Transcript
Hi everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader, and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast US, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B to B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams.
Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits. Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive view is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you be a master leader, manager and coach of your very special sales team. Today. I'm super excited because we're into episode three of how to Create a Top Shelf Sales Process for Any B to B Team. A little check in for those who are new to the podcast and to be honest, a nice reminder for the rest of us is the five steps of the sales process that we've defined so far short, sharp, simple, really easy to remember and ones that we can have confidence our sales teams are going to follow. So we're using the baseball analogy again.
We've stepped up to home plate, we've made connection. First base is lead generation round to second base, which is meet and greet and needs analysis. Third base being presentation home bases for close and post sale key account management rounds in for our kind of postgame warm down. I also mentioned in the initial sales process phase the importance of having objection handling, being omnipresent in everything we do. But I've specifically kept that as omnipresent rather than a specific base because I think the really effective salespeople are consistently doing.
Today we're talking about second base, the meet and greet and needs analysis stage. We stepped up to the home plate, made contact, generated a lead and are now sitting on first base, ready to take our wonderful new potential customer on a journey that they're never going to forget. Well, at the very least, build a relationship, win their business. So today we want to talk about how do we get from first to second base, which is through our meet and greet and needs analysis part of the process.
So why have I grouped meet and greet and needs analysis together? I'm asked this plenty of times. Often they're separate steps. For me, the most effective needs analysis is actually done at the meet and greet. Why that's? Generally, when we tend to get a customer who wants to give us the most time, they've agreed to a meeting with us, particularly if it's a sales generated lead and unless they're there under duress, I e. Their managers or their leaders have forced them to be there.
Normally, if we're asking the right questions, we're going to get the right responses from our customers. The limitation here is when you're in really complex selling B to B selling, that generally really high values or certainly around systems and it you're generally going to need to stretch the meet and greet and then needs analysis processes out over an extended period of time. And that's cool. If you'd like to know more about that, contact me and we can talk about it.
But for me, we all know that salespeople are generally driven, intelligent people who like to do things their own way. It's part of the territory. It's part of what makes them tick. So the challenge here in the meet and greet and needs analysis meetings or part of the sales process is how do we get everyone preparing and presenting to the levels that we expect within our business. I'll say this is not easy. This is one of the areas where I've seen leaders I've worked with struggle the most. And personally I've often had to dig really deep to build a set of rules of engagement as to how we are going to do this as a team.
That said, I'm going to run through the tips now that I've learned over my 20 plus years. So if you're multitasking, come back to me. Okay? So while we're setting the sales process, the first tip that I have is to set the standard. Generally, rules of engagement are really effective. So that's a one-pager that says, hey, how we're going to operate in certain standards, in certain settings. So that's research, that's how. And when we research a company, how we dress the company pitch, we put forward the basic ways that we are going to show up to customer meetings.
Once we get that nailed and our team repeat it, it takes a lot of the stress out of that initial first part of a meeting. And for many it actually reduces the anxiety of saying, hey, I've got to meet this new person and how are they going to view me in that first meet? So for me, make the research, make all of these standards again part of your system. Symbols and norms embedded into the business through one to ones, through training, through meetings, and through how you regularly get together, agree with your teams, how you will meet a customer. This is the second part.
Is it face-to-face? Is it video calling? Is it phone? And for me, probably for most industries it'll be in that order. Although that said, there are a lot of industries that find they have higher cut through rate and close rates. By using the phone, they get to more people than they do face-to-face. Close rates are probably lower from a percentage point of view. But given that churn rate of number of people they're speaking, they get to higher sales, higher closed one sales, and that's fine.
What you need to be able to do is agree with your team how you're going to meet a customer so that everyone knows that's the way we do business here. Third thing, get that first impression, bang on. Any salesperson that I've met knows that if they nail that 1st 10 seconds, the meeting's off to a positive start. So this is where the seven P's, or what I call prior proper preparation, prevents pretty poor performance.
