33
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. I'm, I'm sold.

00:26:38
Bryan Whittington
Right. That, and that gets into the align of the, communication style. That will work with that high detailed person. In a disc profile, that's a high C because they want to prove you're right in that high D that demanding, driven type of person.

00:26:55
Laura Bornyas
Well, I like there something, I don't know if there's anybody listening that sells to it people, but this is what I have noticed is that it departments, especially the good ones, but, everyone thinks they're good at what they do. So like, we're not gonna discriminate there. They tend to have a different set of egos than what I've seen in other departments when it comes to it. When you think about it, a lot of them are on the bleeding edge of this technology curve that we're hitting. They have a reason to have an ego because they know stuff that the majority of people don't know. Right. It's its own language. It's doctors speak, medical terminology, it speaks its own language. One, one thing that I have found when I'm up against somebody that wants to do the pissing match thing, because I don't like that. I don't like confrontation.

00:27:47
Laura Bornyas
I'm not wired that way. I'll say, you guys speak your own language. I know nothing about it, but I'm hoping we can work together so I can share what I know and see if you can help me apply it and you get them on your team before you even get to that point. He's like, look, I'm not a CFO, but I'm the mom of a type one diabetic. I started poking around in this healthcare stuff. I think I've found some things that other people haven't seen. I'm looking to see if like that, like, then you, you don't get into that. What you, that pissing match, man, because it definitely happens.

00:28:25
Bryan Whittington
W what I like what you've put there, I call it trust statements. Right? So there's three types of trust statements. One is going to be a negative trust statement or a negative label. Hey, it seems like you already have this figured out, Hey, it seems like maybe I'm missing something. Right. So, if you talk to Chris Voss, Chris boss was going to say label, he's going to call it a label. Right. Seems like, feels like, sounds like the, so that's the one type of trust statement that negative, the other type of trust statement is a humility statement. Hey, I'm really struggling here. I'm not a hundred percent sure. Can you help me see it through your lens? Some type of a humility, a softening statement, in psychology terms is called, okay. Not okay. Back from the, a book in the seventies. I can't remember who wrote that, but it was called you're.

00:29:13
Bryan Whittington
Okay. I'm okay. Or something like that. But that's okay. Not okay. A third one would be really a clarifying trust statement of, so that means like such as, so if they give you a comment, that's not really a question. You can use a clarifying statement using tonality, which means like things along those lines. Those are some different ways that we can avoid that head-to-head confrontation and using those trust statements, whether it's that negative driving away, going for that. No, if you will, a humility statement where it's softening deflecting the blow, Hey, I'm not really understanding this or a clarifying statement. I know how to do this, which means, right.

00:30:01
Laura Bornyas
Have you, have you done any digging around into like the NLP stuff that they're using for machine learning and those types of things with, using specific words, that drive emotion. Like, are you disappointed in this? Are you frustrated with that? there's certain trigger words. I have not, dug very deep into this, but it's something that's kind of on my list.

00:30:27
Bryan Whittington
I know enough about NLP to be dangerous, but I'm not a hundred percent on that. However, that said, people buy intellectual or excuse me, people buy emotionally and they justify intellectually. Too often times we fall in love with our features and benefits were all intellectual. We don't do anything about the emotional side. That's where if we're doing those curiosity statements couched in a question in terms of their communication style, leveraging these interpersonal skills of trust statements, that's where we can really uncover it. And it seems like you're frustrated here. Yeah. We have another tactic, we call the three magic questions and that three magic questions is the three magic questions. The first one you have to kind of set it up to it, to where you can get an example. So, well, can you tell me more about that? Can you be more specific? Can you give me an example? Right.

00:31:25
Bryan Whittington
Whatever it is, so you can ask the question. Can you give me an example? That's magic question. Number one, because by getting them to give the example, they're reliving it, they get your subconscious doesn't know if it's happening for the first time, or again, it works. If they don't know if it's happening again in your mind, or, if it's reality or not, so you get them to relive it. They're reliving that emotion, that frustration, that everything. Instead of just the NLP using those words, Hey, it seems like maybe you're disappointed or most people are frustrated or most people are angry about right. You're using those to get their emotional involved. If you get them to give an example, they physically feel it's insane how that works. You get them emotionally involved off of, can you give me an example? And then you unpack that and then question number two off of that magic question.

