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. I’ve been on the road for the last couple of weeks, have had a little bit of downtime with the family, got my little one up on skis for the first time. Yay. Go Amali! Cruising up and down the mountain after a couple of days was fantastic. But also, have been running workshops with some of my fantastic customers out there, some of both my smaller businesses and also some of the larger businesses in towards the billion-dollar revenue mark that I work with.
So, I’ve had a real mix over the last couple of weeks of exposure to what’s happening out in the particularly in the B2B sales world the last couple of weeks, but a little bit around the B2C world as well. And it’s been amazing. I’ve been asked and look, this is quite common where themes will really rise through engagements that I have with customers and workshops and the types of challenges that customers are seeing become quite thematic. And what I mean by that is quite similar. I typically find that customers, when they’re having issues, it actually tends to stretch across many customers rather than just one. And certainly, the themes over the last couple of weeks have been hey Ben, how can we increase our close rates? And what we mean specifically by that is how can we increase our close rates and reduce the amount of time we spend handling objections, determining if it’s a go, no go at all, getting stakeholders involved to make that final decision, get paperwork done and really move from hey, I’m really interested in what you do to yeah, let’s get moving, let’s start running and make our project happen.
So, there’s been a real theme of that over the last few weeks and typically this time of year, middle of the year, We’ve just tipped over that end of financial year cliff, if you like, where we often see a lot of deals get done just before. But really this time of year we definitely start to feel that slowdown in deals being processed and projects moving forward. But also, I suspect this year we’re maybe seeing just a little bit more of it than we perhaps have in prior years. And that could be anything at all due to global macroeconomic themes. It can be due to local themes here in Australia. Look, it could simply just be a timing piece where businesses have changed planning, they’re phasing decisions earlier in the year or they’re pushing them out into later in the year. Lots and lots of reasons and certainly ones we’re not going to dive into today.
But what we are going to talk about today is what happens when your deal pipeline slows down and more importantly, how do we stop a deal pipeline or do everything we can to stop a deal pipeline slowing down in the second half of our engagement? So that time when we’ve got quotes out to market and we’re really busily looking at our pipeline saying, right, we’ve got enough out there to hit our numbers over the next 12 months or whatever that period of time is. However, our job is to get these closed and these questions that I’ve been asked really consistently over the last couple of weeks around, how do we help our pipeline close out?
For me, actually steps back all the way to the start of our engagements with our customers. And the good news is we can actually go back to the start pretty quickly, even after we’ve quoted a customer. So, for those who have big pipelines that are trying to close out, you’ll be able to get some goodness out of today. But also, for those who are building pipelines or those who are looking to reinvigorate their pipelines, or simply wondering what’s the best way to get our deals to close a little bit quicker. Today’s theme is one that’s really about setting yourself up to succeed. And what I mean by that is setting yourself up to get deals done with the minimum possible lag after you quote.
So, we’re going to run through that theme today. I’m going to sidestep a little bit around what you could do now if you have pipelines that are a little bit slower to close. However, the theme that we’re going to really focus on first is how do we set up deals to reduce the number of objections that we’re getting towards the end of our deal and thereby speed up our Close rate.
Okay. So, for me and those who know me pretty well, we’ll always expect our refer back to our process. the reason I’m referring back to a process here is because for me, getting deals to consistently close quickly with a fewer or reduced amount of friction is all about making sure that we are doing the same thing as much as we possibly can. I.e. we have a very repetitive process that allows us to be predictable in how we move customers through deals. And the reason I talk about that is because it means we’re leaning into the systems that we create as a business to more effectively engage with our customers. So, we’re going to look really, really heavily here at the first part of the deal, the meet and greet part of the process. But for those out there who are wondering, okay, what do I do to get a process running? The best one liner I can roll out here is that we need to have the majority of our team doing the majority of the same things the majority of the time.
So, a great process is going to be one where we can essentially have all of the team funnelling in the right direction for the majority of the time. It’s not about setting scripts. And I talk a lot about this, about making sure that we’re allowing for individual personality in sales deals to shine through, but that we’re all still roughly following that same process forward.
Okay? So, the number one and the most important piece of advice that I have around reducing the lag for your deals that is increasing the speed with which they close, is to get things right early. And the theme I talk about here is to be chosen early and often. So, what this looks like for us as a supplier, as a partner to any of our customers is that when we walk out of that first meeting with a customer or a potential customer, that the ideal outcome is that the customer has said, I want to work with these guys. Now, of course, that’s very unlikely. That’s verbalized back to us because just from a pure negotiation point of view, it can put the customer into a difficult position. However, inside their head. What we’re looking for is, you know what? I loved what these customers or what these people brought forward or him or her brought forward. I want to work with them. And from that point forward, what we have is a customer who’s validating that decision. Yes, I like Ben. I like Ben. I like Ben. Right the whole way through the rest of the deal. And what they’re simply doing is reassuring themselves that Ben is the person they want to work with versus an alternate scenario where we Go in. And we haven’t been able to have that impact on a customer. And we. And we haven’t been able to get our deals to the point where we think or where the customer thinks we’re the ones we want to work with. And the rest of the deal process ends up being, is it Ben? Is it Sarah? Is it Paul? Is it Ben? Is it Sarah? Is it Paul? Is it Ben? Is it Sarah? Is it Paul? And they’re actually evaluating us against our competition or our opposition as one of my customers puts it.
