Transcript
Intro:
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 Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B 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 you 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.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. We’re coming towards the end of the year for many businesses. Granted, businesses all do run different financial year cycles. However, as we approach a period of time, Christmas, where it’s often that moment where we get to reflect, have a look what we’ve achieved throughout the past 12 months, have a look at areas where we need to improve on and start to plan ahead for next year that I thought today I would run a solo podcast on an exercise that I used to do when I was running my businesses and of course, teams for others in the early days that was really, really impactful to me around finding areas where we could have uplift over the coming 12 months.
It’s a very straightforward exercise, which is why I like it. But what it does each and every time for me is that it invariably brings up some really key areas that I might have inadvertently walked past. So changes to our business or processes that had stopped working that I had walked past without realising. And for me, that’s the reason it’s so powerful, because it brings me back to focus on some things that I probably had missed if I hadn’t slowed down and looked at them. So it’s one of those moments where you put a forced stop on what you’re doing, slow down, have a look a little bit objectively around how you’re doing things and find those great little gold seams that can drive your business in the next 12 months or longer.
So what we’re going to do today, the exercise I’m going to have a look at is a sales process. So we will all have sales processes in our business in varying ways. For many businesses, it’s an informal way of running through how you conduct your activities with your customers, how you engage with them. For others, there’s somewhere in the middle they have a few things written down that’s not quite regimented in terms of how you, you formalise the process. And then for some businesses, they have a very strict process and it can even extend out to scripting, particularly when you have sales teams that are doing the same activities over and over and over again. So this exercise in particular does actually apply to all of these sales process approaches that you have as a business. So it doesn’t matter where you’re starting with a sales process now, this exercise will help you get a little bit better next year.
So before we start, for anyone wanting to brush up on their sales process skills or the understanding that they have around what a sales process is, please jump all the way back to the start of the podcast. Episodes one to six focus in detail across a five step sales process and it also looks at each of those five steps in isolated episodes. Episode one’s a summary. Episode two through until episode six actually looks at each of those stages.
So today we’re going to look at the sales process and how I would encourage you to review where there are areas or pockets that you might need to improve. I’ll also, at the end, give you a way where we can take this to another level. If you feel that your sales process has hit what it needs to, I’m going to show you another lens as to how you can look at whether or not your sales process is actually working effectively for you and your customers.
But before we start, let’s just recap for those who have listened to episodes one to five or have spent some time with me and my team around what we typically do when we’re looking at a sales process. So for us, and there’ll be in the show notes here, you’ve got an access to this as a free resource. It’s something that I share willingly to any sales leader or any sales team who would like to see it. But we work off five steps when it comes to a sales process. Very straightforward.
Number one, that first step is around lead generation. So how we’re actually bringing people into our business at that first prime level of engagement with us. The second piece is then how we’re meeting and greeting and often qualifying our customer. So we’ve generated a lead, we’re then meeting and greeting with them. The third piece is the presentation or the quotation piece. The fourth piece becomes the follow up, that tale of getting a customer from a quoted opportunity through to close. And then the fifth and final step, we work around is key account management or the post-sale follow up. Little bit different depending on what type of business you are in. But again this format is in the show notes so if you’d like to grab it, please make sure you do so. It’s also very much available on our website www.strongersalesteams.com/salesprocess.
Okay, so how as a leader can we sit down and do a quick review around our broad stroke sales process to see how we’re performing? Here’s my advice and what I do with a number of teams across any of my programs and those that I’ve led in the past is first one is if you have a documented one page sales process, grab that, bring that up, put that in front of you. If you don’t have a sales process, but you do have the formations of a sales process of sorts, perhaps through your CRM where you have set stages for each customer. It’s very common when we have businesses who don’t have a sales process but they have CRM stages or if you have a generally agreed way of working, grab that. So that might mean printing out your stages of your CRM or it might mean simply writing down on a piece of paper, here’s the five key activities that we do. Failing that, if you don’t have either of those, grab the free resource that we have off strongestalesteams.com/salesprocess and quickly fill out that template yourself. Failing that, simply write down lead generation, meet and greet, needs analysis, quote presentation, follow up or closing and your key account management. That’s the post sale piece, right? There we go. So this should work for anyone that’s listening no matter where you are in your sales process. The point is how we constructively review that ourselves. Okay, so once you’ve got that sorted and you’ve got that in front of you, hopefully by all means pause if you need to go and grab it, come back and then we’ll start the process. So what I want you to do is put the hat on, put the watch on, put the frame of mind on, the rose colored glasses, whatever they are, that’s going to get you into the mindset of asking questions. Right? So from here on in for this review, we are all about asking questions. We are not about answering those questions. Anything further than a yep, I got this or we got this or oh hang on, I need to dive further. So the first stage here is all around identifying the areas where you might have for improvement. So we’re going to start at the first part of this and for today, I’m going to follow the five stages that we work on on sales processes, as I think that’s a really impactful area to lean into because it’s quite straightforward and simplistic in its approach. And then those who have more complicated sales processes, you can simply dive a bit further. So we’ve got our sales process, quasi sales process, or handwritten notes in front of us now, and the first thing I’d like you to do is have a look at stage one.
