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. Well, we are certainly coming to that busy period of the year. We’ve got through a whole lot of public holidays. It was back for some, maybe not for others. But we are starting to really get into the grind of getting stuff done, right. That time when the summer breaks are over, certainly in the southern hemisphere, the strategic planning’s done and it’s now all about execution, getting those targets or achieving those targets that we said we’re going to and making sure that as teams we’re living up to the standards that we’ve set. For me, I’m also training really hard, right. I’m on the road to Cairns that we’ve spoken about and you’ll hear a little bit more about it towards the end of this podcast. But with that comes a real focus, right? Or a requirement to focus on what we need to be looking at to make things happen. And at the moment I’d have to say something that I’m working really heavily on. Teams with, as always, but probably a little bit more than normal, is around making sure that their members, that the sales individuals and the professionals within their teams are doing the same things as much as possible. And the way that I refer to that is that we have most of the people doing mostly the same thing most of the time.
Now, that’s not always super easy to achieve, particularly when we have a broad spectrum of capability across sales teams, particularly when we have a broad spectrum of tenure of people within our teams, right? As people are new, we often give them a little bit more rope to try and learn things. And when life just gets in the way, it’s not always easy to have everyone doing the same thing. But for me as a sales leader, when you get that, right? When we get our people doing mostly, or most of the people doing mostly the same things most of the same time, it makes our lives as sales leaders so much easier, which means we get to focus on more customer time or more capability development, or more of the good stuff that helps us hit those sales results.
So, today I’d like to talk about what I see as the most important mini framework around a sales process. Now, please. This is not going through a sales process we’ve done a number of episodes around that. But for me, what is the area of our selling structure? Right, the process where we have most of us doing mostly the same things most of the same time.
So, for me, this comes down to a framework that I call the three Ds, right? It’s something you probably won’t find a lot of literature out in the market on. In fact, I can guarantee you won’t find a lot of literature out in the market because it’s a piece of framework that this business has developed over the last 20 odd years, but one that certainly resonates with almost every team, in fact, that I work with.
So, today we’re going to deep dive into the 3Ds. It’ll be a short and sharp podcast because I think this is something that I really want you to spend the time thinking about how you can execute. And if I can give you 10 minutes back in your day to do that, then perhaps that’s my ask. Right? I almost thought about having some nice music at the end of this podcast to say, hey, sit down, get a pen and paper, and now write out how you can bring the three Ds to life. But I won’t do that. We’ll certainly just back in that you, as leaders or as sales professionals can find the time to do so yourself.
Okay, so what are the 3 D’s all about? Well, the 3 D’s is all about making sure that we have real clarity on deliverables and understanding and some engagement with the decision makers and some buying in around deadlines. Now, I will say, as we’re talking to sales teams and sales processes, a really common piece of feedback I get is that it’s just too difficult to have salespeople to remember an entire sales process. And whilst I will say there’s lots of ways we can get around that and we can do things that help our team remember these processes so that we do have the majority of the same things happening by majority of the same people majority of the time, what we can do is look at little mini parts of this framework to help as we’re building towards a broader piece of engagement where the team are all aligned together. And the three Ds is my favorite for this. So I’ll say that again. It’s all about being really clear on deliverables, understanding and being known by decision makers and making sure that the due dates we have buy in from our customer.
So, the deliverables, this piece here I think is the one where the majority of salespeople I work with don’t spend enough time on and they’ll often self-select and put their hands up and say, actually, do you know what, I actually haven’t spent enough time on this over my career or over recent months or things have just changed a bit and I need to get back to some of the basics that I’ve known for a really long period of time, but aren’t executing all that well right now. And for me, the most important piece around getting clear on deliverables is that we’re spending time early with our customers. In fact, I’d argue that the majority of close rates or the majority of businesses that have low close rates don’t spend enough time getting really clear on what their deliverables are with their customers. Because once we get that right, once we understand very clearly what the value or outcomes that our customers are looking for are, that’s when we can start to see, okay, we can start to think about, okay, how do we structure our offer? How can we talk to our customer around making sure that if we hit that offer, do we move forward? Right. How can we probe a little bit deeper to perhaps find some areas of uniqueness or some sizzle that we could provide that others who are competing against us may not be able to do. For me, there’s never a wasted moment in spending lots of time in deliverables and, and it can be achieved as simply as having a set set of questions that we ask in our needs analysis.