I love the seven P's. Those salespeople that spend the time preparing for that first meeting generally will find a way to relate the best. They consider taking something with them that a customer will remember them by. Marketing material, gift merchandise, some form of effective branding that will remain in front of them, learning a little bit about them personally, learning about their business, learning about the problems and the challenges they're trying to overcome. Or even just learning about the type of car that they drive or even just learning about something personal on the way in. The door can be effective. One of the salespeople that I've worked for a long period of time, his go to is to have a look at the cars in the car park. And if they are a business that's typified by a certain type of car or a branded car or even electric cars, he opens with that. And it is so effective for him because it's generally a pretty neutral ground to start on.
Okay, next thing, moving along, agree to team about how much time you want to spend in the relationship building stage. So for me, I've worked with salespeople who build relationships quickly just via their innate chemistry. Our salespeople who use technical experience so it takes a little bit of time. Those who just chat and banter. Those who rely on introductions from others. So every member in your team should know what works for them, what is their best way of building relationships, and how much time are they going to spend on it. The people that I really see nail this are those who take the time to work through this together with their team.
What's really important and critical is to be building capability and credibility during that meet and greet and then of course, into the needs analysis. So the next part, the next tip I have is that everyone in our team knows what our unique proposition, or our special source, as I like to call it, what that is and how to communicate. It really important during the initial meet and greet and then into the needs analysis that the team member or the group of people in the room are getting this out in the room. Clearly.
If your special source is that you have the best-tasting source this side of the equator, then please make sure your teams know how to communicate. That very simple. The reason that it's so effective is because it immediately gives the customer something to think about around trust, credibility and capability. Okay? And we're going through a lot today, so don't be afraid if you forget any of this. There'll be show notes there and there's plenty of opportunities to continue to go through this. In future parts of our podcast, I'm going to really come back to all these regular real-world types of application that we need to implement to make our sales team succeed.
Okay, so we've built some rapport. Now we're into qualifying the lead or re-qualifying the lead. Our aim here is just to find out or to reconfirm what the problem for the customer that needs to be solved is how do we make their life easier? How do we help them achieve an opportunity for their business? Or even how do we educate them about a problem they never knew they had? Definitely can call this re-qualifying, but as part of that initial meet and greet part of the rapport building, we need to make sure that we're also qualifying exactly what our customer wants.
Okay? So we've qualified what they want. This is where we move into the needs analysis. So I call this the pain and scope section of the sales process or of the needs analysis meeting. What is the pain or what is the opportunity for the customer and what scope do we have to fix it? A really good example I have of this is I remember a team that I worked with a couple of years ago. They had equipment, it was equipment that prevented people falling off roofs. And with almost all of the customers, the pain and scope was pretty obvious. Hey, we need to stop people falling off a roof and hurt themselves or anything worse. But I remember one of the team was talking to me about how he was struggling to engage a customer. And I said to him, hey, are you sure you know exactly what they want to achieve? And he said, yeah, they need to stop people falling off the roof.
And I said to him, just ask him again. Would you mind just asking this customer again what they're trying to achieve? Because it just wasn't adding up how slow the process was going. So he jumped online with him and I think he had a phone call. And what came out of it was that helping people, stopping people fall off roofs was important. Clearly that was the reason they were buying it. But the bit they were struggling with is that they wanted to use this fall protection as a form of advertising for their business as well. So they actually wanted to wrap the fall protection around the top of a roof. Brilliant idea, by the way, if you're in the industry.
And they just hadn't been able to work out how they could attach that to the equipment that we were selling. And for me, you could see the eyes of the salesperson light up when they worked this out, because straight away they were like, right, that's the problem I need to solve. Which they did. They got it done. And I think they got quite a significant sale out of that for their business at a really strong margin. So I love that idea of making sure you're really defining what the pain and scope is.
Okay, next part of needs analysis, asking really good questions. We've all heard that saying, two ears, one mouth. It is so important. We've not only qualified our customers as a prospect, we've generated the lead. We've qualified them as a prospect, and we built some rapport with them. Now we actually really need to go a little bit further than that top-line pain and scope and find out what they really need.
In my career, in the teams and the people that I've worked with, the most successful salespeople, nail this part of the process, get it right, and you are instantly head and shoulders above the competition. Sure. Very easy to get wrong one or two questions and then you launch into the pitch. So as sales leaders, we need to think about how do we encourage our salespeople to be asking more and more questions?
