Enhance Your Small Business with Outside Sales Automation for Small Businesses

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Are you a small business owner or a company founder who found yourself in the role Of lead salesperson for your company? It's a really common place to be because the reality is that sales is the driving force of any business, and we often, as business owners, have to master the process of selling what we do. So even if the goal is to ultimately scale up and get other salespeople to do the dirty business of selling for us, we need to master the sales process ourself. So in this video, I'm going to show you nine sales tips for small business. Check it out. (light digital music) Number One: Don't outsource sales. One of the biggest mistakes that I see small business owners and company founders making is that they try to outsource sales really early on in the process. And it's like, you know what? I don't want to deal with sales, so I'm going to hire someone else to do that. But the problem is that without sales, your business goes nowhere. It's one of the single most important roles in a company. And if you're just getting the business off the ground or you're just getting going, you must master the sales process yourself. You must get the process in place so that way you can bring someone in eventually to do that work. But we don't want to just outsource sales to someone else and just say, "Okay, look, you figure it out. I'm going to focus on operations," because that is a recipe for failure. You must at least get the sales process in place. And that could be, you know, that could be done in six months, but you must get that process in place so that way you can bring someone in to do the job. So don't outsource sales from the start. Number Two: Focus on processes. So as business owners, we almost want to think like a McDonald's franchisee where having the processes is the most important thing. So yes, you may have an amazing personality and so you can just use your personality to get sales, but that's no good because ultimately when you try to get someone else into position to do that, they're not going to necessarily have your personality to do all that stuff. So by focusing on a process, now it's like the hamburger maker at the McDonald's. You have mastered the process of making the hamburger, so that way now you can put someone else in and all they do is make hamburgers all day long. Same thing with sales. Focus on the process, so that way once the process is in place, now you can just bring someone in and all they're doing is prospecting all day long or all they're doing is closing deals all day long. By having the processes in place, we can create that repeatable approach to ultimately just put someone in that position and now they're not floundering, trying to figure it out on their own. Number Three: Have a repeatable way to get cold prospects. Now the data is unequivocal that the top organizations on the planet all have repeatable ways to get in front of cold prospects. And a cold prospect is someone who has no idea who you are right now. If you're only relying on referrals and introductions to grow your business, you know, you can be successful but it's going to be small. It's not going to scale the way you would like. You must have a repeatable way to get in front of cold prospects if you want to scale. And the way we do that is by having a consistently repeatable outreach process. And so that's going to ultimately turn people who have no idea who you and your company is into prospects, ultimately into clients. Number Four: Leverage sales automation. So as a business owner or company founder, you are not going to have time to send off every email or make every phone call or write every LinkedIn outreach, right? We need to leverage automation in order to scale our outreach. And so there are so many great tools out there, I'm not going to focus on which one to use, but we must use sales automation. And by the way, I'm not talking about marketing automation like HubSpot or you know, MailChimp or Constant Contact. I'm talking about true sales automation tools that allow you to send personalized emails at scale. That's going to be the key to getting those processes in place and ultimately scaling up to get enough meetings with those prospects. Number Five: Use virtual assistants for the research of prospects. So in terms of actually getting your sales automation in place, one of the biggest tasks is going to be to actually research and get the leads list for these prospects. That is something that you're going to want to get virtual assistants to do the real research. Now you may be pulling the initial list, but ultimately the virtual assistant should be doing the heavy lifting of, you know, confirming that the name is spelled right or that the company is, you know, the company name is correct. And you know any personalization details that you're going to use in your LinkedIn or your email outreach, whatever it is, use virtual assistance for that work because that can be done for five to $10 an hour usually whereas your time is very valuable and should be spent on the big picture stuff. Number Six: Know your company's real value. So what I see so often is that founders, business owners, they're focused on what their offering is, but not on what the real value is for their offering. So here's the distinction. Let's say you sold IT services. So a lot of IT services founders and entrepreneurs focus on the stuff, like what are the actual services, you know, the MSPs and the IoT and all these like fancy jargon. But the reality is that your prospects don't care about any of that stuff. What they care about is what's the real solution that's in front of me? What are the challenges that I have that this solution can actually solve? So knowing your company's real value is often not about like what the actual stuff is that you're selling, but instead like what are the outcomes that you're going to create for your prospects? Number Seven: Disqualify hard. So as business owners and company founders, you don't have time to be talking to hundreds of people that are not qualified. So you must leverage a disqualification process that immediately removes people that are not qualified as quickly as possible. And so that's why we say disqualify hard is like, look, if you're just a salesperson and you've got time to waste with potential prospects who are probably not likely to be a fit, my recommendation would still be to disqualify that person, but at least that person is full-time on sales and so they can at least afford to waste their time a little. As a business owner or a company founder, you don't have time to do that. So you've got to be really, really ruthless about disqualifying very quickly, not wasting your time with anyone who is not a very strong fit. Number Eight: Focus on larger sales. Now as a company founder or business owner, even once you have salespeople in place, it still is going to be in your best interest to focus on the larger deals, because big deals mean huge cash inflows and high revenues. So as the founder, making sure that those large sales stay in track is huge. So that could mean that you just exclusively take the larger opportunities or even when you have someone else in place that you are overseeing that process, because those larger deals are going to be the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in one fell sloop in in some cases, right? So making sure that you are really focused on those larger sales is going to be such a good and leveraged use of your time. Number Nine: Once you have proof of concept, now bring in support. So I started this conversation by saying, "Don't outsource sales." Well, once you've got the real sales proof of concept in place and you've got the processes, now you can bring in support. And usually that's in bite-sized pieces. So that might mean at first just someone who is, let's say a sales development rep or a business development rep who's doing prospecting exclusively and then sending you leads. And then once you've got that in place, now you could bring in a closer or an account executive, someone who's actually closing those deals. But it really requires that you have done the work upfront, that you've created that sales proof of concept. So now you can bring in that support to ultimately follow the process that you've put in place. So there are nine sales tips for small business. And if you enjoyed this video, they have an amazing free training on the step-by-step formula to closing more deals. Just click right here to get registered instantly. Seriously, just click right here. This is an in-depth training that will help you close more deals at higher prices, all while generating more meetings. Also, if you've got some value, please like this video below on YouTube and be sure to subscribe by clicking my face, which should be right about here, to get access to a new video just like this one each week.