So, if we don’t have those set set of questions, we need to be building them. If we haven’t worked out the five things that we must know about our customers before we move forward, right, then we need to be making sure that we are very clear on those. So, our team can be asking them, but more importantly is how we go about then asking them. And one of my favourite techniques when it comes to understanding deliverables or the needs of customers is, is to ask a question and then follow it up with another. Mr. Prospect, can you talk me through what it looks like to you? If we’re able to save you 5% off your operating costs? Or can you talk to me, Mr. Customer, about what we’re able to do if we could alleviate some of your cash flow to go and spend on more equipment to purchase? Or can you help me, Mr. Customer, if we were able to solve this legal issue for you, what does it look like for your business? Right. And we’re then listening to that answer, but we’re not listening to respond with our offer. We’re listening to dive a little bit deeper. Okay, great. So, you’ve said if we can free up 5%, that allows you to then go and invest in some more marketing for your customers. Fantastic. All right, so if we go and invest in that more marketing, what does that lead to? All right, that’s a pretty basic question, but okay, so what would you expect that 5% savings to generate in terms of revenue for your business? And the customer might come back and say, well, it’s going to grow our revenue by 2%. Then we know. Great. The size of the prize here is a 2% revenue growth. If we can save them 5 off their bottom line. And a 2% revenue growth equals a certain amount of money within the business. And we then know the impact the outcome that this can generate for our customer. Right. It’s a $10 million plus plus on their business. If we can get this program up and running. Right. And the program is $250,000. Right. So, we can do the sums there. That’s a 40 time return on investment, or it’s a $250,000 potential uplift on their sales. And we’ve got a $10,000 program here. It’s a 25 times uplift.
But by being prepared to ask those questions a little bit deeper, that says not just what’s the problem or opportunity, but what does it mean for the business? And you can even go into third and fourth and fifth questions. Right. If you can ask those questions to your customers, it not only builds that relationship, but it gets really clear on what the deliverables are. And once we nail those deliverables, that obviously helps us keep control of the sale, keep control of the football. Right. And build some relationships with our customers.
So first one for me is understanding deliverables. Second piece is decision makers. Now, this can be seen as really straightforward, but I’ll certainly say now it’s not right, but getting really clear on who’s making the decision and who’s influencing the decision. I see a number of salespeople do. So, can you tell me, Mr. Prospect, who are the Ones involved in the decision, well, it’s our CFO and our general manager and myself. I’ll put a recommendation forward and they’ll then make that decision. Fantastic. But that’s where a lot of salespeople stop. And for me, the real power of understanding decision makers is to then say, okay, I need to make sure that the CFO and the general manager know who our business is and who I am. And because certainly, and I’ve used this example, those that work with me will have heard this a number of times before, but when we have two proposals in front of people, or perhaps personally, when we have two proposals to do something around our house in front of us, right? If we have a known quantity versus an unknown quantity. So, an electrician who we know versus an electrician who we don’t, or a provider, a mortgage broker who’s provided us a written quote versus one that we’ve provided a written quote and met, right? And I can go through example after example here, but where we have a party, a business or a person that we know and the offers are essentially equal, who are you more likely to go with? Now, I know you can’t answer in this forum, so I’ll try for you, but for me, we generally are going to go with the people that we know, right? Because. Because there’s a high level of trust or we might like them, right? We can talk about, know, like and trust, but really importantly is we need to make sure we are known by those decision makers.
So, the best sales teams, I say go about understanding who decision makers are is they make sure that they are known, right? And for me, this is where the magic happens, is that we can get to a CFO or a GM by asking for meetings, by connecting on social media, by simply reaching out to them, by having mutual introductions, whatever it may be. But where we’re spending the time to make sure we’re not just knowing who these decision makers are, but also getting known by them. Close rates rise rapidly and I could throw statistics out everywhere, but certainly I would encourage you to just go back and look through your own deals and have a look where decisions have come your way, where you’re known by decision makers and where you’re not, right? Go and run your own numbers if you have time.
So, number one, here is all about deliverables, right? Getting really clear on what the deliverables are by asking multiple questions so that we can turn them into outcomes that will help us succeed. Number two is around decision makers not just getting clear on who they are, but being known by them.
And then number three for me is around due dates or deadlines, right? You can call it either or, I don’t mind. Right. It’s the third part of the three Ds here where we get really clear on when something needs to happen by a couple of reasons this is important. Number one is that when we know when a decision needs to be made by, we can back all of our activities up along that decision-making timeframe, right? So, we can work out when proposals are needed, when we need to be having key meetings, when we need to be looking at roadblocks or showstoppers, when we need to be meeting the right decision makers. Right? If a decision is going to be made in six weeks’ time, we’ve got until then to get in front of our decision makers. Or if it’s going to be made in a week, then we got to hustle, right? We’ve got to get things done before that. So, it allows us to keep control of that process. But number two is it determines the rhetoric that we have between us and our customers, how often we’re talking to them, how we’re engaging with them. Right. We can actually set up certain milestones that we need to tick off along that journey so that before we get to that due date, right. We’ve provided everything we need to.