For me, that key aim, that key outcome, whenever we are thinking what do we want out of our first meeting is not that we have a deal done, is not that we have a verbalized, we’re going to move forward. What we do want, though, is the customer in their minds, picking us so that then the rest of that process is simply validation of that decision. So how do we do that? I’m going to run through a number of ways here that I see great salespeople and great teams make this happen. And what I’d like to recommend you do here is at a bare minimum, if you’re an experienced team or an experienced leader, try and find one or two things that you can do to tweak your process, right? Those little things that you can do again and again and again and again in the process, where we have the majority of our team doing the majority of the same things the majority of the time or through to if you’re reasonably new as a leader or you’re a business owner listening in right around, where you might be able to actually run this as your entire process, right? So, this might be the way you conduct your first meetings with customers. So, lots of room in here to work with in between. And I’ll also oscillate out to what you can do with an existing pipeline.
Okay, so buy. By no stretch of the imagination, the first five minutes is the most critical for me of building any relationship in any sales deal you will come across. And that is quite simply how you greet a customer, how you have those first few sentences to put them at ease. Those first few topics, those first few discussion points that has the other side of the table simply saying, I can work with this person. This comes down to preparation, right? Walking in and understanding a little bit about your customer. It’s so easy to do detailed preparation now, right? It’s one thing as sales teams, if we’re not leveraging AI to do better preparation for our customer meets, then I’d say we’re getting across or a little mini failure here at this point in time. Very easy to do. Right? But so, it’s not just that preparation around what the customer might want. It’s preparation about learning a little bit about the person you’re talking to, what their role might look like. We can even profile if we’re meeting a chief technical officer or an operations person or a marketing team lead, right? What typically those roles are looking for. It’s also trying to find business specifics that we might be able to talk to with that person or for me even sometimes, most importantly is some common ground. Right. People generally have a public profile now, at a minimum, we’re seeing LinkedIn profiles and Facebook profiles. Right. There’s a difference between stalking and doing research, by the way, but simply stepping in to find out a little bit about that person so that when you’re walking in the door, you know, you can find common connection.
If you’re wondering where to start, the most common points we’re going to see connections around sport, family, leisure, right? So, sport, family, leisure, leisure being holidays, leisure being common interests, right? Anyone that gets on the phone with me, the first thing, if they’re attuned in, is they’re going look at the surfboard that’s sitting here behind me, right? Question, do you surf? Right. That’s going to lean into a conversation, and it’s going to get me talking with anyone that we’re meeting with, whether it’s phone, whether it’s video, whether it’s face to face. Finding those common ground is, for me, the most important part to being chosen early. And often it starts the relationship in the right way, and we can then open up and develop from there.
Alright? That’s number one. Number two for me here, when we want to be closing deals quickly is all about setting up this outcome. And what we need to do here is really understand what the problem or the opportunity is that we’re talking to our customer about. Now, sometimes that problem or that opportunity, customers simply won’t know. Right. And we need to work through that with them and ask great questions. And the ability to ask great questions or the openness of the other side to answer those questions comes down to how we’ve built just those first few steps in our first few building blocks of a relationship right at the start of the call. But certainly, if we can get down to what the problem or the opportunity is as quickly as possible, we’re then able to work through what solutions can look like. Certainly, there’s a lot of questions that are going to come between now and getting the solution. Right. But the sooner we can uncover the problem or the opportunity, the more likely we are to get engagement from the other side. Right.
So, we’ve all had those sales meetings where we can walk in and we sit down and we talk about what’s happening in the customer’s business. And then the customer says, hey, tell us about what you do. And we start to talk about. About what we do, and just be nice and friendly and smiling. And after 20 or 30 or 40 minutes, we get to the end, and we’re like, great, let me see what I can do. Let me see if there’s anything that fits my profile. Let me talk to some other divisions and see if there’s a match. Right. Those are the conversations that, for me, just simply don’t deliver the outcomes of closed deals as often as the ones that can sit in and say, okay, let’s talk about the problems that you have. Let’s talk about the opportunities that you have. Let’s talk about if right now we could change one or two things in your business or your role or your team, what would they look like?
