Entrepreneurs' Sales Secrets Revealed (eBook)

Chapter 2

What Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know about Sales—Sales Fundamentals

In this chapter, we’ll point out important sales fundamentals you need to understand, master, and adopt as standard practice—both now and as your sales function grow. There are plenty of excellent sales process approaches and trainings available that provide more detailed tactical playbooks and it’s not a bad idea to find one that works for your selling reality. Considering all of the demands on your time, we’ll provide a shortcut and distill the concepts that many share so you can fast-track the skills that lead to winning more deals regardless of which sales approach is best for you.

No prospecting, no sales!

There’s a good reason why the process of finding interested prospective customers is called prospecting. The main goal of prospecting in the strictest sense is to find a lump of gold or a jewel. The process of true prospecting is less than appealing. Your feet are in the water. You repeat the same task of dipping your pan endlessly, and 99% of the time, you end up with little more than dirt. Sounds like fun, huh? There are no silver bullets when it comes to prospecting. But there is one absolute truth: if you don’t prospect, you will never find gold.

So what do you do?

• Resign yourself to the fact that you have to prospect, or you will sell very little. Acknowledge that it will be a grind. Responses will be spotty at best. Most will never respond.
• Be thoughtful about whom you want to target and which types of buyers are most likely to be interested in what you sell?
• Develop three target lists with fifty to hundred prospects in each. You can add more if you’d like, but you need to be sure you have the available time to do the outreach. If you pick fifty, that means you need to attempt to contact ten targets each day in a business week.
• Make your outreach meaningful. Remember, prospective B2B buyers want to solve business problems, so use successes or useful work-related content as your reason for contacting them.
• Write what you are going to say verbally—but don’t read a script. Effective prospecting hinges on being efficient and getting the value your offerings deliver front and center immediately. And make sure you get to the point. Say as much as you can with as few words as possible.
• Vary how you reach out. Combine phone calls/voicemails with email, a personal written note, or even a fax. Remember, you don’t want to leave voicemails that talk only about your company or products—see “Communicating in the dark” in the previous chapter.
• Stay disciplined. Set a weekly outreach goal and stay dedicated to it—week after week.
• Practice polite tenacity. Be prepared to reach out to the same individual eight times or more. Rule of thumb is that it takes six outreach attempts before a prospect even remembers you. To get action, you need nine attempts or more. Most salespeople stop after two calls.
• Rinse and repeat. In a three-week period, you should be able to make eight attempts to reach individuals on a target list. After three weeks, set that list aside and work on your next one. Then return to the first list and repeat the process.
• When you do reach someone, get them to agree to a specific next step. “Can we confirm 2:00 on Wednesday for our initial discussion?” Don’t agree to do this when the prospect says, “I’m just heading into a meeting. Can you call back in an hour?” Don’t leave things open-ended. If you do, most next steps will never happen. Do your best to secure a specific time and date, then send a meeting request immediately. If this isn’t possible, then send a meeting request for one hour later.

BANT—the first step in determining if you have a sales opportunity

Once you make a connection with an interested prospect, your first thought should be: “How do I know if this will actually lead to a sale and how much of my effort is it worth?” BANT is a great way to quickly answer this question. BANT is shorthand for Budget, Access, Need, and Timing. Understanding if a prospect can fulfill these four fundamentals helps you determine how much effort to devote to them readily.

Budget

You need to determine if a prospect has a budget or if they have a good chance of securing one. The reason is obvious. If there is no money to spend, there will be no sale and you should look for stronger opportunities. There are a number of ways to ask: “Is this project budgeted?” “Has funding for this project been approved?” “Have dollars been set aside for this effort or does the spend need to be justified?”

Access

In thinking about many B2B selling situations, you essentially have three types of players on the chess board. One can approve or veto an effort. This is often a senior executive and, in most cases, there is only one. Let’s call them the Approver. Next is the person who is making a recommendation to the Approver. Let’s call them the Project Lead. As with the Approver, there is typically only one person who makes the recommendation to the Approver as to how to solve the business problem at hand. Third are the individuals to whom the Project Lead will go to for input. We’ll call these people Influencers. In assessing any sales opportunity, you need to discover who will play each role. The best way to determine who the Approver might be is to ask, “Who can ultimately veto this effort?” Finding the Project Lead is pretty easy. Ask “Who makes the final recommendation on what the best solution will be?” Everyone else is an Influencer.

To get insight into your position in a sales opportunity, you need to determine who is playing which role: Approver, Project Lead, Influencer. Then you need to determine if you have access to the right individuals. If you are selling to smaller companies, you may have fewer individuals involved and these roles may be combined. For example, the Project Lead may also be the Approver. Influencers may be limited as well, but it is rare that a decision is made by just one person. Even if the Project Lead and Approver are the same person, they are most likely going to ask for an opinion or input from others, so make sure you don’t lose sight of this dynamic.

Approver

Having Approver access can be challenging but is a definite plus. Being able to assess the likelihood that the Approver will say yes provides important insight. And it keeps you from getting an unexpected veto at the very end of the sales engagement after you’ve expended much of your effort. If you don’t have easy access to the Approver, executive peer to executive peer communication can work. To be more specific, outreach from another CEO will at least get you on their radar screen. You may not get a response, but at least you are not an unknown. To be effective, you need to communicate from a strategic perspective: “I am reaching out to let you know that we are working with your team to explore the business value that reducing returns could mean to your business.” Avoid product specifics and promotional language.

Project Lead

Access to the Project Lead is typically not difficult, but you must have it. If you don’t, you need to get it as early in the sales engagement as possible. The Project Lead takes the responsibility for finding a solution to the business problem and making the final recommendation to the Approver. Having credibility and a consistent dialogue with the Project Lead is also critical. The fast lane to getting that credibility is to communicate from their perspective. Don’t talk about product and features. Focus on the business impact that solving their business problem delivers. If you are effective, you’ll be viewed as an advisor and not just someone trying to sell them a product.

Influencers

Influencers are the individuals who the Project Lead involves to help evaluate potential solutions to the business problem they are targeting. There are typically several. In larger deals, there can be many. Influencers can bring many perspectives in a sales engagement. Some have a real stake in a preferred solution because they are faced with the business problem in their day-to-day. Others are supporting business functions like IT, finance, compliance, etc. What’s important is determining who will be involved and to what extent they can influence the Project Lead’s final decision.

We’ll talk more about how to manage opportunity dynamics and stakeholders when we talk about consensus and Power Mapping in Chapter 4.

Find a champion

At times, you’ll find that you have an internal ally who can benefit from your solution and is willing to offer information and insight that others don’t. A champion is most often an Influencer, less often, it is the Project Lead, and on rare occasions, it can even be the Approver.

There can be a number of reasons why—both business and personal. When you find this person—or when they approach you—you will want to foster this dynamic. Don’t be afraid to ask questions like, “What can I do as part of this effort that will help you directly?” Beyond being a conduit for internal information, a champion is also valuable because they can support your cause when you aren’t present. To leverage this to the fullest, you need to make sure your champion has accurate talking points, success stories on...