Fred Copestake’s take away sales friction podcast
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Take away sales friction 🎙️ Fred Copestake’s podcast
I had the privilege of sharing the 4Qs framework with renowned UK sales trainer, Fred Copestake, on his acclaimed podcast show, Selling Through Partnering Skills. Fred explores how the 4Qs helps business leaders overcome friction and shift from 🎚️ order-taking to solution-selling.
4Qs IN 30 SECONDS
The 4Qs is a decision-making framework designed to help founders and sales teams 🏆 scale a business. Quadrant 1 addresses whom we serve. The remaining three Quadrants deal with what we are serving the customer, what we share in common with the customer, and how we serve the customer.
q. Who are you and what's your background?
I design and build sales systems for enterprises and startups across Asia Pacific. I’ve been doing this for a number of years. I’ve built approximately 30 sales processes. I’m probably the most experienced person in Australia on this subject.
Each time I start a new gig I’m given three months to show results. So when I’m trying to free a founder or a sales team, I use the framework I designed called the 4Qs.
q. How does my value framework improve sales teams?
After reading your book, Selling Through Partnering Skills, I realized there was a step missing in my approach. Previously when I designed and built a sales process, I would simply identify friction inside an organization, and design out that friction.
The result was an improvement in sales performance across the entire sales organization. That’s great, but I missed a fundamental step:
If a sales leader asked this question, I would have said: Ask Fred. Today, I have an answer. I use your value framework to understand if we are shifting up from order taking (what you call classic selling) to consultative selling. Or in other cases, downshifting from consultative selling to order-taking.
q. Where does the value framework fit in the bigger picture of 4Qs framework?
So I wrote the 4Qs because I needed a robust tool that addressed friction at an organizational level. Reducing friction lifts the sales performance of the entire sales organization and places less pressure on individual sales performance.
There are plenty of frameworks out there but none of them are predicated on reducing friction. And none of them are built with product-market fit in mind. A big influence came from Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape who coined the idea ‘product-market fit’.
For a lot of us, ‘fit’ was a light bulb moment. What made his metaphor so brilliant was that rather than thinking of building a business as a step 1, 2, 3, Marc is saying it is 1, 2 then 1, and then 2, and then 1 again.
While I like this metaphor of ‘fit’, however, product-market is a little too broad and I needed something more granular. The 4Qs encourages users to ‘play’ or ‘fit’ 🕹 one quadrant with another.
Today, we have identified at least eight kinds of plays or fits that one can make using the 4Qs, making it easier to apply.
For example, by classing decision-making as a Quadrant 1-2 fit or a Quadrant 1-3 fit, everyone understands the gravity of the decision being made, and how it will affect their respective Quadrants.
q: Okay tell me, what are the four quadrants?
The 4Qs (short for Four Quadrants) is a decision-making framework. The power of the 💪 4Qs rests in how it organizes people, processes, and tasks into one or more quadrants, such that everyone in the business has a clear picture of how their role and decisions touch a customer.
If I was to provide a summary of each of the Four Quadrants. Quadrant 1 who we serve, focuses on customer profile. Quadrant 2 what you serve is what we are serving to Quadrant 1 and is generally a product or service.
Quadrant 3 is who we are and is ubiquitous. Unlike Quadrant 1 and 2 which you can get a fit between Quadrant 1 and 2, Quadrant 3 is about our beliefs and cuts across all three Quadrants.
And the last one, my favorite, Quadrant 4, focuses on the precise number of interactions required to create a customer.
q: What else do you recommend salespeople use?
Read Selling Through Partnering Skills by Fred Copestake. Figure out what mode of selling you are and what you want to be. Read run_frictionless to help design and create your sales process. Then read ‘sales craft’ by Brendan McAdams to figure out routines and sales habits.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Fred Copestake is the podcast host and author of the book ‘Selling Through Partnering Skills’. The concept of partnering intelligence (PQ) forms the basis of discussions with show guests. Fred is a consultant, trainer, coach, and expert in helping sales professionals around the world improve their performance and unleash their full potential. He uses the elements of PQ to help salespeople develop a more modern collaborative approach to selling.
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