WTF does everyone complicate this so much?

Sales Process - dictionary definition

A sales process is a set of steps aimed at initiating and supporting the identification and evaluation of likely customers and successful conclusion of sales activities.

For the purposes of this article, I'm focusing on new business in a B2B environment and I'm assuming (always dangerous) your esteemed sales leaders have figured out that your process succinctly fits with your average buyers journey.

Sales Processes can get horribly convoluted, to the point where no-one has a clue how to follow one. If your process can't be understood by the janitor, you're over-complicating things!

As such, Dave Kurlan's Baseline Selling is the simplest process I've seen. Everyone knows that baseball, softball or rounders requires you to go through a series of bases in order to score - a sales process is no different. There are 4 P's that each represent a base; Prospect, Probe, Present and Propose before the Close.

PROSPECTING - Getting to the Batting Plate. The purpose of prospecting is to get a decision maker or mobilizer, who has a problem you can solve, to a point where they have agreed to hear (usually via a meeting), how your product might solve their problems.

PROBE - Getting to First Base. Probing is done by asking questions. You are trying to find a fit by probing for the problems your product helps solve. NB; You should be trying to qualify your prospect OUT as much ( if not more) than you are trying to qualify them IN (no point in wasting time on prospects who won’t/can’t buy).

PRESENT - Getting to Second Base. The presentation/demonstration is where you match the benefits your product provides to the prospects problems. If the prospect agrees that your product can solve their problems (you MUST get this confirmation), you close the base by asking if it makes sense to send a formal proposal.

PROPOSE- Getting to Third Base. Your proposal should begin by re-confirming your understanding of the problem and a summary (max 10 lines) of how the prospect will benefit from your solution. Proposals must include financials, SLA’s (what you’ll do for them), what outcomes should be expected and a deadline. Once the proposal is being considered (and negotiated) the prospect is on third base.

CLOSE - The run for home base. Usually where T's&C's are negotiated!

An effective process does not to rush to home base in a straight line but goes through the bases in order. Rather than trying to close the sale too early, we need to close each base individually by asking the client if they think it makes sense to move on to the next step of the process. By making incremental closes for each base, we’ll home in on the sale itself.

Sales Methodology - dictionary definition

The way in which we get from one step of a process to another.

In our terms - how we get from one base to another. You can run, walk, dive, steal a base, hit a home run etc. There's clearly a number of ways to get from one base to another and so the sales method is nothing like as rigid as the sales process.

The methods we use will change and evolve over time as some tactics become old hat, while new tools will introduce new methods of getting more prospects through the bases at a quicker velocity.

PROSPECTING

TARGET

All prospecting begins with understanding your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and then segmenting it so that you can prospect to different parts of your TAM in different ways.

Ideally you’ll have three segments; Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), Minimum Customer Profile (MCP) and those in between.

An ideal customer is NOT anyone who can and will buy your product - it is usually the customer whose Lifetime Value (LTV) is the greatest, but for strategic reasons, this isn’t always the case e.g creating vocal advocates with industry leading influence can pay more handsomely in the long run.

If you have a generic product that can be used by a huge number of verticals it is absolutely critical to carve out a niche rather than focus on every vertical that might buy your product.

Once you have identified the ideal customer (NB: not who you would like them to be, but who they actually are) then apply firmographics such as Industry, Location, Size, Structure and Performance.

Now we have to do the same for the MCP, adjusting the firmographics down to the minimum acceptable to your organisation.

You should be able to identify three distinct groups; a very small number of prospects in your ICP, a very large number in your MCP and all those in between.

The next step is to identify the person within the organisation you most want to talk to.

This is usually referred to as the Key Decision Maker (KDM) but increasingly, thanks to the Challenger Sale, we are advised to hunt for a Mobilizer (someone who will champion your cause internally while being able to build a consensus).

The same process of ideal to least ideal (but still acceptable) should be undertaken. Nine times out of ten, job title is the only definition of a persona (and for anything below ICP, this is perfectly acceptable). For prospects in your ICP you really should go deeper i.e. demographic, typical identifiers, their goals and challenges they face as well as identifying negative personas (who would feel threatened by our product).

Now we have our segments and personas, we need to decide how we’ll go to each market (GTM).

ENGAGE

Ideal Customers

Each salesperson should prospect to no more than 20 accounts (10 is way better than 20).

If you have one salesperson, you can’t have more than 20 accounts in your ICP, two sales people equals 40 accounts etc.

This group will effectively be sold to on a named account basis. Each account will be mapped for relationships and influence and a range of personas will be identified and contacted. Where necessary bespoke buyer-stage content will be created for different personas within the account.

This requires a big effort (and therefore big expense) so you better be certain the effort will pay-off when, and if, you land the prospect as a client.

For low value, transactional products, all this effort will more than likely be completely over the top if you are judging the reward by LTV (for strategic reasons you may decide having the biggest name in an industry is still worth the effort).

Prospecting your ICP should be done by your top sales people (so opportunity cost will also need to be accounted for) and will include a combination of social, email and phone. In practise this means socially surrounding target personas (liking and commenting before following them on social media) and then listening for a trigger event which prompts bespoke outreach via social, email and phone.

Middle Group

Prospecting the middle group (still trying to think up a catchy name for them) should be done by sales development reps (SDR’s) via a mix of email and phone. Emails should be personalised at scale (name, company and one thing unique to the recipient) and tracked for opens. They must also include one (and only one) property (video, white paper or other attachment) that can also be tracked for opens along with a discreet website link (the harder to find the better) where your website can identify specific visitors. This will allow your SDR’s to score leads, which informs them who to follow-up, in what order of interest.