So for us, that’s lead generation. Now we’re all about asking questions. So the key questions that I’d like you to start asking yourself, and by all means, you might want to pause this podcast as we go. This is very much a workshop style podcast. If you feel you need to pause it to take a moment to think, go for it. Because I’m going to bring all the action items in to a nice chunky 25 minutes or so. So we’re in the lead generation stage. Questions that I want you to start asking yourself is, do we know the markets that we are targeting? So I’ll give a slightly extended example just for this first one, but how this would go is do we know the markets we are targeting? So if you know the age profile, the demographic, the geographic location, the type of business role, the stage they might be in their process or in their prospecting stage, what other types of products they’re looking to buy, where they hang out, what specifically the problem or the opportunity for this customer is, if you have answers to a lot of these questions, then you’re going to give yourself. Yep, we’re on track with this. If you don’t and you start to quickly fall away when we talk about your target selected or your target or selected markets, and you start to fall away from anything further than people in procurement or businesses in mining or homes that are looking to renovate. Right. If you can only really go one or two layers deeper, then you might say, oh, no, hang on, I’m really not sure. And the reason this is very important is that the more specific we are in understanding who our target market is, the more engaged we can be when we are prospecting with them. Certainly there are definitely two schools here where you can go really broad and see what sticks, or you can be really specific and hone in on that exact target market. In most businesses I work with, the markets they play in are big enough to be quite specific in who that target market is. So I always encourage you to be really clear on who your target market is.
So the other types of questions we need to be asking here around our lead generation process or the first stage of our sales process. So we’ve asked this, who is our target market? What are the problems or opportunities that we solve? Are we really clear on the problems or opportunities we’re solving for them? Are we clear on why they’re going to choose us? So why these target market with said problems or opportunities are going to choose us as their provider? So why a company looking to upgrade their machinery whose issue is that they are spending far too much money on equipment that is being used to only service customers. It’s not generating revenue, so it’s a compliance activity. They’re spending too much money on it. And their equipment is becoming an ageing fleet. So they need to find a way to modernise their fleet at a lower cost. And why would they choose us? Because we’re able to provide them solutions that will allow their equipment to run with less servicing or will allow their equipment to run with longer lifetimes or will allow their equipment to run at lower price points. Right. Whatever it may be. Right. We need to be really, really clear around that from a lead generation point of view.
Second piece here is do we have a program, both an outbound and an inbound program, that is generating the leads that we need? For many sales leaders, the inbound program steps across to marketing and I really encourage you to delineate marketing versus sales and we start to focus on outbound activities here. But the question is, are we generating enough appointments? Because for many businesses, they’re generating enough appointments, but they’re not necessarily nurturing them through the funnel and then closing them effectively. But for other businesses, they’re not generating enough appointments, but maybe, for example, fantastic at nurturing them and closing them out. So are we getting enough appointments in? And if no, do we know what channels are working for us and what channels are not working for us? Once we know the answer to these questions, we can double down on what is working for us and we can start to replace those that aren’t with others that perhaps will. Are we clear on how we qualify our appointments when they come in the door? So are we really, really clear on how we rank and qualify our appointments when they come in the door? Because when we get this right, we’re bringing in leads that are more likely to close. When we get it wrong, our teams are spending more time quoting for less return at the close end, which means we have less time then for prospecting. It becomes a really vicious cycle or a doom loop if you like. Are we clear on how we move customers from the lead generation stage into a meet and greet? So I are we creating rapport? Are we really clear on the process that we need to follow to get our customers from hey, I want to talk to you, to ooh, I want to meet you, I want to see what you offer, I want to know more about your business. So we’re really clear on that process.