00:32:17
Bryan Whittington
Number two is, well, because of that, what now you get the impact. So they're emotionally involved. They relive what the impact is, and now you get their motivation with magic question. Number three is well with, or without my help. How big of an issue is this? Does this need to get solved? Or is this back-burnered? No, I need to get this done. You can go to an embedded command, which is of NLP. Well, let me, do you mind if I make this suggestion, let's do this and I do an embedded command,

00:32:48
Laura Bornyas
You said something there and, this is something that I've wondered about, but I haven't dug in very far. Okay. Process for creating priority. Right. There a whole, is there a whole process for elevating or is it with the pain? Is the pain? What drives the priority? Do what I mean?

00:33:09
Bryan Whittington
Oftentimes, so the way that we structure that, and again, this is another,

00:33:15
Laura Bornyas
Well, I have, I take people off track. If we don't have time in this episode, we can put that to the side.

00:33:24
Bryan Whittington
Comes, comes with getting them to admit it, right. We're now admitting getting them to admit this maybe in a exercise, but to prioritize that there's two different ways. One in that discovery call is how you set that up. One is you make sure that you outline what the steps are. So we call it hashtag next steps. Two is, once you do that, you get them to paint a picture, help me.

00:33:52
Laura Bornyas
Do you think that analogies examples would be, so for example, something that's super easy and super relatable would be, let's say new technology with like TV quality, right? Think about the progression of quality of a TV screen, right? Oh, don't worry. We we've got the best, new screen on the market. I'm good. The picture I have is fine. Right. High death comes along and it's so crazy good that a lot of newscasters got let go because they couldn't make their appearances look the way they want it, because the high Def was too clear. I'm like, you think about like, just crazy things that just totally disrupt. Right? So one hand you have people they're at home. They like high quality TV and they're like, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm covered. But then you've got those early adopters. All of a sudden they're exposed to there is a better way, right? Then the exposure, the awareness, the knowledge, and then they see it.

00:34:54
Laura Bornyas
They're like, Oh my gosh, I want that. Or maybe they wait because the price has to be at a point where, there's other factors that come in to make the decision. I'm wondering if we can use that example is a way to create, map out maybe the psychology or what goes on in the minds of a purchaser. When you think you have everything you need. You're not aware that there's new things coming out.

00:35:19
Bryan Whittington
Well, what that made me think of is target. If you go way back in the day, there's a great book that I'd really highly recommend. It was called crossing the chasm. If you think about crossing a chasm, those early adopters, those are going to be those people that are in innovation. Those are going to be the CEOs of their, those visionaries. If I can target those type of personalities, and then you're also going to need to align your marketing and sales to target them. If I have low maturity, meaning I don't have a lot of education on this product yet. There's going to have to be a lot of education. That's going to require different sales and marketing approach to target the right person. I need the right type of salesperson to execute that. I need to have a perspective of length of time that this is going to do so my go to market sales process, talent strategy, hiring strategy is all going to be attack wrapped around two things.

00:36:23
Bryan Whittington
One who's my target and to the maturity level of my product. Thirdly, off of that is really the buyers journey through that, depending on the buyer's journey is going to depend upon all of this complexity and how I'm going to attack it. All of that, to me, what you just said goes to targeting, but to answer your question, to do what stories and analogies help you bet, that's another way that you can get people emotionally involved without attacking the Rigo.

00:36:53
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. Yeah. I think that I was thinking about that TV analogy, where you thought you knew everything until, right? Like there's stuff that's being created that didn't exist yesterday and that's happening. Products, services, strategies, processes, like automation, all these different things. They're, they're being created faster than most than really not most people they're being created faster than people can even vet them out.

