5 KEY INGREDIENTS TO CLOSING SALES OFTEN (MY SALES 101).
Over time as a sales individual, I have been asked what are the key sales enablers and how we have come to form and perfect our business development skills. The input required to determine the 5 key ingredients to successful selling has come from my participation in countless seminars, trainings, learning from colleagues, reading books and posts in journals, newspapers and online — but most precisely comes from the learning acquired when walking the walk — facing partners and customers at every stage of the sales cycle.
What follows is my “personal insight” on what has worked for me in my sales experience as a Business Development professional in the IT, Commercial Real Estate Finance and Finished Goods sectors. Hopefully this will help you and others, who have chosen selling as their profession, to focus, plan and drive to get great results. It is important to note that the sales enablers written about, are those which we drive individually and don’t include a marketing program supporting it in the likes of email or digital marketing campaigns and participation in tradeshows, which in my opinion is one of the most efficient ways to find, and meet face to face, key selling partners and customers.
In my honest opinion, sales success is achieved when we:
“Have a YES attitude”
“Build Trust Continuously”
“Drive a Disciplined Sales Engagement Process”
“Provide a Valuable Product/Service Offering”
and we “Empower Customers”
Lets look at these 5 key sales enablers:
#1 — YES Attitude
As with most sport winners, as sales winners we must carry a positive attitude and have an inherent gratitude for our business development profession.
It is essential for those who want to lead as passionate sales professionals to live and breathe as the service providers and advisors they are to become to their customers.
If we are not the positive, empathic and the go for it type we simply should choose another profession. Sales requires attitude to stand up when we fall (ei. prospect says “I am not interested” or a sale doesn’t close). This is a must as we will face probable continued dissatisfaction as part of the sales engagement process.
It is precisely our YES Attitude that will allow us to make calls, even on days that we may not feel like doing them, and will allow us to bounce back, when needed, in order to bring the required leads in.
Again, if you are not panned on wanting to serve the needs of your prospects and customers, with a positive attitude, respectful demeanor and delivering service and value in your interactions — maybe sales is not for you.
#2 — Trust Building
Just as when we start to date someone and as our relationships grow, there is a need for us to portray and relay ourselves in a manner that instills respect, honor, truthfulness and true caring for one another. It is essential that we understand clearly our product or service and also the motivations and needs of our prospects/clients. We must “only” provide our customers with products and services that are of true value to them (we will touch the value factor on sales enabler #3).
It is through Trust that our key customers become our friends. Trust becomes the pillar and catalyst of our sales strategy, just as Trust is a pillar in most human relationships.
Saying YES to a sale opportunity is key, when we have the right solution for our customer. Offering a solution to our customer when our product or service doesn’t fit that customer’s need, is a factor that will generate distrust and disengagement in the near future.
Now this brings us to the need, as professional sales individuals, to say NO and try to pass over to someone else or let go the opportunities that aren’t a fit for our product or service solutions. This will not only do our stakeholders right at that specific moment, but will help build trust overtime with them and the parties we refer our customers to, in order to maintain their relationships and drive recurring sales.
It is essential for us to build a list of professionals who can complement our sales role and add value to our prospects or customers when our products or services can’t. These individuals, with whom we must build trust over time, are people where we can send our prospects or customers to whom we have said NO and can provide a valuable solution to them. At the end this gives value to the relationship with our prospect or customer, as we helped solved a pain point or need and also increases the possibility that the complementing professional refers qualified leads back to us.
Prequalifying and defining these collaborators will ensure we add continued value and we have an assurance, when we can’t servethat prospect or customer, of NOT losing them to a direct competitor.
It is also key for us to define a list of influencers who are individuals that can help us reach decision makers, in those prospects and customers, with whom we don’t have a direct relationship link. A good approach now a days is to open a premium LinkedIn account which lets us contact individuals, via email type communication, even if they are not in our network. The bottom line here is to have a good number of influencing individuals to facilitate us the scheduling of meetings with key decision makers — be it a CEO, CFO, etc.
Also, since sales is a numbers game, we must not worry about the opportunities lost when these are not fit for our product or services. We must focus on the opportunities that are a right fit for our customers and if we drive enough opportunities into our pipeline, we will eventually be continuously exceeding our quotas in a period of a few months.
This now brings us to define and execute our Disciplined Sales Engagement Process, one that defines who, when and how to reach prospects and customers over a time line. This process will produce a minimum required number of leads, which in turn will slim down in number from the many opportunities we prospect for, and result in sales closings if we serve qualified prospects right and exceed the value requirement they have for a specific product or service.
#3 — Disciplined Sales Engagement Process
Most businesses define their customer segments to their sales personnel, therefore this should be something already resolved to most of us when coming to a new company. What is most important is defining how we prospect, profile or qualify the prospects and define a process to reach out to them to by continuously adding value. Just as when we want to have better defined muscles in the gym, we must do the right amount of repetitions, in a disciplined manner, to see results.
