Category Archives for Sales

My Favorite Visual to Explain the Art of Sales

Definitely my favorite visual to explain the art of sales. Customers aren’t buying the drill — they are buying the hole (that the drill makes). In other words, your customer has a DESIRED OUTCOME, which means you have to get beyond the feature-selling or benefit-listing.

Imagine if you tried to sell Mario the flower. Hey Mario..this flower is better than all the other flowers because it is vitamin rich, organic, blah blah. No!

“Mario this flower is what will turn you into the TOWN HERO. Just imagine what it will be like AFTER you have pillaged the village, slayed all the bad guys, and saved the people. You’ll get recognition, win awards, heck you might even become mayor of the town. All from this flower I am showing you today. I had thought this was aligned with your goals, which is why I am here. Are we on the same page?”

Notice I did not talk about a single feature of the flower. I only talked about the customer’s desired outcome. Your customer has a desired outcome. Figure out what it is and sell that.

Lead Scoring is the Real Deal

Everyone is looking for the next major hack, the silver bullet, the easy thing they can do to get some immediate results. Let me tell you that this pretty much never happens. It usually takes hundreds of experiments and iterations to finally get that big win. Well, I’ve done those 500 experiments and iterations and am here to tell you that Lead Scoring is the real deal.

Here’s the situation. If you have a company that lacks leads, this post is not for you. You need to focus on lead generation. But if your company is working with a large database of past leads, customers, etc. then you likely have a sales team that has to choose who to call, who is the priority. This is where the productivity gain is seen. Lead scoring uses machine learning allows your team to focus on the prospects that are most likely to close.
We implemented our own machine learning to make this happen. We did a large analysis of our customers and seeded it with approximately 40 characteristics that we felt were critical. This included demographic info, website behavior (what blog posts they read, pricing page visit, testimonials page visit, etc.). We gave points to each of these, we updated every single lead with a lead score, and then we ran reports. 90%+ of all closed deals has a lead score of over 100. So then the solution was simple – get the reps to attack every lead with a score of 100. Ignore the rest, until their score improved, which is the job of marketing.

Here’s the final kicker. We were able to produce the exact same amount of sales, but it only required half the number of reps.

Closing Doors is the Key to Closing More

If you have been selling anything for a year or longer then you should already know every objection, excuse, delay that your prospects will say to you. The way they say it will be different but the responses can usually be grouped into 5-10 core objections.

These objections are open doors. If you don’t close these doors BEFORE they talk about the open door, you already lost. You’ll be delayed, pushed off, etc.
EXAMPLE: It’s December right now which means in most B2B industries, sales are tougher. So when you talk to a prospect, you are expecting to hear “sounds good, call me in January”. You know its coming. To beat this the maximum % of times you need to start the conversation with “So glad we were able to connect, because right now is by far the best time of the year to buy (insert any other key reasons here)…so let’s talk about that deal…”. Beat them to it and slam that door shut. It makes a huge difference.

So get all your objections on paper, write an ideal rebuttal script for each of them, get them to everyone on your sales team, and strategize the timing of each so that you always close ALL the doors before your customer slips out of one!