Empower your team with tech sales closing for Personnel

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don't you hate it when potential customers just completely go sign you I'm gonna show you some ways to prevent that from happening in the future okay so starting off with the initial list and the people that you're talking to because you can't really prevent things from happening if you're talking to the wrong people so looking at your sales pipeline how are you building your list if your existing sales person at a company and you've been there for a while or if you're a new guy or girl though the lowest hanging fruit is gonna be existing customers previous clients or previous opportunities so starting off with going through that list to try and find out who's got some opportunities for you to quote on who's got some new projects that you can look into and start circling back with them to freshen up that relationship if you're new with the company it's a perfect opportunity for you because you can throw that old sales guy or a girl underneath the bus and be like you know they weren't doing so great they're not here anymore I'm here wanted to follow up see if that projects still alive see if you guys have anything new it's gonna be a fresh face so you can start that relationship over again and get them excited about your business so that's gonna be the lowest hanging fruit now when it comes to building out a new list if there isn't already a plethora of information from the previous sales person or you guys don't do have market research lists or email marketing lists that's that lists that have been built the best way to start with that that we've seen is gonna be zoom info now the zoom info is a data resource some people use datacom through salesforce if you have that as your CRM the issue with datacom is the the information somewhat outdated it's a little bit janky and you really want to try and focus on the highest quality data zoom infos what's something that I've used in the past something that I've you recommended clients to use it's got a high it's got a high rate of quality even do custom searches you can export it you can just do copy and pasting so that's the best thing to do from a from a list building standpoint and getting contact information it is expensive you're gonna be looking at probably about 5k starting point but you do get access to their database you get to export contacts all right so before you can get into the different categories you need to have some sort of CRM system doesn't matter if it's Zoho or salesforce or Infusionsoft or shark Spring whatever it is you need to have some sort of organization because there is no way possible you're gonna remember to follow up with all these different people that you're working through if you're just doing it on post-it notes notebooks spreadsheets anything like that there has to be some sort of system in place at least to organize things so you can visually see people moving through the different stages of your pipeline and to the fullest extent if possible setting up some sort of automation that once they get to the later stages in it and you need to follow up with them or you need to do some nurturing campaigns or they say not right now you can put them into automation to just let allow the automation to touch base with them and follow them up most of the time the issue that salespeople have is just keeping all their data together when you've got all these opportunities keeping them straight and remembering to follow up with people that is how you're gonna lose deals if you don't have a system in place where you are fully organized so getting a CRM system even if it's something very basic try and avoid spreadsheets and things like that put something in place if your company has something in place and they're not using it or if they are using it you know you kind of gotta take a case by case figure it out do it on your own if you have to but having an organization is gonna be paramount to keep make sure that all this stuff moves smoothly through the process so that's how you can build your lists out the important part of that is making sure that the quality of those lists is good because there's no point in going down the path with prospecting and talking to people and following up with them if you're basically dealing with bad data so once your list is built and you start going you start pitching to them then you can get into the qualification phase which is really really Next so in pipeline management and in prospecting the win sales management the way that a lot of companies break it down is into individual categories or stages the way that that I've broken it down in the past the way that we break it down internally and when our clients come to us we recommend that they do it is the first step is a lead so some people say hey I've got a hot lead you know I'm going after this person to us and to me a lead is just a name of a person at a company that's it it does not mean that they are qualified it doesn't mean if they want to do business with you it's not some hit on the website that comes in that is not necessarily a qualified lead so a lead is just somebody that's not qualified name of a person and a company when you're building out your list and you start to identify people that probably have a high likelihood of potentially being a customer based on your qualification standards you can tag them all as leads because everybody's essentially a lead until you qualify them that goes into the next step so for us going from a lead the next step is a prospect a prospect is essentially somebody that's qualified so before they could be titled as a prospect and move into that sales stage then they need to be qualified through a conversation with physical person it's not something that you can just automate where they fill out a form and you're like yep that person is qualified they're now a prospect or hey they said that they want to do all this stuff with you they already do all this stuff with somebody one of your competitors that's still not a prospect because you need to qualify them under your own standards so the second stage is going to be a prospect and going through the qualification process you need to find out first and foremost can they afford whatever it is that you're selling because if they can't then there is no point of moving forward with the next stage that passed that in the sales pipeline you have to ask the specific questions you need to ask