So, it’s a really nice way that we can drive engagement with our customer or our potential customers along the journey of our sales process. There’s another piece I like around getting deadlines really clear. And that means that we can actually start to talk about offers, right? When we know deliverables, decision makers and deadlines, we can start to talk to our customers around, okay, so if we can deliver this level of the 5% saving on your business that we spoke about, that would lead to a 2% revenue growth within your business, right. Within the next six weeks. How does that look in terms of us being able to proceed? Right. We can start to talk to customers around what’s next? We can start to talk to customers about expected deliverable pieces, we can start to talk about customers around really clearly around what roadblocks are, right? Cause we’ve spoken about the deliverables, we’ve understood around who the decision makers are and what they need. And we’ve spoken about deadlines. And from here it’s like, okay, so what’s getting in the way? What’s going to be the showstopper that’s going to not make this happen? And it really allows us to progress our deals far more quickly. Than without it.
So, for me, I really highly recommend that we have the courage to ask around deadlines. Write. A lot of salespeople I see just simply are nervous, right? They’re edgy about asking this. But I think when we’ve spent time understanding deliverables and asking questions and decision makers and really building a bit of a relationship with our customers, there’s a right, if you like, to be able to ask that question. We’re investing time as well. We don’t have a right that they have to say yes, but we certainly, I think, have developed the credibility and the opportunity to say, hey, when do we need to get this done.
So, they’re the three Ds that I’d be encouraging salespeople and sales leaders who are looking to roll some form of process out into your…I’d be encouraging you to Talk about the 3 Ds as often as you possibly can. So, to recap on those, they are all about deliverables, getting really clear on what the deliverables are, making sure we know exactly what the good outcomes look like and asking the questions to find out. Also then getting clear on who decision makers are and making sure we are known by those decision makers. Because when you’re known, you’re more likely for someone to choose you. And the third and last but not least is the deadlines, right? Really understanding when deadlines are so that we can then back-step everything that comes through that, right? And when we can back-step effectively around all of our next steps, then for me, that’s what becomes really powerful because we can start to talk about, right? If we structure a deal in a certain manner or we structure an outcome for you in a certain manner, Right. Does that make it likely to go ahead?
So, they’re your three D’s for today. My request data here is go and take 10 minutes, sit down and think about how you can start to bring these to life. Because it’s quite a straightforward framework, but really, really the secret here is in how you execute it and get everyone doing the same thing. By all means, reach out if you’ve got questions, more than happy to have a chat about it. But my request, I think from today is take the five or 10 minutes we’ve got back from a slightly shorter episode and go and roll it into thinking about how you could execute it within your team.
Okay, so that’s it for me today. And I’ve spoken a number of weeks now about my road to Cairns, my goal that I’ve set myself and I’m really encouraging everyone listening to set yourself a goal, particularly when it comes to personal health and fitness. And of course, mindset can be certainly one of those. Right. But for me, I’m into week four now and there’s no doubt that general fatigue and tiredness has started to set in or I’m getting up earlier. Some days I’m up at 4:30 and by no means the earliest up here I’ve got friends who are up even earlier to get out riding. But I’m out there, I’m working hard and what I’m now recognising is that I can’t do everything along this journey right to have these goals. I’m having to sacrifice some things so I’m probably drinking a little bit less, I’m a little bit more fastidious about diet but that’s probably something I need to get more into over the coming weeks. But making sure that I’m getting enough sleep, that I’m looking after my body and then I’m eating well, it’s risen to the forefront for me. Right. But certainly, those out there are also training for Ironman Man. It’s a lot of work to do all this training but I’m enjoying it. I’m getting fitter, I’m getting stronger. I’ve just got to work out how I can stay on top of that tiredness so it doesn’t overrun me so I don’t hit that cliff. And certainly, for leaders out there, right, you know when you’re pushing too hard when it comes to work, you might be out late, you might be entertaining customers, you might just be working too much. Just get really clear on your boundaries and make sure you’re not stepping over them because once you fall over that cliff, as I did last week and had to take a couple of days off training, right, just the drop is really fast.
So, stay on top of your game, look after yourself, but most importantly, keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E112 A Shortcut to Rolling Out A Sales Process That Teams Will Follow