Next question here is, is our CRM capturing all this information so that we can share data across the business or review the success of what we’re doing? A number of those first questions that I’ve just asked need data to be able to answer them. And if we do have a CRM that’s collecting that, fantastic. But if we don’t, then it’s going to make it really hard to answer all of those questions. So five or six questions there around the first stage of a sales process that I encourage you to ask yourself. And these today, these are coming from 20 plus years of experience and having worked with thousands and thousands of salespeople over the last 10 years. So by having had such a breadth of experience here, I’m able to actually talk through this review quite succinctly. However, for many sales leaders, you’re doing this once a year, right. Whereas I’m doing it many, multiple tens of dozens, if not more times a year. For you, it’s actually taking this information and saving you the time of having to do a full day or a half day review on your sales process, but just a short and sharp area that’s going to define where you might need attention. So the first stage of that sales process, anything that you’ve ticked off as a, oh, I’m not so sure I’ve got that covered. I just want you to highlight it or circle it or asterisk it. Do something that’s going to bring it to your attention so that you can come back and look at it later.
All right, that’s stage one. Stage two, if we’re following our sales process that we like to use, that is the meet and greet or needs analysis stage. So this is the point where we’ve qualified a lead and we’re now meeting them for the first time. So questions I’d like you to ask yourself. Are we clear on how we build rapport when we first meet our customers? Very straightforward question, but this one here I often get a no to. And it’s because we’re simply relying on salespeople to walk in and build that rapport. However, to build that rapport the more we know about a customer, the more likely it is to happen. So this is around pieces, around doing our research, around looking for cues with customers as to what we can jump onto or grab onto to build a relationship about doing, sending out pre information to a customer before we meet with them, to build that excitement or that engagement or that anticipation that we’re going to meet together. So are we clear on how we build rapport? Are we clear on how we understand their business or their market? So partly research, but also really clear on our standard questions that we might be asking when we’re in front of a customer. Are we clear on how we understand a customer’s needs and really what this means is how we understand their specific opportunities or problems when we’re in front of them? We might be great at knowing it at a generic level, but are we really clear how we go through that needs analysis to understand what they really want out of this engagement with us? Are we clear on mapping who their decision makers are. So when we walk out of a meet and greet or our first initial meeting, that we’re really clear if it’s 1, 2, 5 or 10 people making the decision, who they are, what they do and how we need to engage with them. It goes without saying how important it is to cross thread through across a business. Are we testing offers when we’re meeting and greeting our customers for the first time? Are we having conversations such as, if I can bring you back a proposal that has a return on investment of 25% per annum, that it would meet board requirements to move forward? Or, if I can bring in a service that’s going to allow you to reduce the time you’re spending internally on some of your legal frameworks by 100 hours a year that cost this amount of money, will you be prepared to tick it off and move forward? So what we’re not asking for is a, hey, I’m going to go with you. But what we’re looking for is setting the field, putting the gates around or the fence around the paddock to make sure that when we come back we’re playing in exactly the right paddock. Are we really clear on how many of these meet and greet meetings we need to be having per month? So I spoke about, are we clear in lead generation around how many appointments we need to be booking, that is, are we booking enough? Same goes with meet and greet. Are we really clear with our team how many of these they need to be having each month to be successful in what they’re doing? And the last piece here is our CRM capturing this information. In fact, that’s a question that we’ll be asking in most of these stages. So again, a number of questions in there around looking into the health of your meet and greet and needs analysis process. Same again. Circle the ones that weren’t an instant yes, and we’ll come back to those later on.
Okay. Into the third stage of our process which is all about the quoting or the presentation stage. When we’re back in front of customers, we’ve met them, we’ve done the needs analysis and we’re ready to show them just how good we are. So, very first piece here is are we doing our research prior to walking into the meeting and when I mean research, are we really clear on who the decision makers are and getting them present? So that’s build from the meet and greet stage. Are we really clear on who’s going to be in the meeting? Are we really clear on what we need to bring forward to the customer to make sure that we’re in the paddock or in the hitting zone. When we get into the meeting, are we really confident that we’re re qualifying needs? So if we’ve walked away from a customer after a meet and greet and the customer said, what I need from you is the surety that you’re going to do this safely, that I can trust the quality of your work and that we’re not going to have problems for the next 10 years, are we coming back in that quote and presentation piece and saying, right, I’ve put something together that’s built on doing a really good job safely that’s going to give you a set and forget solution for the next 10 years. And the customer then says, actually, do you know what? No. I’ve got a maintenance budget here and I can allocate some money each year to fixing it. So I’d rather save some money upfront. Boom. That’s a big change to our proposal, but we’re better or potentially a big change to our proposal, but we’re better to know that now before we start presenting versus at the end of our presentation. So the question here is, are we really sure that we’re re-qualifying needs before we start? Are we making sure the decision makers are present? Again, another a build on a build here to make sure that when we get into that room, we’re really clear around who’s in the room. Do we have a process around presenting the offer so our team are clear on what literature they have available to them, they’re clear on the quoting template. They’re clear on how to talk through that quoting template and we’re getting the right people in the room with our customers. And what I mean here is, are we bringing the right blend of technical vs sales vs customer relationship management skills into these meetings. So maybe quite fast. Again, don’t be afraid to pause on these if you want to just slow down, write them down and come back to them.
