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in this video I want to break down my exact sales process and how it's evolved through three distinct phases over the last five or so years and is responsible for a total of $6 million in sales collected now if you're new here my name is Greg Hickman I'm the founder and CEO of a company called all agency we are a training and consulting company and we've taken over 700 clients through our process to help them productize and systematize their business so that it runs more like a well-oiled machine we also help people package up their intellectual property and bolt-on new income streams that get them paid for their thinking like training Consulting and workshops and in today's video I actually want to talk about the sales system and how that's evolved from kind of a founder-led sales process as I said earlier to having appointment Setters or sdrs as some people call them or account Executives and closers in the process as well and now some of the things we're even testing like selling via Loom videos and notion documents which is a little bit more advanced but I want to talk you through the evolution over the last five or so years because at its core the system really hasn't changed it's just a few tweaks and iterations and how new people fit into the process that have allowed and provided me with a whole lot more leverage as the founder before we jump into each of the three workflows I want to call out something that I've heard Alex horoi say and when I look back on our iterations of this sales process I think a lot of people jump out of the gate and they try to over automate too soon and Alex made a comment around when you're building out your sales and your sales process first you want to maximize flow meaning you don't want to have a lot of obstacles or Hoops that the prospect is required to jump through before they hop on a call with you to learn about how you might be able to help so in the beginning even if you do have say a questionnaire to capture a little bit of info you're probably going to just capture light information all right because we don't want to add too much resistance and why do we want that because in the early days there's a ton of gold to be found in the conversations with your prospects to help you better refine how you articulate how you can help to hear how they share their problems their fears frustrations their wants and aspirations and really the words that they're using to describe those things because you can utilize that to improve and better speak to your target market so having as many of those conversations early on is really important so again keeping the friction as low as possible when you go to have these calls so that's what Alex means when he says maximizing the flow the second phase of this is really starting to monetize the flow as you're having more rep you're going to get an idea as to who is a good fit who's a bad fit and in that regard you should be enrolling more clients into your services because you're having more conversations and you're just getting better and as the volume is starting to increase maybe your marketing efforts or your paid ad efforts are starting to pick up and you're starting to see more volume of calls that's when we want to go and start to control and throttle that volume because as we get more volume we just want to make sure that we're talking to the most highly qualified people that are likely to be a good fit for our service and so this is where we're going to start to add a little bit more friction maybe some more in-depth questionnaire questions before they can book the call we might turn some people down we might require them to watch a short video before the call you get my point but we want to maximize the flow first then we want to monetize the flow and then we want to start to control and throttle the flow for high quality so it's kind of a higher quality get a lot of reps to I'm really only speaking to the most qualified people for the service that we know that we can offer and sell to people that are very specific and clear to us so that being said let's dive into the first process founder Le sales phase one now we got started with paid traffic a little bit early but we use both organic content and paid and so you can kind of see here when we create content in our business and kind of what we help clients with is how do you create content that gets people to engage raise their hand and say hey I'm looking to learn more and when they do we have warm Outreach to go chat with them whether that's in a LinkedIn message or in an Instagram DM if you find yourself in a conversation with someone who engaged with your content we want to make sure that they and check in that a we're adding value and B that if they are qualified and so you're going to find yourself in a situation where we're looking to qualify them by chat now you could easily also just send them a link to schedule a call but at the very least you want to make sure you're talking to someone that is in the Wheelhouse of who you might be able to help so we can qualify them we want to get verbal interest if they're actually looking for help then we go ahead and schedule a consultation or Discovery so hey are you an agency owner yes are you looking to productize your service awesome well that's what we actually help people do is this something you'd like to chat about possibly yeah okay cool here's the link let's have a conversation and so they would schedule a call right and that's where we have the consultation which typically was 45 to 60 minutes and in that conversation the flow is very simple we have an agenda a tiny bit of Rapport kind of understand their motivation and talking with us in the first place I like to go through what their current reality look looks like how are their things how is their business going where do they want to get to what's the success look like what are the roadblocks that are getting in the way then we want to replay that back to them just to make sure we heard everything correctly provide them a prescription or a plan get their Buy in on