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Simple Steps to Better Sales Calls: STEP 1 – Begin With The End in Mind

Brendan · January 18, 2021 · Leave a Comment

Like anything worthwhile, being effective at sales takes time, effort, and dedication. But everyone can become better at sales.

Getting better at sales is simple. Start with the fundamentals. You can significantly improve your sales effectiveness by developing good habits and executing them consistently.

And best place to start is with the sales call itself. Each opportunity for direct customer face-to-face time is a chance to advance the overall sales process, so optimizing your effectiveness here has enormous payoff.

This post and the next few in this series outline the ten simple steps that every sales professional should adhere to. And this first step sets the foundation and establishes the momentum for everything that follows.

So let’s get started.

Step 1: Begin With The End In Mind

You’ve scheduled a sales call. Now what? Is it the first real sales call, or the fifth? Is it a discovery meeting, or a big formal presentation? Whatever the circumstances, you need to be prepared. You will want to have a plan and a process.

But before you can effectively formulate that plan, you should first invest time and think about where this specific call or meeting should end up. You need to begin with the end in mind.

Ask yourself the important first questions: What is your desired outcome? What does this successful meeting look like? What did you learn, and what did you accomplish?

Hopefully, you know what you aim to achieve by the meeting’s final minutes, whether it’s an agreement to have a next meeting, or a verbal commitment, or a detailed implementation discussion.

More even more important to every successful sales call, what is the client’s desired outcome? They agreed to the meeting, so they clearly have expectations. What are they? Do you know? Are you prepared to address them? Are there advocates or coaches attending that support your solution? What exactly do you think they want to learn and happen by the time you’ve wrapped up this meeting?

Because, in the final analysis, it’s all about the customer.

Getting Overlap

Once you truly know their meeting objective(s) and your own, do this. Create a simple little Venn diagram that overlaps your objectives with your client’s

What does it look like? Does it look like this?

Or… is this more like it?

Thinking about your next upcoming sales call in this admittedly unconventional fashion can be illuminating because, with this simple exercise, you’re qualifying the opportunity. You’re estimating the customer/product fit, and determining if there is a significant gap.

Aligning Objectives

We don’t need 100% overlap, but we are striving for something close. We’re aiming for aligned goals and objectives between you and you customer.

This can be as simple as ‘they want to solve ABC problem’ and ‘your solution solves 90% of their ABC problem, plus it addresses their DEF problem, and I want to get them to understand they have both problems.’

This is a much better product/customer fit than if your objective is to get them ‘to only solve their DEF problem.’ It doesn’t mean you don’t have a legitimate sales opportunity, but it does mean your objectives are different from those of your client.

With this awareness, both of your customer’s desired outcome as well as your own, you can then begin to reconcile any gaps (or chasms) that you’ve identified.

Which is the next step. Step Two. Your sales plan and process.

Companies ≠ Customers

Brendan · September 29, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Just as you wouldn’t confuse your job with your career, don’t confuse companies and customers. You might have a list of companies that make up your territory, but it is always the people at these companies that buy. Here’s the simple math:

Companies ≠ People

Customers = People

Over the course of your rich and varied sales career, you will likely have the good fortune to meet and get to know an overwhelming number of prospects, partners and customers. Chances are that some of them will turn into great long-term friendships and hopefully most have the promise to become future working relationships. Regardless, they will inevitably bounce around among companies and industries over the years. They might get promoted or need a recommendation. Or they may go work for one of your competitors. Or perhaps provide you with a recommendation or a reference. Anything is possible.

What if we stopped thinking of B2B as anything other than still just selling and marketing to people?
— domm (@domm) August 17, 2020

https://twitter.com/dommstatus/1295472373735387141

It’s easy to fixate on the company as ‘the customer.’ For most of us in sales, the company is the defining entity, part (or all) of one’s sales territory, and ultimately the target, after all. It makes sense to equate someone in the company as the company, but it’s not that simple. People get recruited, fired, move, get fed up and quit. Even a CEO, the face of the company, can go somewhere else. (Some of them can be odd, narcissistic and even sociopathic, but even sociopaths are people. Right?)

This also means that there’s an excellent chance you’ll run into these people throughout the arc of your career. Personally, I’ve been hired by past customers, and I’ve frequently been referred to other customers by past customers. I’ve even had a customer invest in my business.

You Never Know

In one memorable example, I found myself in the midst of an especially heated, contentious negotiation on what was one of the largest and most strategic deals of my career. I’d developed several solid relationships in the account, and in partnership with one fellow in particular had devised the framework for an exclusive customer/vendor affiliation. The proposed deal promised to dramatically increase our revenues, strategically position us with one of the largest health plans in the country and deal a significant blow to several competitors. All at once. And after a series of meetings, presentations and proposals, both sides agreed that this new, bigger relationship made sense and that a deal should be hammered out.

As the negotiations played out and we worked through the myriad details, my primary counterpart became increasingly adversarial and ultimately opposed to the deal terms. But the executive team above him wanted this done, and over the ensuing weeks he was sidelined unceremoniously from the negotiations. In the process, the friendly relationship we had established over the years became frayed and he ultimately left the company.