So, being able to drill in to those problems or those opportunities early just allows us to spend the rest of the time that we have together really zeroing in on how what we offer can meet what the customer’s looking for. So, to make this happen and to make this really effective is we need to be quite adept at asking questions. And I think the best advice I have for particularly individual salespeople out there is that when you ask one question around one topic. Ben, do you surf? Be prepared to follow it up with a second question. Ben, do you surf? No. I love having the surfboard behind there. I live up in Noosa. Most of what I do is around triathlons and water polo. Oh, great. Tell me about triathlons and water polo. Right. So, it’s following that conversation through. So, it’s beyond just that first question. Ben, tell me about what’s going on in your business. Well, at the moment, things are pretty good. Future pipeline’s looking fantastic. Customer outcomes are solid. But I’m really working hard on how to look into AI. Great. So, tell me, what would using AI look like for you if we could really get it right? So, he’s really zeroing in beyond just that first question and starting to try and understand a little bit more about our customers, drivers.
So, for me, the best way to uncover problems or opportunities is to be prepared to ask questions. Now, leaders, this is a practiced skill or certainly, at minimum, A learned skill that then follows with plenty of practice. And the best way I see teams doing this really, really well. Right. Is A Role plays is a way of doing it. I’m not a huge fan of role plays because they can be quite forced, but certainly through deal reviews. So, deal reviews is a meeting I’ve discussed across plenty of our episodes, but that’s when we’re sitting in and we’re workshopping through customer deals. That’s a really great time to start talking about questions. Next way. And by the way, get in touch if you want to know more around how deal reviews run. They are the most powerful meetings that I see sales teams have. From there, what I’m also seeing is teams having set questions written down. Right. So, you end up having not a script to follow, but a bible of questions that you might ask.
Okay, so we’re building good relationships. We’re asking lots of questions. We’re trying to get to the bottom of problems or opportunities. From there, what we need to start to do to set up a deal to close. And this is where leaders and salespeople who are listening, where you have deals or a pipeline that stopped. This is a great point where you can step back in, and that’s around creating checklists. I’m a huge, huge fan of sitting down with customers or anyone in teams or functions. Doesn’t matter who you’re dealing with. And writing a list around what needs to get us from where we are right now to where we need to be.
So, in a sales deal, that can really commonly look like. And let’s talk about that example I gave around rolling AI into your business. What that can really commonly look like is something like, okay, so we need to make sure that we can get across all the options that you have around exploring AI. Then we need to start to pick the top five that we could work with within your business. And perhaps from those top five, we highlight the one or two most important. We need to engage some of your other decision makers or influencers in your business. We need to get the commercial terms right so that we’re hitting a payback of an ROI of 20% or an increase in revenue of $100,000. And then we need to get this done by the 30th of September, which will allow you to roll this out so it’s well and truly embedded into your business before Christmas and you go on a break. Right. Or the example might be if we’re out selling a product. Right. Okay, what’s our checklist here? Well, the first thing we need to do is make sure that the product is fit for your team. So, we need to involve these three stakeholders across your team to make sure that they’re comfortable with the product. We need to have a look at how it would integrate in with your existing systems and hardware. We need to make sure that you’ve got the right storage space to put it into your warehouse. We then need. And I’m throwing ideas around here, right. We need to then talk about pricing and make sure that has a payback of less than four years. We need to talk about servicing and warranty. And last but not least, we need to make sure your CFO is really comfortable with how we’re going to go about rolling out the product. Right. Boom, boom, boom. Whatever those checklists may be.
For me, fundamentally, this is the step that I see a lot of salespeople walk past, often because they’re worried about upsetting a customer or seeming too forthright. So, for me, when you’ve spent the time building the rapport, you’ve asked questions, you’ve got engagement from the other side because they’re clear on what the problem or opportunity to solve is. When we can build that checklist, that’s when we allow ourselves to have something, a pattern that we can follow or a process we can follow through the entire engagement with our customer. We then get to tick these off, Tick, tick, tick, tick as we go and cross check with our customers as we do. So, have we made sure the product’s right? Have we got the right product and the right specs and the right features to use this with your team? Yes. Are we sure? Actually, do you know what? We still need to pick the right colour to make our meet our branding of our business and make sure the marketing team are on board. Okay, great, let’s go back and do that. Right. But really, ticking off that checklist allows us to follow a process. And then better yet, once we’ve ticked it off, ask our customers that they’re ready to go. Because at the end of the day, we need to find a way where we’ve earned the right to ask for the business. And where I see great sales teams do this effectively is by running through a checklist that once they’ve ticked off, it allows them to then move forward.