they want to do something about this and our service is the good fit and then we want to confirm the start date Andor schedule of followup okay so from there if they do enroll then they go into new client onboarding if they didn't enroll then typically we follow up and have a follow-up consultation that's you know anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes that consultation is really about scheduling the follow-up only as needed answering any questions confirming their start date Etc now it's very similar if we do paid ads if we run a paid ad and they opt in we're going to deliver the asset of whatever they opted in for and that asset is fundamentally encouraging them to schedule a call so if they schedule a call and they're qualified again we have that same consultation if they scheduled a call and they're not qualified they end up in our Weekly Newsletter and we continue to nurture them and provide value and try to bring them onto a conversation at a later date again at this stage these are the key pieces of the process and you can dial and Notch down on how hard you qualify in each of these stages like you might in the very early days not even use any questions in your chat you might just say hey if you're interested in this we can hop on a call and just do everything you can to get them onto a call so you can hear that language and on the flip side if you're using paid ads you might not have them really quote unquote apply or fill out a questionnaire they might just be able to schedule the call and you take all of the calls in the beginning as you start having more reps you can start to take only the ones that you want to talk to so at a high level the founder-led sales process for us was organic content into a conversation into a consultation and if they enroll sweet we onboard them if they don't we have a follow-up plan whether that is follow up with specific calls or at a later date oneon-one and even continuing to send them our our content from our email newsletter if that was a paid ad they might opt into a lead magnet of some sort a PDF a checklist or you know a video sales letter and from there they're invited to book a call in which case we end up on the consultation again which is just that 45 minute consultative process where we kind of explore how we might be able to help that my friends is phase one of the founder-led sales process which again in the early days I was doing all of these pieces from having the qualifying conversations to reviewing the questionnaires to having the consultation to scheduling the followup Etc all right so as that evolves and as you start having more calls and more volume something that's really common in a founder-led sales process if you have enough volume but not enough volume to justify bringing on a closer or an account executive to close on your behalf because that does cost money and time often it makes sense to bring on some sort of an appointment setter or a sales development rep often called an SDR and that person is really there to do do a short Discovery call to make sure that you're speaking with people that are a good fit and so how does that update our process which is this is really phase two the first part of phase one really doesn't change from our organic content perspective right you have organic content we're getting into conversations we can qualify in the chat that qualifying by chat could go directly to the consultation or depending upon how strapped for time these people are we could just invite them to a 15-minute call where we do all of the qualific there so this could literally be a 15 to 20 minute call now if we zoom in on this discovery call what are we really doing again we're just trying to qualify we want to give them a demo of what we do high level how it works and how it might benefit them and we want to get again verbal interest to see if there's a match and it's worth having a conversation to see how we could help you will find that you'll have Discovery calls and you might say hey actually I don't think it's best for us to have a conversation we don't actually work with people like you or that's not our wheelhouse so you know best of luck here's someone that I might know but if they are qualified again we are then having this 15minute call schedule the consultation right over here which we've already talked about so if we zoom out Phase 2 is not all that much different it's just instead of qualifying in a conversation and driving them directly to a consultation we're inserting a 15minute discovery call that is going to be utilized to further protect the Founder's time so say as a Founder you can really only handle 20 calls a week and you're getting those 20 calls but only 10 of them are qualified well if you start now having an SDR come in and have this discovery call First you're going to be more likely to get your 20 slots filled with quality people that are going to be better candidates for your service and so that SDR is going to be doing some of that triaging of are we a good fit can we help you do you need what we have do you want what we have and are you looking for help yes let's have a consultation and so that's a really great way if you're still doing a Founder Le sales process to bring in help that's going to be fairly affordable to bring in and insert them into the sales process to protect your existing call slots talking to the most qualified people for what it is you do all right now let's look at version three which I'll say is a little bit more advanced and I'm seeing people do this now that are really experienced in sales I'm just testing this right now and it's going pretty well and you'll see if we zoom in everything's really still the same except we've added in a presentation andori pitch so what's the difference between a presentation in my eyes versus a consultation I think now more than ever we have very sophisticated and educated buyers and they want to just see how things work and so the presentation can be a loom video that walks people through how you do stuff before a call you could on the call where you typically would do the consultative