The story could easily end right there. Instead, we ran into each other awkwardly years later at an industry conference. Eventually, the conversation steered itself to that deal and our falling out. I ended up getting a much better perspective of the internal politics that he was enduring at the time and the implications of the deal. That chance interaction was the catalyst to reestablish our relationship, and he has since become one of my closest business friendships, something that would have been impossible to predict as I was consumed with one of the largest deals of my career.

People Have Lives

In your daily sales efforts, keep in mind that your customers are people that go home to screaming kids and obligatory soccer games, have cats to feed, need to mow the lawn, have debts and ailing parents, and are hooked on Game of Thrones. So maybe it’s not about you. Maybe it’s the company culture that best explains their actions. Or something else entirely. And chances are they won’t always be at that company.

When it comes to people, take the long view. Ultimately, it’s not all business.

Sometimes it’s personal.

Sales Fundamentals: Cold Emails

Brendan · September 23, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Cold emails work, especially if they’re not cold.

I got hit up by a start-up founder with a cold email in response to a post I placed on @IndieHackers. It’s worth sharing as it’s a great example of how to to start a sales conversation.

"Hi Brendan, I found your answers on Indiehackers quite interesting and since you're an expert in sales thought I'd take a chance & reach out!"

Off to a good start. 1) Personal. 2) Explained how he found me. 3) Deft compliment w/o being smarmy. (An “expert” in sales… of course!)

"I'm trying to make tracking the information on when the prospect is most likely to buy less of a pain for B2B salespeople through a curated database."

Also good. 1) Specific description of the problem/solution. 2) ‘B2B’ and ‘salespeople’ so again applicable to me.

Two sentences in and I’m intrigued.

"I have a few early customers but need feedback from experts in the B2B space to understand who (and how) will benefit from it the most. You've been successful at it for a while, would you have time to check this out?"

There’s the ‘ask.’

This founder is still in customer development and product definition mode, so a request for feedback from an ‘expert’ (me…I feel warm all over now) is all he wants. Not selling, but looking for comments. And “would you have time” is a nice touch.

Then, two links to review.

Four sentences, but tailored. And by starting with how he knows me, we share a community. And then we share interests (B2B, sales, start-ups.)

So I responded. Checked out his new product. Gave it some thought and sent him a Loom video.

Here’s the kicker…After checking out my comments, he tweeted a shout out thank you and retweeted one of my posts. Win/win. And unexpected.

And I’ll probably end up buying his product. Well done, @akhilpedia!

Sales Tip: Have Reasons to Reconnect

Brendan · September 4, 2020 · Leave a Comment

To keep the sales process moving forward, you need to keep the conversation going. To do that, you need to be proactive. And one solid way to do that is to create reasons to reconnect with your customer.

This isn’t complicated, but it requires some preparation. And execution. To create opportunities to reconnect, consider the following:

Explain at the end of the meeting that you’ll need to follow up on ‘item’ and try to schedule that next call. Or simply set the expectation that you’ll be reaching out, and when.
Close the meeting by reviewing next steps, and make sure that the customer is responsible for something on the list, however inconsequential. It’s another chance to follow up.
Have a follow up document/action item in mind that you can use to elicit feedback.
Simply explain in the call that you’ll check in on ‘date’ to see how things are moving.
Send them meaningful content…with an explanation of how it applies to them.

At some point, if you get complete radio silence after an extended period of time(which will vary on the deal, where you are in the sales cycle, who you’re dealing with, etc.) you can then ask if there’s still interest, is the deal dead, what is going on over there…

But until then, keep pushing and keep finding reasons to reconnect… albeit as deftly as possible.

Sales Fundamentals – Have Patience

Brendan · August 31, 2020 · Leave a Comment

When selling to big, brand-named B2B accounts, it helps to have patience. One of the more frustrating aspects of sales for early stage start-ups is the decision-making process and the slow pace of progress that’s inherent with enterprise accounts. A juicy, high-profile deal with one can be a game-changer for any small company, but making that happen can be arduous and time-consuming.

Certainly, the primary objective is to move along the sales process as quickly as practical. But it’s important to understand that most companies simply can’t move at the same speed as a start-up. And big companies can be absolutely glacial. Understand this. (As is often said, acceptance is the first step…)

There are innumerable reasons for the long process, and a wide range of obstacles and issues that come into play, including:

committees and meetings
a budget approval process
the need to build internal consensus
having to deal with internal politics
waiting on legal review
other projects, deals and distractions
vacations and travel
potentially competing or conflicting initiatives
etc., etc., etc.

Simply put, large enterprises are big, slow-moving, inefficient behemoths. And they’re behemoths due to the multitude of complicated internal structures, personalities, and operations.

So when it comes to the progress on your deal, delays and silence don’t (necessarily) mean a lack of interest. But they do require you to have a strategy and a set of tactics to keep things moving.

So have patience. But be prepared.

Be Proactive to Keep Momentum Going

From the outset of your sales effort, you should be thinking about how you can:

Create reasons to reconnect *
Develop multiple customer contacts, and stay in touch
Have phone conversations
Keep prospecting (and include their competitors)
Visit the company
Anticipate delays (and manage internal expectations)

There is an almost direct correlation with company size and the pace of decision-making. Selling big brand-name B2B deals can be worth the effort, but go into it with a clear eye, patience and stamina.
Remember, enterprise clients are essentially buying your ability to be quick, nimble and innovative.

So don’t expect it from them. Have patience.