Is it a whole lot of preset questions? Is it a rule of five? We ask five questions before we move on? Is it just ask one more question mentality? Is it a number of questions? And we keep confirming with the customer until we think they have nothing else. I love that question that says, is there anything else? Hey, I think I've got your needs analysis or I think I've got your problem sorted. You need to be able to find a way to deliver to your customers at 5% lower cost than you are. Have I got all of that?
And often we find that there'll be more to it. And we need to keep asking our customers, have I got it right? Have I missed anything? As many times as we need to until the answer is no. For me, I've seen this work so many times. And I'll share another example, just because this is such an important part of the sales process. I remember, again, a business I was a part of, this would have been six to eight years ago, and they're in front of a customer, and the customer was focused so heavily on the lowest price possible. It was a lighting product for their stores.
They had a lot of these they had 80,000 of these lights, I think, and they were $10 each plus a whole lot of labor and insulation. Right. So we're talking about a reasonably significant into the millions of dollars of sale. And it was low price, low price, low price. We actually ended up walking away from that deal and said to the customer, here's what's going to happen if you go down the low price path. And it was all along the quality of lighting and regular warranty call outs and those type of things. And we walked away. And at the end of the meeting we said, please give us a call back because we think there's another way for you to do this if this doesn't work for you. They said, fine, great. And away they went and they did it. About six weeks later we got a call back and they were experiencing all the problems, particularly around a poor customer experience.
I think the lighting wasn't strong enough to be presenting their products correctly. They said, hey, can you talk us through what we want to do next? We actually then reverse engineered and said, hey, what's the amount of light you actually need on the floor to be able to have really happy customers and a really great shopping experience? And we worked backwards from there. And what happened was we actually ended up selling a product that was about 30% higher than the initial product that they asked us to pitch on. And we picked up 90% of those 80,000 lights and had a terrific relationship.
And this was a terrific brand, terrific people working in the business. But what happened is we actually provided through some really good needs analysis and some patience, we actually ended up finding a solution for them they didn't know they needed. And it took a little bit of time. We sat in this needs analysis, meet and greet and needs analysis stage for a good couple of months. But once we got it right and we asked the right questions and in the end designed a product for the customer that was far better than anything else they could get, we really did reap the rewards out of it. Okay, so during the needs analysis, when we're asking lots of questions, a nice tool that I've seen used effectively is one called the BANT method. BANT. And I've got a couple of methods I'm going to introduce to you.
So much content in today that if you don't get it all, my hope is that you pick one or two things out of this that really work for you. But the BANT method, it's all about budget. B, authority, A need N and timing. So more simply, budget. How much does a customer want to spend? Authority. Who's making the decision right? We really want to make sure we're in front of the decision-maker. When do they need it?
N and T is the timing that they're going to make the decision based on. So needed is when they actually need it, but the timing is how long it's going to take you to make that decision. So if you can have some really interesting case studies or data around that you will have ready to present when you're using this method and slot it in cross those four budget authority, need and timing stages. It sets you up in a really good position.
In fact, check it out. There's a really cool software out there. It's called shuffler shuflr.com. Fantastic. It's a type of SaaS software that actually allows you to a much larger slide deck ready in front of a customer. But you might have only selected, say, eight or ten slides out of that deck. But you can very quickly, and intelligently, when a customer brings up something you weren't expecting, find something else. So go check it out. Shuffler Shuflr.com.
Another method when you're out there trying to determine needs analysis is the PPVC method. Really long number of letters in there, ppvcc, you can see it down in the show notes. It's all about pain. Finding out where the pain is. Power, making sure we're at the right level. Vision, really making sure that yourself and the customer are aligned on what they're trying to achieve. Value. Knowing what value the customer wants to get out of this control.
So how we can move the buyer along the journey to a decision? So PPVC, those that are most effective, they spend most of their time around vision and value. So, nice, cool little method that you can look at if you want to look it up online, you'll find plenty of information about it. Okay, so we have met the customer, we've made a great first impression, we've re-qualified the lead, and we've been working through the needs analysis to determine exactly what they want, the pain that they have, or the problem, or opportunity for their business.