Profiling prospects obeys to asking them the right questions, and after having answers to those questions defining how these impact our expected sales results and segment and name that group accordingly. I chose to label (qualify) prospects in groups named Tiers (Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 & Tier 4) defined by what frequency of closings that prospect/customer may yield in specific period of time. The top Tier, or best customer, was labeled as “Tier 1’ and it was that initial qualification that defined when and how I was to reach out to these prospects/customers in planned activity calendar.
I remember my early days working in the early days of Silver Hill Financial, a commercial real estate lender division of Bayview Financial in Miami, where I initially covered two counties with a list of 400+ names of potential B2B customers (unqualified), composed of prospects and influencers, whom I reached doing 40+ calls a day — in order to get clarity on their business profile.
There was also a small list of prequalified prospects provided by the person who was before in the position. These type of leads are typically a list of prospects or customers that have been reached before over the phone by a person or group of people, be it in the sales department or marketing, and with this prior screening we have an initial understanding of what prospects are active in our line of business (meaning they have purchased our type of goods or service or are poised to purchasing them) and which are not.
It was shortly after reaching into the position that I concluded I needed to have my own simple and disciplined prospecting, profiling, segmentation and engagement plan. My plan was based on defining a grouping or Tiered segmentation of prospects and customers, one which I have followed and has yielded great sales results since 2004.
Segmentation was simple. Initially since most of the prospected businesses in our database had not closed any loans yet, we had to define their segmentation based on our intuition of how often they could be closing loans with us. Top prospects where labeled as “Tier 1” and these had the potential to bring us a minimum of 4–8 pre-qualified loans per month and allow us to close 1–2 loans per month, “Tier 2” were those who brought us 2–4 pre-qualified loans per month and “could” close 1 loan, at least every other month, “Tier 3” were those with whom we could close 1 loan every 3–6 months and Tier 4 were those who will bring the occasional loan. The rest of the companies simply didn’t work in our sector and weren’t influencers — therefore were deleted.
For each of the defined Tier segmentations we drove an engagement calendar, and by following it in a disciplined manner — a significant pipeline was created over time which yielded many closings. As our customers enabled us loans that closed or the contrary, this made us shift them from one Tier to another — or keep them in their initial labeled Tier. Results ultimately define the Tier and engagement plan we must drive with these customers.
The initial engagement defined face to face meetings to be done on Tuesdays and Thursdays and calls to be made on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. The engagement with “Tier 1” customers had me calling them every day and meeting with their owner once a week, for “Tier 2” customers it meant calling 1/week and visiting 1 every other month, for Tier 3 customers it meant calling them 1/month and visiting 1/quarter — “Tier 4” prospects/customers were engaged by the marketing programs executed crisply and timely by the company (email newsletters and seminars were at the core of the marketing strategy provided to all prospects and customers). This engagement calendar defined more time to talk and provided more face time to the prospects/customers that had a higher closing potential or documented closings. Keep in mind the engagement definitions and frequency can be adjusted as we see fit.
Fortunately for me, after a couple of months and having recurring successful monthly closings I was able to take my top 13 customers and move on to the National Accounts Team, where I strictly focused my efforts in serving this customers who yielded the higher recurring sales on my pipeline. It is at this point when you consolidate your buying customer base and you work together with them to grow the business as part of an established, mutually beneficial and trustful relationship.
Also, it is important to mention that it is integral to the sales process to save information pertaining to prospect and customer engagements with a CRM tool or even through a worksheet. This way we can document our communication exchanges, save relevant content and program future calls and visits, all in one tool.
#4 — Total Value Offering
It is of the essence that us as selling professionals, we choose a company that has valuable products or services. It is therefore most important that the benefits these products or services provide are true solutions and benefits both channels and end customers; otherwise we will be stuck selling a product which in time will cause our business relationship to erode, and our trust to disappear.
It is most important that we clearly identify if the company we are about to join, truly offers value to their customers.
Try not to join a company where you have to offer your customers round pegs when they are really requiring squared ones.
I define value as the product and total service offering that solves our customer’s problem, or pain point. and exceeds her/his expectations.
Us, what we offer, what we do and how we do, to help our customers, becomes an integral part of the total value offering we deliver to them.
#5 — Customer Empowerment
We must always present clear, factual and resourceful information to our customers. We must educate them and let them become knowledgeable about our products and services. We must speak to them truthfully and candidly about the benefits and drawbacks, if any present, as we don’t want them coming back and asking us at a later day, why didn’t we disclose information that impacted them in a negative way.
A regular open communication and transfer of knowledge, to our customers, helps us build ongoing trust and will position us as a friendly expert.
Lastly, all of the before mentioned sales enablers, when mixed day in and day out, will eventually provide us with great selling results and many loyal customers and referrals.
This in time will translate into more prosperity to us and to those we care for.
Happy selling !
Regards, Saludos.
Pablo Vega.