Okay. Are we gathering feedback and handling objections effectively in these meetings? And what I mean by this is, are we allowing enough time in a meeting to ask a customer for their feedback and then to dive deeply into any potential obstacles that are going to stop us moving forward. Because whilst we might be in the right paddock, the grass might just be too thick. Right. For you to walk through. The grass might be dead. Right. I can have a whole lot of silly analogies out of here, but the point is, we might be in the right paddock, but there’s other things getting in the way that we don’t know about. So we need to make sure that before we’re leaving these meetings, we’re working out what could get in the way and starting to handle them.
Last but not least here, in fact, as important as any is are we talking through next steps, what the decision timeframe is, who’s making the decision, and super importantly, what the customers need from us to be able to move forward here. We love keeping, for me, my teams, those I work with, I love making sure we keep control of the football. So we are keeping control of the process and the next steps are often sitting with us. So the customer is expecting to hear from us. Makes it a lot easier to keep engagement going back and forward after we’ve met. But more importantly is if we’re really clear that a customer needs to make a decision now, we can act appropriately. If we think the customer needs to make a decision down the track, again, we can act appropriately.
And lastly, that our CRM is set up to be collecting all this information and prompting us on what we need to do next? Okay, so that’s lead generation, meet and greet and needs analysis and the quoting or the presentation stage completed.
We’re moving into step number four here, which is all around the closing or the final decision being made. So the questions to ask yourself here is, do we have a process to really getting to the bottom of what the potential roadblocks or objections are? It’s a build on what we had from our quote or presentation stage. But if we’re in front of a customer, it’s quite easy to get feedback. Once we’re no longer in front of them, it gets a little bit more difficult. So are we really clear on the process we go through to make sure that we’re finding out if there are any roadblocks? Are we asking for the business? So this can be around asking timeframes to close, it can be around asking who’s making a decision, but it can also be as straightforward as, we’d love to be the ones that you’re working with, are we your chosen provider? So what’s really important here is we’ve set ourselves some targets on lead generation. We’ve set ourselves some targets on our first meetings and our quotes. But are we also clear on what our close rates need to be for our team to be successful? Because every team will have targets they need to hit. But are we clear on the percentage of customers that we quote that we need to be closing? What that is really impactful on is seeing if our processes and our quoting and presentation stage or our closing and onboarding stage are effective. Because if we’re quoting lots of customers but our close rates are low, then we know there’s something off. So do we have a process for working through what our close rates are? Do we have a process to make the onboarding stage or the signing the contracts or the agreeing to move forward to be as easy as possible? I reference here being easy to work with? It’s a very common theme. I talk with our teams around, but how easy are we to work with to get a contract signed and to move forward? Do we have deal work-shopping deals within our team? So are we regularly looking at projects, looking at deals and working out how we can close them? Do we have an onboarding process? And most importantly is when we don’t win a deal, are we learning from it? Do we have time in the diaries for everyone to sit down and review deals that aren’t being won? Okay, again, don’t be afraid to pause on this, but last piece here is our CRM aligned. So we’re collecting all this information.
All right, so we’ve gone through the first four there, lead generation, meet and greet and needs analysis, the quote or presentation stage, and finally the closing stage.
