How to Convert Prospects to Customers & Sell in 2021

In this session, Kelsey talked about scaling your startup and scaling your startups sales processes specifically. We delved into how the buying process has changed and how you can improve your current sales process. 

Buyers are more in control than ever before.

There's been a tremendous amount of change when it comes to selling and changes is inevitable. People don't like cold calls and they don't like cold emails, they would prefer to educate themselves. 

You need to aim for a single brand experience. 

Your buyers don't care if it was your sales team, your marketing team or your service team they reached out or were talking to you. Everything needs to be tied together in a consistent way. What we're finding more than ever, is that it's not so much what you sell, it's how it's how you sell and go to market that is really going to differentiate yourself. You need to be able to build a phenomenal experience through your sales and marketing teams. 

Your selling motion has to match the way that your buyers want to engage with you. And the way that we're going to start to talk about this, is to talk about creating a sales process. 

As simple as sales can sound, there is a lot of finesse and nuance to it. 

Six steps that are keys to your sales process. 

Prospecting. 

Adding another salesperson doesn't always mean that you are doubling your capacity. At some point you might want to look at getting a business development rep -- somebody who's going to take, primarily these first three steps of the prospecting, connecting and qualifying early on and doing some of the research and discovery.  

Connecting and qualifying early.

When you're thinking about how you are going to scale, you need to create processes around each one of these steps along with best practices so you can share with your team. how do they know if somebody is a good fit customer and to disqualify them? By being able to give them a lot of great examples and tie that back to the research and discovery phase. 

Research and discovery.

Because buyers are so much more educated, they know there's so much info about them out on the web that they expect you to come with that information and have a tailored approach. When you have that tailor personalized experience for them, your likelihood of closing the deal goes up exponentially.

Presenting.

Make sure that your reps aren't wasting their valuable time on somebody who's not qualified. 

Objections.

Make sure that your reps are actually seeking out these objections. If you are not an experienced salesperson it's easy to shy away from it. 

Closing.

People will talk to people that they like, but they buy from people that they trust. Make sure that you're building a process that is encouraging trust. 

What makes a good sales process? 

What we're seeing that is much more effective is having an educational approach to selling, rather than a traditional sales approach. We've all gotten so much more sophisticated, nobody wants that used car salesman approach. 

• Deal stages that are factual and inspectable
• Match the way the buyer likes to purchase
• Educate, don’t sell

Actual deal stages.

You need to have an understanding amongst your team on what moves a prospect from one stage to the next. What's the trigger? What needs to be completed? 

A good approach to selling especially in 2021 is a consultative one. It is one of the most successful approaches and in my experience in sales. One of my favorite selling books is called The Challenger Sale. It’s all about being able to establish that relationship with your client, especially those of you that might have a more complex sales cycle or it’s a bit more of a complex relational sale. Being able to educate them at the same time that you challenge them, is a real art form so definitely dig into it. 

What we see when we talk about best tips for consultative selling is that our top performing salespeople are 10 times more likely to use collaborative words. So talking about we and us and our or together. Rather than using these individualized words. You want to be viewing yourself, and acting as a partner, not a sales executive. 

Dig into your prospect’s pain points. Ask them how they have solved for that in the past. What's making them want to reach out and talk about this now. 

And help them solve their problem. Part of that is just showing that you're genuinely interested in their business; how their business works; how they determine success for themselves or what are their most pressing objectives. 

That's how you're going to present yourself as a partner in the solution and help your champion reach his or her personal goals, 

• How are they going to make the decision?
• Who's going to be involved?
• When will the decision or meeting happen.

Make it easy for them

• Here's all the information for you and this is what I would highlight. 
• How are you presenting it to your team - do you need a slide deck or a one pager
• Is it going out via email? Offer to craft an email for your prospect. 
• Make it as easy as possible, because that's how you're going to get the most traction! 

When I am going through a call there are four things that I want to make sure that I get. And if I don't get these four things I have not completed my call with this person. 

First, I need to understand their goals. 

• And what are their personal goals? 
• What are their priorities? 
• What is it that they are actually responsible for? 

Too many times we find ourselves talking to the person that is not the decision maker or this is not actually under their purview and there's somebody else that needs to be in the room. 

The second is their plans. And drill in. 

• If their goal is to double their sales in the next year, you need to know how they are planning to do that. 
• What was their approach last year? 
• Oh you tried paid ads. Did that work for you, did it not work for you? 

Remember your competition isn't only the other product or service out there, your competition is also them continuing to do the same thing that they're doing. So you need to figure out how painful it is for them and do they really want to make a change. 

Third, what are the challenges?

It’s not just enough to say, hey I'm going to sell you this product because it's great. It needs to actually solve their needs and what hurdles are going to come. 

• So you want to double your sales in this year, what do you think could stop you from doing that? 
• Dig into what those challenges are because that's what you're going to speak to in your tailored pitch. 
• They people want to be seen, they want to be heard, and they want to know that you understand their pain points and can speak to them. 

Lastly, figure out what is the priority for them when it comes to these goals. 