close process you would actually take them through a presentation of the proposed solution so it' be kind of a a hybrid make sure that they have the problems that you help with and then you come in and we' present a proposed solution that has a price scope timeline again some people more advanced are selling from a Google doc right now we've been able to do that a little bit where at this stage the person has a clear understanding of what it is what they're getting and if they had that level of transparency they'd probably make a decision to move forward and or not and you'd be able to protect your time so instead of being very kind of consultative based it's hey are we a good fit let us show you how this can benefit you and we'll take you through more of like a demo and I don't know I can only speak for myself but I've seen the prospects coming to the call more interested and looking for oh my God I can see how that will help me and so I see it as more of like a demo like a SAS demo where first I reiterate what their problem is I make sure that we're on the same page that I think we can help and then I'm just showing them how our process works and where it will benefit them based on what they told me and then I can give them examples of other people like them that this process has worked for and so it feels more like a presentation than a live consultation although there is a Consulting element to it and again why I'm saying this is more advanced and future is is the ability to put together a short video in Loom or a Google doc that accurately conveys what you do in a way in which people will just pay you after reading that Google doc and or seeing that presentation in a loom video you will likely have had to have a lot of reps and enrolled a lot of people in into your service now there's always asterisks to this and exceptions to the rule but if you've worked with 700 people and you can clearly articulate exactly what steps they're going to go through you can share that in like full transparency in a presentation and say look we've worked with 700 people or 100 people or 50 people that look just like you here's what we can do with you and how I think it might help now let's hop on a call to see if it's actually a fit and if the timing is right and all that stuff so you can kind of do a loom video into a call you can do the live presentation Allin one sitting but I think kind of the where we're seeing sales go at least in B2B Services is people are expecting a bit more transparency especially in sophisticated markets if they've worked with other agencies and if they've hired other Consultants then you being able to demonstrate your process your methodology and your approach and very clearly point out how it's going to help solve the problems that they told you about is going to make for a more seamless I'll say less ful sales experience so again as you can see there's three very subtle differences there's always content or ads getting people to come into our world we are qualifying either through a questionnaire or a short Discovery call which can again happen with a sales development rep Andor you as the founder and we are having a consultation for 45 to 60-ish minutes understanding their pains and problems and prescribing how our services can help them all the way down to the future is where you've done that so many times you can get away with having a video or a document that walks them through how you can help woven into that process every single sales process that I've been in a part of has done these core pieces and I think with technology video we're just seeing people find more interesting ways to create leverage and make it a less cumbersome process for the prospect if your Market has high skepticism having them consume a video beforehand and while yes it might decrease the number of calls you can get if that's how you buy then you might want to consider how you're making your prospects buy and that's my final takeaway here is as you develop your sales process however it iterates this was just how it iterated for us I think now more than ever think about how you buy as a prospect I love transparency I love the hey here's what it looks like and I'm always trying to get better I'm not going to say I'm always perfect but the more that I can expose through these videos of what it's like to work with us and what we focus on and who's a good fit and who's not before we ever have a conversation the more productive our conversation going to be there's a handful of studies that have shown I think Google's most recent study talks about when people get on the phone to actually buy like they're already 80% through their own buying process like they're really close to making a decision and if you leverage your marketing and your content and you show up authentic and transparent I think the calls that you're going to have are going to be a lot better at least they have been for us when people have watched a ton of our videos and then they come on a call they're already bought in on our methodology our approach Etc now that being said again when I got started I didn't have all of this stuff so I was trying to talk to as many people as possible and understand their situation so that I can continue to refine and iterate so that's why phase one founder Le only we're having as many conversations as possible whether they're qualified or not we are not putting them through hoops all the way through to 5 years later we're a lot more advanced still ton to improve on and we're able to share loom videos that do a lot of the heavy lifting for us or a Google Doc before we hop on a conversation and it's been extremely helpful for myself and the team to have a sales process that aligns with our values as well so hopefully this is helpful if you found this useful please share your biggest takeaway in the comment section below and share this with an agency friend or a consultant friend if you know that they're struggling with sales now if you're looking for what I believe to be the future of the agency and Consulting business model Market go ahead and watch this video right now