Right? For me, from here, the really effective sales leaders work with their teams to make sure they are setting expectations with their customer. So that's not only the expectations that the customer has of our business, but also an expectation about how the process will run. What we're going to be doing from here when decisions around the process will be made. And this is where small micro closes are rolled out by the salespeople to just step them through from where they are today.
Not necessarily to making a decision in one go, but as to when they'll make a decision about the amount of product they need or the type of product they're going to need or when they might need it. Lots of micro decisions that just help step them along the way in the journey next stage that I love, and I've seen some unbelievable operators in this part of the sales process, is that once those expectations are set, in fact, they often even do it earlier in these meetings, is that they map out the future.
It's an aspirational journey that they take the customer on, which is essentially something they can aspire to when dealing with our company. It gets customers excited, it builds your credibility, it builds trust, and essentially it presents your company as one that people want to work with. Everybody loves an aspirational journey. Now, that can be rolled out any time during the meet and greet and needs analysis, but often I see it coming towards the end or if not, at the start.
Okay, as you're finishing up the meeting, make sure that the salespeople are doing something that the customer will remember them by. Pretty standard Sales 101, but I think we should make sure that our teams don't forget it. And then once we've left the meeting this is very rarely used, but I love it when teams or team members send a post meeting sales summary, if you like. So an email or a text message or whatever the form of communication that works best in your industry is that says, hey, thanks for meeting me.
Something really nice about the customer and a summary of your meeting if there's any objections that have been raised, what you're going to do to be handling those. Really nice way to end a meeting and sends a great message of your level of professionalism. Okay, last but not least, making sure the CRM system within your business is clearly set up to be able to manage this stage of the process is really important.
Plenty of great CRM systems out there. Salesforce, HubSpot, they're two really common ones. But having sure data fields are clean, the teams, the BDMs, anyone else that's involved in the deal knows which fields are compulsory and which aren't. But having that CRM to hold teams accountable, to store all that wonderful data that they've just got out of that first meeting, absolutely critical. Even better, clearly types of CRMs that can be used away from a desktop or a PC.
Okay, last but not least, and you hear this from me in just about every session, is when we're building a sales process. We need to make it omnipresent in everything we do. Again, this is where the elite sales managers shine. They embed the principles of how we're going to conduct needs analysis. For example, into one to ones, into training programs as system symbols and norms or even rules of engagement that their team will have.
Okay, we've gone through a lot of stuff today. Again, look into the show notes. If you want to see any more information, feel free to DM me or contact me. I'd love to hear more from you. But essentially that's it for today. We've skipped through to second base, we've generated our lead, and with some gut running, we've made a great first impression and conducted some fantastic and thorough needs analysis.
Everyone's following our process and next step is presenting the value that we're going to give to our customers. So that's going to be episode four, which will come out shortly. For those who want to dive deeper, I'm going to have a free how to guide out shortly. Please DM me sales process and I'll make sure you're on the list to get this. For those also wanting that broader perspective, make sure you jump back to episode one where we went through how to define or redefine your sales process so that your salespeople will not only buy-in, but actually follow it and follow it repeatedly. Okay? Today's health and fitness tip. I promise these as often as I can. It's all about movement this month. For me, meeting with customers is a really great way to get some exercise in park two blocks away. Nothing like a walk to clear the mind before we get to meetings.
Fantastic for sales team members as well who struggle with the confidence to have those first meetings. Walk up the stairs to meetings. Don't take the elevators. Do preparation on your feet as you're preparing, as we're focusing on burning those calories. It's all about how can you move more in your jobs. I want to see you as a sales leader be the best version of yourself that you can be, to be fit and healthy and present like that to your team, because it goes a long way into building a great team.
Any questions again or any ideas, please let me know. I'd love to get them out in the podcast series, but until next time, keep living in a world of possibility, and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel.
We're @StrongerSalesTeams on most of them, and if you DM us 'stronger', we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super-powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions, and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of Stronger Sales Team.