questions about what are they currently doing how's it working out what are their pain points get them to talk more about themselves and you just pitching your services to them because you need to fully understand what it is that they need from you and what type of expectations are gonna have and in order for you to do that you have to have bliss built out and you can write the list down of your standard 5 questions or if you already know them memorize because you've been doing this for a while and that's great it'll sound more fluid but you have to have core group of questions to ask them to get them into that qualification phase sometimes it may take 2 phone calls to qualify for us we try and qualify in one phone call and for our clients we try to get them to qualify within two so going through the qualification phase is extremely important because you're not going to be wasting your efforts going back to the original point about follow-up and people ghosting a lot of times the reason why people ghost is because they weren't really a serious buyer at the anyways or they weren't a fit for what it is that you do whether you were too expensive you weren't you weren't a good location geographically they were thinking about using your services they've never used it before regardless of whatever it is going through that qualification process and for your own company making sure that they are a good fit will prevent you from following up with people that you're not ever gonna sell in the in at the end of the day anyway so it won't even matter if they ghost they won't even get to that phase they're not gonna waste your time going into from a lead to a prospect and then into a proposal phase and then from proposal moving on don't waste your time with that qualify them and spend time at that stage and really make sure that they are good fit for you third stage of your sales process is gonna be the proposal you've already qualified this prospect first they or lead now they're qualified you're gonna do a proposal for them once you get them into that proposal phase getting that done as quickly as possible and getting that back over to them making sure that the content is good that you're touching on all the points that they wanted if they sent you an RFQ if they sent you an RFP and they had specific questions or specific things that they wanted answered including them that into the proposal who's gonna make it appear that you paid attention to what they were looking for and it's gonna show the process that you walk through now for a lot of the b2b guys you guys may have specific systems and things that you use internally for your proposals if you're still using word documents spreadsheets things like that creating a PDF the fastest way for you to get proposals done in 2018-2019 in the system that we use internally is propose a Phi now propose a Phi as a cloud-based system we're not an affiliate we don't get any money for saying that we're not promoting it from that standpoint but it is the best system to use right now for us because you can create templates and have all your content library together it's very quick to put a proposal together initially as a boilerplate and then customize it from there it looks nice and clean that's gonna typically be the hold up a lot of times people are having issues getting the proposal done because they're waiting on pieces of information even if you've duplicated an old proposal you're going and just changing it for that specific customer that process can get drawn-out if that customer asks for a proposal and you drag process out in two weeks you're gonna lose our interest you're gonna lose the necessity that they have to use your service or the or you know the speed that they're looking to move at the faster you can get it through is gonna be the higher likelihood that you can keep that momentum going and get them as a client all right you sending the proposal now you go into the the final phase of it which which is what we call closing at this point they've been qualified you sent them pricing now you have to close them give it a little bit time before you do your initial follow-up but asking them questions of when do you expect to have an internal meeting when you guys looking to make a decision on this those questions should all have already been asked so that way you can understand the timeline if you send somebody a proposal two days later you follow up and say wanted to see if you guys chose us that's gonna be a bad move you need to give it a little bit of time and ask them ahead of time what their process is gonna be so you can then follow up ingly if they're going out to multiple companies you want to be consistent but you do not want to become an annoyance so planning out how you're gonna follow up with the closing phase to try and get them the business is gonna be important to make sure that you don't just either get lost because other people are doing things better your competition or your be gonna become annoying because you're just the pasty sales guy look that's looking to close a deal in the closing phase there's only a couple different paths that they can move from here typically it's gonna be won or lost either you got them as a customer or you didn't the way that we do in the way that we teach our clients to do it is gonna be they're gonna go into potentially two other categories from there they can either go into a nurture category which means they say we like the proposal we like what you guys sent us but right now it's not the right times things have changed internally there's been budget constraints this projects been put on hold whatever the reason is they're gonna go into a nurture campaign the nurture campaign is strictly to just follow up with them if you have a CRM system you've got things built out you can allow the automation to follow up you can create tasks and reminders down the road in the future six weeks 10 weeks 12 weeks to follow up just to say touching base to see how things are going wanted to see where you guys are at the project sometimes they may say follow me in three months and ends up in two years we just had a potential customer last week that we've been trying to close them for a year and a half and it's just been a constant that projects on hold and now it's back and then now it's on hold and we've continued to push through it from the past year and a half they continue to get that follow up that's why we were potentially chosen and looked at continuously for this