NB: Use a combination and sequence of touch points including phone and email (I don’t recommend using social as a touch point in an SDR’s sequence) but social should be used to inform the SDR about the persona and scanned for trigger events.

Minimum Customers

The MCP is prospected via automated email only. A semi-personalised (name and company only) sequence of email touch-points is set up, again with tracking. This group is only followed up once they have scored more than an open of the email i.e they have clicked on a video or opened a white paper attachment.

NURTURE

The biggest mistake most organizations make when prospecting is to focus all their efforts on the 3% of their target market who are ready to meet, while ignoring the 97% who don’t want a meeting right now.

For this reason we need to create relevant, stage aware content for every contact within the TAM who can be put into the correct nurture stream for their stage of buying readiness.

Prospects fall into 4 stages of readiness:

• Unaware (don’t know you and probably don’t know they have a problem).Content; Focuses exclusively on the problem we solve and doesn’t mention our product.
• Aware (know of you and they have a problem but are not, and may never be, ready to do anything about it).Content: Focuses on the implications of not doing anything about their problem - should include a case study that follows the Situation, Problem, Solution, Outcome formula. The case study must include details about how the problem would have become worse if they hadn’t done something (i.e. used your product) about it.
• Shoppers (actively looking for solutions to their problem - both information and vendors)Content: This is where we should introduce our collateral including features and benefits with standard case studies that focus on OutComes of using our product.
• Buying (have decided on a solution and a provider). Content; A discounted or hugely incentivised offer is the only way to gain Buying Stage consideration (but in reality you’ve almost certainly missed the boat).

PROBE

We are trying to find out if our solutions can solve the prospects problems, and these problems must hurt enough to do something about them (rather than doing nothing - which will always be your biggest competitor).

The most famous framework for asking probing questions is SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication and Needs/Pay-Off). The problem with all questioning frameworks, and SPIN in particular, is that the prospect can, all too often, feel as though they are being interrogated as the sales person fires question after question at them.

A far better way to question is to have a conversation, focused on how they do things at present, whether they are happy doing things this way, if they think there could be any improvements, have they looked for (or tried) alternatives and quantifying just how ready they are to do something different (depending on how big a problem their present way of doing things is proving to be).

Because this should be a conversation it’s critical the sales person knows precisely why our existing customers brought our products. What their problems were before buying, how acute they were and what additional problems were being created by not finding a solution. We must know what the typical catalyst for purchase of our products was.

The salesperson must be able to drop in situations and scenarios that are similar to the situations they are being told the prospect is facing.

This may well include names of people and companies the prospect knows (so long as the information being relayed is not commercial in confidence).

You must leave this stage with knowledge of;

• How they do things at the moment.
• What problems are being created by doing things this way.
• What are the knock-on effects for the rest of the organisation.
• You need to know what the implications of doing nothing about the problem (ideally in financial terms would be) for the organisation.
• You must be able to quantify just how desperate they are to do something about the problem (compared to how desperate your existing customers were).
• You need to know what this means to the person you are meeting if they (a) do nothing and (b) if they found a solution.
• You must know your solution can solve their problem.

Without this information making a sale will be difficult and knowing how to create urgency impossible.

PRESENT

Demonstrations should induce Shock and Awe not Bore and Snore.

Which means we should be short and concise - not long and rambling.

Only demonstrate features that directly solve the problems the prospect mentioned in the Probe (and come to light through the demo). Put another way - you are not there to demonstrate every feature your widget possesses.

Every feature must be followed by “which means that” so your prospect understands how the feature turns into a benefit for them (if there’s no benefit, there’s no point in demonstrating it).

Although you will have done the demo 50 times and you understand, and think it’s obvious, how everyone would benefit… you still need to join the dots with the features you demonstrate i.e explain how they will benefit (if you can use an example the prospect knows it adds enormous impact). If you can quantify the benefit in terms of increased revenue, saved time or improved quality, then so much the better.

Demo’s should be two way - the worst demo’s are where you do all the talking and the prospect does all the listening. The best use ongoing dialogue to uncover deeper information as the prospect begins to understand the possibilities your product can offer them.

It is far better to demonstrate and quantify the return on three features than demonstrate ten without being able to quantify their benefit. Once again, LESS IS MORE when demonstrating.

PROPOSE

All proposals MUST begin with an executive summary. This is often the only document a senior decision maker will see before signing off on a purchase, as such, it must re-confirm your understanding of the problem and explain, at a high level, how their situation will be improved by using your product (they don’t need features or details as to how your product works - they only want outcomes). A senior KDM has a short attention span so this is no time to waffle - get to the point with your Executive Summary - no more than 10 lines (5 is better).

The proposal should then cover off what we will do (our obligations), how we intend to service the client (SLA’s), the intended outcomes and the financials (of course!) with a deadline.

All proposals should only have two financial options (unless prospects have asked for more). One that fits the brief (and budget) and the other which has considerably more value, and should be far more attractive, but stretches the budget.

CLOSE

Far too much has been written about closing, it is the single most overrated task a salesperson does. The less we focus on it the better.

As such, if you are in any doubt how to do it...use these words: “Does it make sense to move onto the paperwork now”?

That’s it - it’s not rocket science - and should never be treated as such.

If you run a company, or a team of sales people, and want to understand how the division of labour can increase your revenues while reducing your Cost of Customer Acquisition, give me a holler on +61 418381829, message me through Linked In or email on [email protected]