00:37:24
Bryan Whittington
Right. How are you dealing with change management in a hyper changing hyper change environment? I mean, nobody wants to change and they love status quo. How are you handling that? How are you keeping up, how are you not going to be the next Kodak or the next, blockbuster?

00:37:47
Laura Bornyas
I like that one, right? That's right. Yeah. Kodak or, Oh gosh, what's the stat on the fortune 500 companies since the 1950s, half of them have gone away and some of them actually went out of business. A lot of them were acquired. Those are, you think those too big to fail, right? Fortune 500 level, too big to fail, but yet half of them are gone. Correct. Those disappearances, I haven't looked at the chart, but I would imagine they run on an exponential curve and they follow technology. I wouldn't be surprised if exponent, like, if less happened in 1950 than what happened in, 20, ,

00:38:28
Bryan Whittington
So let's talk about that. We've talked about the awareness of it. We've talked about getting them to admit it through a couple of different ways. That's going to be curiosity, statements, questioning strategies, aligning with communication styles, targeting. How do we get, how do we overcome status quo? Because I just did a LinkedIn post the other day about that's like the black hole.

00:38:51
Laura Bornyas
I think I, I think I know, and I have to say it cause I'll forget how my mind works. Fear of loss, people hate losing. There's the psychology of losing versus winning. They hate losing twice as much as they like winning. Yes. Now you have to maybe walk down the process of what they're going to lose if they don't change and maybe focus on that versus what they're gaining, or maybe a combination of the two,

00:39:24
Bryan Whittington
I've heard it, 80, 20, 80% fear of loss, 20%, what you'll gain.

00:39:30
Laura Bornyas
Oh, okay. I never heard of that, but I mean, Parado principles everywhere. So that makes sense. Yeah.

00:39:35
Bryan Whittington
The reason being is if you just make them feel badly, here's what you're going to lose.

00:39:41
Laura Bornyas
Given them the solution, Steve you've left them, something, keeping them awake at night and there's no alternative to run to.

00:39:49
Bryan Whittington
Precisely. That, yeah, so I, I did, identify fear of loss, call that 80%. And then, hope.

00:39:58
Laura Bornyas
I have a funny story. This, obviously this healthcare monster is so big and there's so many different aspects to it. Right? When I first started plotting out what the problem was to do the education piece, my business partner now refers to it as our bitch deck. He said, he said, we got to fix this. Like we have to, like, we have to like teach them the problem, but also show them how to fix it. That's our, we may have had a hundred and zero in that scenario. We might not have had any solutions.

00:40:36
Bryan Whittington
The other thing to overcome status quo is identifying that fear. Also the hope of what utopia could look like. We have a way, the other thing that I just marked down there is content creation.

00:40:50
Laura Bornyas
That's like, that is, I in thinking about the change. Okay. You think about a distribution of content right before you would, print something, mail it, all this stuff. Right. Now the distribution channel was digital where you don't even need physical products. Right. What happens in distribute digital distribution is that all of your costs are in the upfront content creation because you can distribute basically for free or close to nothing. Right? So most people undervalue, what it means to have a good content person, because it's not just pretty words. It's also the sales process wrapped into there, right. And, and their ability to adapt to the channel that they're going through. I think we're going to end up with a shortage of content creators. I mean, I think they're on the list with, programmers, developers, that kind of stuff. Many of them can freelance. They don't necessarily have to work for a company.

00:41:48
Laura Bornyas
They're freelancing the supply and demand is out of whack. Anyways, that's I went off on a little tangent there,

00:41:56
Bryan Whittington
Mark down off of that as subject matter experts, personal branding. If you look on LinkedIn, there's a lot of people that are all about personal branding. That's going to help with talent acquisition. That's going to help with branding. That's going to help in shortening downtime to trust because that's the key here, right? Why am I not going to buy from you? Because I don't know you, I don't trust you. Why am I not going to buy from you? Because I don't even know that if I have a problem and now you're pointing out that I have a problem. I don't know you. I don't trust you. What's your expertise here. It's brand new. All of that subject matter expertise dropping that you're going to have about a 300 to 500% better likelihood of somebody buying from you. If they look at you as being the content expert, right.