Okay, last but not least, when we’re doing a real quick review around how effective our sales process is, what’s our post sale process? So do we have an onboarding plan very similar to the closing piece? Do we have a key account management plan for customers that will come back to us again and again, be it the same site, be it a different part of their business, be it a different site, be it a different product, be it the same product again once its lifecycle is over. Do we have a key account plan to keep our customers engaged? Number two is, are we working with our customers through the implementation phase? So are we clear what as a sales team, we need to do to keep our customers engaged during this? Moving along is once we’ve won a deal and we’ve installed a deal, are we asking for referrals, are we getting feedback from customers and are we getting reviews as to how effective we were? I talk a bit about Google reviews with our customers and around making sure that we have a number there that isn’t going to turn customers away. So there’s a critical mass as to how many number of reviews we need. I don’t think there’s any science behind it. We certainly need more than one or two reviews to be a business. Is it a thousand before we’re reputable? It’s going to depend on your industry. But I definitely work with businesses around making sure that at a minimum, you have 20 to 30 reviews, but you’re working towards that 100 as soon as you possibly can. Right. What are your reviews at a level that’s going to represent a positive representation to a customer? Below 4, really tough. Between 4 and 5, generally acceptable. Between 4.5 and 5 getting towards outstanding. Are we asking for referrals from our customers? Are we reviewing our offer once we’ve completed all of these stages to make sure that it’s on track? So we’re sitting down and saying, hey, how’s our offer? Do we need to review it? Do we need to refine it? Do we need to refresh it? This is the most effective stage to do that because the customer’s gone through the whole process. Are we getting NPS scores? Are we asking the customer where we could improve and how we could do things better?
So this piece is really about making sure that moving forward we’re getting better and better at everything we do. But it’s very much from a customer lens rather than an internal sales process. Right.
So that’s a very macro approach to sitting down and looking at our sales process to see if it’s working for us. I’ve done this exercise many, many times with sales leaders and salespeople, and I can genuinely say that not once have we not been able to identify a tangible, positive impact we can make to a business. So my encouragement to you is to do this. If you didn’t do it today and you were just listening as you were driving or at the gym or walking your pet or whatever else you’re doing, I’d encourage you to go back and do this exercise. It’ll take you an hour. Grab a couple of key members from your team, do it yourself, grab your whole team, doesn’t matter. But have a look at where you see areas for improvement and get busy on fixing them. So the areas to get busy on fixing are clearly those that you circled, highlighted, asterisked, whatever it may be, because they’re the ones where you’ve got some opportunities to improve. So for those who have done that exercise and they feel like they’re tapping around the edges of a sales process rather than getting to the heart of it, first thing I’d say is probably have a second look because again, I’ve never done this and not found something tangible. But the other recommendation I have is to do this process again, but do it from a customer point of view. So map the customer’s journey from start to finish, from first engagement all the way through until their post sale care or their care account management program. And that will include your operational delivery or your execution and perhaps dealings with your finance, legal and customer service teams. Really sit down and have a look how the customer journey is happening and whether or not there are areas for improvement. I generally will do both of these activities with my customers and my businesses is that we’ll look from an internal point of view and we’ll look for an external point of view. But absolutely looking from a customer lens, there’s plenty, plenty of opportunity for you to find something that could be really impactful on your business.
Okay, so that’s it for today. Really chunky episode. I’d encourage you to do this between now and perhaps Christmas or early in the new year. It’s a terrific way to look at how your sales process is working.
But before we go, I want to talk quickly around a health and fitness tip. Every time we do a solo episode, I like to get to this. And something that I’ve been working on actually with a couple of sales leaders right now is around their health and fitness. And for these people, they generally know what they need to do to be healthy, to be fit, to be looking after themselves. But they’re struggling to build consistent behaviors and consistent patterns. And what I do that works almost without fail, if it’s powerful enough, is we find something that will hold someone to a goal. So the most obvious example here, and one that I use very frequently, is I will look for events that I want to compete in. And I’ll make sure I don’t have any more than about three months between an event that I’m competing in. And that keeps me focused on making sure my base level of fitness remains reasonably proficient. Right. Because then I know when I get to these events, I just have to, you know, rev the engine. Vroom, vroom. And I get that fitness level up. So works really well for me. At a more basic level when we have events coming up that are on the social calendar and we want to be looking good for. When we have events for our kids coming up that we want to be really active for. Right. So it might be a kid’s sport day that you want to get involved in. It might be summer that you want to take your kid to the beach. Kids are a really powerful way of keeping us healthy and fit. Right. But find ways to keep you accountable. Generally, what gets measured gets done. And I love seeing it when anyone I work with can actually put these building blocks into their health and fitness routine to keep them honest.
That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. There’s so much benefit you can take from here if you sit down and spend a little bit of time on it. But between now and next episode, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E92 A Powerful Way To Make Sure Your Sales Process Is Delivering Results