because we're not just saying oh they don't have they're not gonna pick us let's just forget about it throw them in some automation throw them on a list and just continue to follow up because those are the guys and the companies are gonna get the business from them now the ghosting aspect is the other kind of subcategory of closing in in the closing phase ghosting is where they just not respond to you at all so if you get a lot of times salespeople get that a lot too where you sent them emails you you've given them phone calls and you've left voicemails and they're just not responding if somebody's in the GoSee phase and you have if you have a lot of people in the ghosting phase and you are not doing a good enough job in the in the second step of prospecting and qualification it means that you're sending out proposals with people that they maybe thought that they have a need or they're not the decision-maker and maybe there were you know going through the process with you and they're just wasting your time or they weren't really serious about you guys in the beginning they were just getting another quote from somebody else because they had their company or whatever it is that they're doing they had their company of choice they just need other people to make sure that they're getting a fair price on that so if you got a lot of people in ghosting go back to prospecting aspect in the prospecting phase and make sure that you're qualified people hire if you still have people in the ghosting phase you know a small percentage of them that's gonna happen people get busy you have to understand that that their life doesn't revolve around the job they're not always gonna be there a response they people do travel people do get sick people aren't in the office every day so being patient but persistent is what's gonna make you win there to try and get them from the ghosting phase back into the closing phase but it's essentially a subset with closing at the top and then down below nurture nurture and ghostie not gonna be the subcategories and then one in loss is essentially the outcome of it now when you're trying to follow up with these people after you've you're in the face the top two things that people do is email and phone call the laziest thing that people do is just send emails in sales meaning I have meetings I have heard so many times I sent them an email and I'm waiting for them to respond if you are waiting for them to respond and you've got a long list of people you're waiting for you're not taking enough action from a follow-up standpoint so if you send them an email what else can you do you can you can shoot them a phone call and leave a message most the time people aren't gonna pick up the phone when you when you call them because most of the time people are busy and they want to respond on their own time so email phone call you have to get creative with this do a personal visit do a cold visit shoot them and even say hey I'm gonna be in the area or hey I'm I'm gonna be traveling by you I just want to pop in you can give them the heads up don't put it necessarily a date to it because they may say oh I'm not gonna be around that day just because they don't want the confrontation just stop in there at any point in time and try and do a personal visit if that doesn't work hit them up on social if you're not already connected with them on LinkedIn which hopefully you are from all the videos that we produce talking about how LinkedIn is the best prospecting tool for you you're already connected with them send them a message on LinkedIn do a post and tag them in it to get their attention maybe they're not on LinkedIn enough and that's not gonna work maybe you need to send them a piece of direct mail throw a note a personalized note and your business card in an envelope and mail it to them you have to look at the different aspects of communication that people have to figure out how can you get their attention back now hopefully these tips will help you with that but even if it's something different than these four or five six things that I've mentioned just the mindset of not just focusing on email and phone call and getting somewhat creative about the follow up process and then don't give up the biggest hurdle that salespeople will have is giving up their stats out there saying 76% of sales people give up after the second follow up and most deals are closed with an 8 to 10 touches with a potential customer you cannot just try twice and say you know what I don't know they they they obviously don't want to do business with us because they're not responding and just throw your arms up like you have to be persistent and consistent until they tell you that you that they don't want to do business with you for whatever reason sending them an email or a phone call or something like that that says hey I'm I'm following up because I'm working through my sales pipeline and I want to know if I should just mark you guys off as as you know a loss here once you start doing that people will respond and say oh no no don't don't mark it off as a loss like we're still working through it sorry I've been busy and they'll start to explain things to it to you or they'll respond back and say yes we chose somebody else Thanks now if they do that ask them what is it that you could have done differently or what is it that that other company or service offer that you didn't have because you're trying to better your own business when we lose opportunities with people that even if we think that we're right there we take it on the chin and we ask them how can we better ourselves in the future give me two things that we could have done differently sometimes they'll come back with something some creative feedback and some constructive criticism other times they'll say you know what they just came down to price or just came down the distance or just came down to whatever but you need to get some feedback so that way you can understand what should you change in the future to make it a higher likelihood of you closing that deal from a follow-up standpoint never give up on that keep working them even if it's years down the road putting them in some sort of automation to keep touching them is gonna be much easier than you looking at your contact list or a spreadsheet saying oh I need to touch this guy if you guys liked that video make sure to give us a like and if you have any questions leave them in the comments below see you on the next one that is harder than I thought [Music]