So, where you have deals stuck, if you’re a business that has deals that are not moving forward, this is where I’d really recommend you roll back to and sit down with your customer and say, okay, would you mind if we go through all the things that we need to get done to make sure that we can then move forward, that we can roll out this solution, that we can capitalise on this problem or make sure we can capitalise on this opportunity. So, you’ve got your deals, they’re stuck, they’re not moving forward. How I’d recommend you do this is simply get your team to then re-engage with your customer. Whether it’s face to face would be fantastic otherwise by video number two and by phone number three and work through what still needs to happen to get these deals moving forward. It’s very, very powerful because it allows us to understand if the deals are simply just stored and we’ve got a few more things we need to tick off or actually if we have a customer that’s not interested, these will often come out here and can often be called a red flag meeting where we wave that flag and say, hey, what’s going on? Why can’t we make this happen?
Okay, so they’re fundamentally the four most important things that I’d be talking about to any team around. Increasing their close rates and reducing the cycle time of deals. Make sure you’re building those really strong relationships that will allow you to dive into effective questions and finding solutions. Second one, setting up the outcome right, what’s the problem or opportunity? Third one’s asking the right questions and the fourth one’s getting a checklist done.
There’s a few others here that I think a few other tasks or roles that are really important in helping set deals up early so that we can be chosen early and simply validated through the process rather than compared against others. And for me, that’s getting really clear on the roles that people play within the engagement, what role the customer needs to play, what role we need to play, and really asking them what the best things are that we can do, how we can communicate with them when they want to be talking to us, what’s the best way to present a proposal to them, who else they need to get involved in the decision, who we need to know, who needs to know who we are, but really engaging with the customer around how we move forward and what’s the best way that we can support them. And the reason this is so important is because what we’re essentially doing here is seeking permission to engage. We’re asking the customer to tell us how they’d like us to proceed, right? Thereby they’re saying to us, hey, we got some skin in the game here we are, you know, I’m communicating with you, exactly what I want you to do. Right. And often that means we not only get better engagement, but there’s, there’s somewhat of a sense of accountability from the customer to say, you know what, I did actually ask them to do this. I need to follow through.
Now, of course, this doesn’t work in every situation of every time, but what we’re looking for here is ways we can have processes that work more often than not. Okay, so then moving on from there, setting up timeframes and understanding what the fundamental go, no go’s of deals are is really, really important to help us close at the other end. For me, the reason this is so important is that once we’ve got clear on what the go no go is, that gives us the, the point in time in which we can be asking for the business, but also when we’re setting up timeframes, we can backwards plan everything that needs to happen from there. Again, so often I don’t see salespeople sit down and say in the very first meeting, when do we need to get a resolution on this buy? When do we want to get to a yes or a no or a not yet? By doing this early, we’re setting up the deal so that we can work towards that solution. And whilst we may not hit that arbitrary timeline in many circumstances, what we are doing is building just a generalised sense of productivity or urgency, if you like, to be able to move us forward.
Okay. Last but not least, to make sure that we are the choice, right? We are chosen early and often is to make sure that when we’re ending any of our meetings with our customers, the customer knows who’s doing what next. And at an A grade level here, that means they’ve got something to do too. We’ve all heard that saying, you’ve got to keep the busy, busy, right? When we’re giving our customers something to do, right? And ideally, we have something to do as well. It’s giving reason for dialogue to continue. It’s giving reason for that relationship you built to move forward. It’s giving reason for all those ideas and opportunities and problems that we’ve spoken about to be brought to life when we’ve all got jobs and we’re productively moving forward towards them, right? When we go on holidays, we so often fall back to, the days disappear. We eat breakfast, we go for a walk, we have lunch, we go to the pool, right? We chill out, we go to a museum, we go to a concert, whatever it is, right? By the end of a holiday, we’re exhausted from doing nothing. The idea here is that we keep the busy busy and the deals rolling forward.
So, that for me is the way that I handle with teams that we work with when they have a pipeline that is slowing down. A number of objections or deals that can’t close is what we try to do is we go back to the future. We sit down, we work through with our customers, what we need to do to tick off progress items to then be able to move forward. But more importantly is for future deals. We set them up to succeed. We set them up so that we can be chosen early and often rather than compared against others across the lifecycle of our journey.
So, a little bit in this podcast today, my advice is absolutely make sure you take one or two things out of here that you can roll out with your team at a minimum. If not, use that as a way to build out your meet and greets. I love talking about this stuff. It’s my absolute bread and butter. So, for people out there that want to know more, please get in touch with me. I’m not hard to find, but they’re the main things I wanted to really run through today is helping teams set up deals for the rest of the year to fast closer with fewer objections.
Okay, so that’s it from us to today. We’re going to keep moving forward. We’ve got some terrific guests rolling over the coming weeks for everyone. Until next time, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
Simplicity Sails, Complexity Fails, with Lasada Pippen