00:42:43
Bryan Whittington
That leading edge of that. Oh my gosh. I didn't even realize I have a problem. You're pointing this out to me. Oh, I like the hope side of this solution. Let's let's try this out. I think, Oh, the other thing that overcomes status quo is allowing it to be so it's de fractioning the bicycle or the fractioning, the buyer's process and making it easy for them to try it. De-risking it, what's a small yes. That they can have. How can I, de-risk it because people are scared of death right now, if I'm selling to an enterprise, which is where you're going out. If I'm selling to an enterprise, I no longer have seven people in the buyer's process. I'm up to like 11 to 14 people in the buyers process. Any one of those knuckleheads can veto it. How do I make it super risk averse to say yes to this, where they can try it out without losing fearful of losing their job.

00:43:39
Laura Bornyas
I'm actually working on, and I think that this could actually be built into this innovation process for anybody, but I'll look in document, how do we dip our toe in and do a couple little things tested out and then have those preconceived, Hey, we find this, we'll find you more than what we charge you for the first little looking, right? Or we take it out of the shared savings or some other kind of business model where you really, it is deep risks to your point. It creates a small project that's contained and defined so that it's not limitless and ongoing.

00:44:15
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. And, and bring up a, gain share, right? People are willing to pay more if there's a lower risk, if you can, de-risk it, in a gain share, I'm going to pay more, but I'm okay with that because I've not lost my job now, how that looks over time as competitors come in, you're going to likely have to switch up your business model. I mean, to get started off, that's a really nice way of doing it, that gain share. Or like how you put it as look in,

00:44:45
Laura Bornyas
I think that, other companies or other, people looking to do like little trials or little test. Right. That's, I think that's another good point though. You're a new business, you have to realize that they hold all the chips because you're new and you don't have your, your book built up. Right. Doing some of that upfront work, you could consider that part of your marketing costs, if you will, because if you get somebody that's willing to allow you into their business, even just a small piece of it, there's so much value in what you can learn, reference what have you, right? Because you have to practice your theory or your idea about how it works. You might not make a million dollars off their first client, but the experience you gained from that, or the reference that you gained from that, or the referrals that you gain from that are, just, you can't really put a price on that when you're starting out.

00:45:43
Bryan Whittington
Cause you're getting into efficiencies, right. Here's where we're inefficient. We can now fix that process building. Okay. Here's how I can now scale. You're also getting messaging. Here's what we're running into. Now. I have messaging to go back to point out to other people, to make them aware, get them to admit. That landing of the first couple of people not only allows you to get product market fit, but so much market Intel about how you can build this thing up even faster because it's land and expand into there. You find other offerings, lower cost of customer acquisition. We get introductions into others. I mean, there are so much good off of getting those first initial couple of clients.

00:46:26
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. There really is. That's why I said, like, not that I like to give away things for free, but it's just more of that concept. Like in a way, you can't put a price on the education that you get from those types of accounts precisely. So no,

00:46:40
Bryan Whittington
This piece that I had here was engaging. That engagement, I think, and this goes to a different episode that we talked about as one funnel marketing that's marketing approach, where it's, where are you bringing marketing in to once again, one de-risk or that educational piece too, if there's choke points within the sales process, what are we doing to proactively engage that? So that's back in the admitting portion where we're proactively objection, handling, here's where the stage typically slows down. Can we talk through that? So we're doing that in the engaged stage to shorten down that sales cycle. I think the third piece to keep them engaged would be that easy. Yes. What does that small bite-size to get them engaged there? I have an idea.

00:47:30
Laura Bornyas
Too, as well for engagement or education. As part of the content strategy, maybe partnering with some of the associations. You reverse engineer and see who your target, what associations they're members of and see if you can present, in exchange for maybe continuing education credits or maybe just, something that they might be interested in.