• So you want to double your sales. Within a year, does that mean the end of December? 
• When do you want to have a solution in place? 
• What will happen if you don't double your goals by that date? 

You kind of need to build just a little bit of fear … ‘Well, if I don't, then I won’t hit my commission for the year which I need to pay for my child’s private school or hockey camp”, 

Regarding early objection handling - you need to ask your prospect, on the scale of one to 10 priority level, what priority is it for you to solve this problem. Ten be, I can't sleep at night, and one being, this is just a convenient call but I never think of it.

If they don't tell you seven or above. Do not use your time on this prospect! 

Frictionless Selling Framework

Creating a frictionless selling framework starts with analyzing your current processes. Consider what is and isn't working, both in terms of your sales reps and in terms of your prospects.

• You want to either observe your reps or be observing yourself as you go throughout the sales process. 
• It might be a little tedious at first but you're going to uncover things that you didn't know.
• Look back at those last let's say five or 10 deals that you close and what these deals look like from beginning to end. 
• What were the touch points that this customer had with you, and consider how long this entire process took.
• How much time lapsed between each one of the steps. 

The more examples that you have and the more people on your team that those examples come from the better your data and the better your information is going to be. 

Get a better understanding of the interactions that they are having with your reps, the pain points they experience, and why they need your product or service. 

Make sure that you take the time to define your exit criteria layout, what information does your team have to gather before moving someone on to the next step of the sales process. what commitments they need to gain from your process before they move forward.

Measure your results. 

• What are your conversion rates to your demo? 
• How much time are prospects spending in each stage? 
• Is there a stage that's particularly long? That's a pain point. 
• What are the dropout rates after your discovery call. 
• What are the deal close rates, what are the closed rates by your reps, what are their productivity rates? 
• What is the average time that it takes to be able to close deals and the average revenue per deal. 

Dig deep and see where you can tighten up. 

Enable your sales team by taking a hard look at our infrastructure and really cutting the fat out of the systems, whether that's your sales team or you. 

Align our sales team with your target buyer and ruthlessly prioritize buyer needs over your own systems and processes. 

And last, transform our sales team culture through continuous learning. 

Your team needs to be working together on your business. Those early hires need to be people that are not just soldiers, but have the capacity to be able to grow into generals, making strategic decisions and being able to be analytical about their role, rather than just implementing.

The Frictionless selling framework is going from having multiple tools that have a high level of data entry to having automated processes and one system. 

You need to be able to get good insights fast, you need to make sure that you have systematic prioritization of the leads that come in. 

Scrutinize their sales process and tools. 

• On a day to day basis, how many emails are they making?
• How many calls? 
• Which one of these things can you automate?
• On average, 70% of what a salesperson does are things that can be automated. 

If you have a process where you can automate half of those of those things, then that's essentially like hiring a second salesperson, because you're giving them double the time back in your day!

Think about how you can automate enough to be able to double your impact. 

How do you help your teams better align with what your buyers' needs are? 

There's a delicate balance of making sure that you have enough processes early on that people have something to follow but also making sure that the processes that you set up are flexible and adaptable As you iterate as you figure out better even more about your buyer personas, is if you figure out more about their buying process, your sales reps. 

A difficult customer is still giving you feedback, whether or not you like the feedback, it's still valuable. So some of the ways that you can align with your buyer to make this process easier, is to be able to set up your systems. 

• Can you do something through video? 
• Send a video proposal?
• Have a chat bot set up to give them some basic answers?

On average it takes seven emails to set up one meeting -- that has a lot of friction and a lot of social capital that you're expanding for nothing.

And try to be as transparent as possible when it comes to pricing and cancellations. 

The really important thing here is the whole customer journey. Make it a Priority and constantly course correct, and use metrics to help you align or to be able to think about things differently. If you are aligning well with your buyer, your close rates are going to increase and the time it takes to close is going to decrease, and your customer satisfaction should increase. 

How do we transform and create a culture of learning? 

The last step is thinking about how you can enable your reps to be able to lift themselves up out of the weeds and evaluate what they're doing and what's working and what's not, and do so with a sense of transparency.

I recommend a shift to focusing on coaching and asking questions. Make it less about the metrics and ask about the little details. You want to be focusing on how to enable everyone to be able to do better, to be able to reflect better, to be able to ask these questions of yourself, be able to solve these for yourself, etc.

Have real time data.

You need to be able to show your reps where they're tracking towards their success so they can plan and prioritize their deals. Focus on coaching but have playbooks and training. Start to build up those successful playbooks and make sure that they're accountable for customer success. 

Key metrics to see whether or not you're actually hitting this are:

• Your customer retention
• Rre your reps being more productive, and 
• Are they happy. 

You want people that are growing with you.

Lastly, sales / marketing alignment is huge. 

Have your sales and marketing systems be the same system, because one of the biggest complaints I've seen from sales reps is that all of a sudden they get this lead but they're like, why are they a lead, what makes them qualified, how have they engaged with us? You need systems that are going to help you look professional and be able to scale and give that personalized outreach 

And don’t forget to setup great reporting to give you the insights you need! 

Check out: hubspot.com/startups