 In this video you're going to learn about pricing service design, you'll learn why you actually want objections and you'll learn how to get in front of the right people. The special guest in this video is Mike Killen. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. And in order to do that, you actually need to convince clients to engage with you and that sometimes poses some interesting challenges. In this video and this series of videos, we'll be talking about some of the more common and interesting sales challenges and the person who's going to lead us through these sales challenges and hopefully overcome them is the one and only Mike Killen. Welcome to the show, Mike. Hey, Mark. Thanks so much for having me on, man. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk with you. You have no background in service design, but we know each other through YouTube. You actually run a channel called Sell Your Service. Yeah. Man, what is it about? So basically I ran a marketing agency a little while back and I did pretty well, I moved on from that. And the goal of what I do now as I'm the founder of Seller Service, you know, we have a small team, I basically help marketing agencies predominantly increase their prices, define a niche and sell their services for at least $25,000 plus. I predominantly focus on marketing agencies because that's my background, but the reality is the majority of the training that I do, we work with translation companies, we work with graphic designers, we work with tourists, companies and travel operators. Anyone who basically sells an intangible service, we essentially help them close. Exactly. That's us. The biggest problem that we're going to come up against on these great little training role play videos that we're going to do is just because it's intangible doesn't mean that it's harder to sell. So I don't think you need to necessarily have a firm background and hopefully when your guys are watching this, they'll be able to swap in and out words that maybe I misuse, but I'm really excited to kind of jump into this. Awesome. Yeah, and I'm really excited to have somebody from outside of the service design community to give a perspective on the things we're going to talk about are general sales challenges that are usually not tied to service design, but often to businesses that sell intangible stuff. I'm really excited. We're going to do five videos. This is the first video in the series, so make sure you keep watching until the end because we'll give you a hint where the next one is. In order to do these videos, I reached out to the service design community to get some of the challenges. We picked three that we'll share with you in a minute, but Mike, I want to go back with you down memory lane and try to understand, when did you get excited about selling? When did you realize that this is something you need to get better at? It's interesting because we've actually got a family of sales people and maybe in the UK it's the same. Sales in some respect is kind of looked down on. It's treated a little bit as a role as something you do when you can't get a real job. The reality is I've actually found that nothing happens in any business ever until someone makes a sale. The cold hard reality is that no one celebrates whether you're the best author, they care whether you're the best selling author. I actually come from a long line of sales people and pretty early on I liked the idea that I could help solve people's problems and it could be kind of the core engine part. The part when it really clicked for me is I did product design at university so a lot of graphics and drawing and CAD and stuff and I loved that idea but turns out I can't draw for money, I'm terrible at it. So I had to tack on a marketing component to my degree in order to complete it. So I didn't design very good products but I was really good at selling them and I found actually you could be the world's best photographer but if you're not as good as someone who can sell their photography it doesn't matter and from there a big part of my background has been working with insurance companies, car rental companies, big software companies, predominantly working through the sales and marketing department but now I'm pretty much exclusively focused on sales. Awesome. I think we're going to learn so much from you man, I'm really excited to dig into the real challenges. So in the next video we're going to help you to solve a real life sales challenge and that will be when a client says, you know, well Mark your proposal is great but that sounds pretty expensive for just two customer journey maps. So we'll hear about how Mike handles that comment in this next video so make sure you click over here and we'll see you over there.