00:47:54
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. I love that. The other part would be as, clubhouse. I don't know if are you on clubhouse yet? social,

00:48:02
Laura Bornyas
Well, I kept getting all these notifications and I'm like, I'm trying to focus here. I gotta turn this off. Like, so I'm in it, but I haven't actually sat through anything yet. What value are you finding from there? Because it seems interesting. I'm just super busy with, building out the app, building the foundation of this business.

00:48:22
Bryan Whittington
If you use that as an educational model. Yeah. That's a place where you can become that subject matter expert.

00:48:29
Laura Bornyas
What do you think the demographic is? I'm sure it's all over the place, but if you had to say, 80, 20 role, what do you think the age, go 80 20 with each. What I'm trying to think what's in your early level in terms of expertise is on there, is it a lot of salespeople versus, I'm sure it's a mixed crowd, but like what do you think the breakdown is?

00:48:57
Bryan Whittington
I have no idea. Let me just give you some anecdotal experience from being on there. Okay. You have a number of subject matter experts. You have a number of new people and they have the different clubs they call it. You're, you can be very segmented into the expertise that you're getting. This morning I was listening to, experts on VC, right? How do we raise capital? How do we pitch that type of growing, scaling the business? So I was listening to that. There were a bunch of seasoned expertise or venture capitalists, different things along those lines. I really look at it as exposing me to things that I might not otherwise be exposed to. That's how I'm leveraging it, but then also leveraging it on an expertise perspective. There's a couple of people that they have a decent following. You jump in there and they ask you to be on the panel to help them, answer questions.

00:49:52
Bryan Whittington
You, if you put on a consistent, like your own TV show, right? So if you do a consistency every single week, I'm doing it this time, to talk about this discussion. Those are some different ways that you can do it. So, that's an education piece. That's a content creation piece to overcome the status quo, keep people engaged, content creation off of that. If you can dual purpose that you're hearing the questions that people are asking you. So, okay, now I'm going to make an offering off of that. I mean, there's so much that can come to if you're consistent on being on there and maybe you get some business off of it, maybe you don't, but that really gives you some key insights, I think for messaging, marketing, all of that stuff.

00:50:38
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. I don't think I was speaking more from like, I'm actually selling something from there, but more of like, where are the insights coming from? Because a lot of the feedback that I think is really important, but it's hard to get our, from those higher level executives, mid medium to larger organizations. Even if you're not selling them, just hearing what they have to say could be so valuable.

00:51:02
Bryan Whittington
100%. That's where if you can, if you put a show on there, you can invite those in, but then you go back to Eric, Reese's lean startup or, what's his name blanking on his name? he's out in Stanford, Forgive me. I can't remember his name is a brilliant guy, but where you talk about product market fit and you're doing those interviews. You're reaching out to those whoever you're targeting in an interview that was doing a good effect of interview.

00:51:36
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. That's a really good takeaway. I kind of, I've kind of done that loosely by, but I haven't created a process around it in terms of asking one-off questions, but not like, Oh, here's my list. I want to see if I get them to answer five questions, ?

00:51:51
Bryan Whittington
Yep. Don't do it through a survey monkey or something like that. Steve blank is the guy's name, amazing stuff. If you can check them out and he has a podcast, he also has, YouTube channel, just tons of good stuff. Yeah. All right. I think that we beat this topic of how to sell something brand new is getting people aware that they have a problem, different ways of doing that, how to admit that they have a problem. I think the biggest thing coming out of that as a questioning strategies, aligning communication style to effectively ask those questions, using trust statements. They feel a lot more comfortable in asking or answering those questions and targeting the type of person that's going to be willing to admit that they have a problem. That's going to be the innovation people, the CEOs, those that are really looking for competitive advantages.

00:52:38
Bryan Whittington
We talked about how do you get people to overcome the status quo? And that's going to be really that identification, identifying fear of loss, giving them what hope is, and then content creation. We talked about engaging through that education that's shortened sales cycle, make it easy for them to say yes. And, I put professional, I don't know what I meant by that,

00:53:01
Laura Bornyas
Associations or professional education through the associations, if I'm keeping you on track, Brian, you might need.

00:53:13
Bryan Whittington
Did we cover everything? I mean, that's there. I mean, we can go a lot more deeply into each and every one of those, but I think that's a pretty good high level overview of some things to think about whenever you're trying to find out how do I sell something that even in the market. Yeah. There, there wasn't a market for this.

00:53:27
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. I think that, I think that covered a lot of the things and I think you gave some really good feedback in terms of even, I mean, we did go into some details. I mean, I'm sure, like you said, we could go deeper, but I think that's a pretty good outline for somebody that's just getting started, or somebody that is stuck or they've maybe plateaued and they're looking to, try different approach. I think there's some really good nuggets in there.

00:53:55
Bryan Whittington
This a little bit further. If you're stuck, maybe you need to re-engineer your product or you're doing a new product offering likely the same thing would work. Yeah. Cool. Well, Hey, I can't thank you enough for those of you listening. If you have different hyper growth banter topics that you want to lay out there, definitely. Definitely let us know like us on all your different Spotify, Apple, iTunes or whatever, where are all the different places we are. Definitely like us get us out there. Laura, how, who should reach out to you? How should they reach out to you and why should people reach out to you?

00:54:30
Laura Bornyas
Oh my goodness. I appreciate you asking that question. I founded Maverick after my son was diagnosed with diabetes and everybody really has a healthcare story to somebody whether personally, or, their parents or their spouses or their kids, like everybody has a healthcare story. What happened was I started, researching, what is the root cause of this problem? And what I found was that large employers, I kept pulling on the string large employers that have 200 employees or more, they are self-insured and they're the main payers of our healthcare system. So, what we do is we help these employers, procure their healthcare more efficiently. We help them negotiate better terms and conditions. We do that by putting doctors and lawyers on the employer side of the negotiating table. HR is no longer left on an Island with their healthcare broker. And it's amazing. My business partner was a corporate CFO at a fortune 500 company.

00:55:34
Laura Bornyas
He basically quit his job when I showed him the numbers of what was going on behind the scenes. We've been financially modeling this to also help companies, forecast and scenario plan, how they can do a better job from a strategic planning perspective.

00:55:49
Bryan Whittington
Got it. If you are in HR or an owner of a organization with 200 employees or more you're self-insured and you want to save a gang load of money and help your employees.

00:56:01
Laura Bornyas
Workout quick COVID recovery, we have solutions to recapture EBITDA in less than 90 days.

00:56:07
Bryan Whittington
Say that again, cause that's a pretty bold statement.

00:56:09
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. We have solutions that can help companies recapture EBITDA in less than 90 days. Totaled all of our advisors total together have saved companies over $200 million. There's a lot of in healthcare, you just new approach, different team of experts, different execution, we'll get your results.

00:56:30
Bryan Whittington
Nice. How should they reach out to you here, Laura?

00:56:33
Laura Bornyas
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Laura L a U R a B as in boy, O R N Y a S or, I don't know if you can post something. Brian, can you add my email?

00:56:46
Bryan Whittington
Yeah, we'll put the email in the notes here. Yeah.

00:56:48
Laura Bornyas
Yeah. My email is at Maverick pgh.com.

00:56:52
Bryan Whittington
Maverick pgh.com. Not Maverick as the pilot and Topcon. I can't wait to see that again. Whenever that finally comes.

00:56:59
Laura Bornyas
Well, that's what I named my company after. Oh, nice. There you go. Did. I was like, I was like, he's doing something different with this plane. I'm like, what does Maverick mean out of the box? I'm like, that's us beautiful.

00:57:12
Bryan Whittington
Well, Hey, thanks so much, Laura. I really appreciate it, gang. Lot of stuff here that we covered, take it. Think through it, do the hard work of thinking. Do the hard work of strategy. Building, do the hard work of innovation, which is really problem solving and set everybody else, or just set yourself apart from everyone else and have that competitive advantage. Love it. Thanks so much, Laura. It's been a lot of fun, super proud of you. You only swore like one time. I think I swore more than you so well,

00:57:43
Laura Bornyas
You kept me on track today. Right? See everyone. All right, bye.