Power structures exist in most areas of our lives. But there are some power structures that we are in control of.
In this episode, I’ll give you some ways you can shift the power structure in the sales process and put you in control.
If you’d like to schedule a High Achiever Strategy Call, go to https://billcaskey.com/strategycall to get on my calendar now!
How do I get from where I am to where I want to be? It’s a common question that I hear in my profession.
We all have an underlying human dilemma. We know what’s possible, but that can either steer you away or push you towards your goals.
In this episode, I’ll give you some tactical ways to help you on your journey.
For years I have run small coaching groups to help people grow their income and their business. It never fails to amaze me how small groups are an overlooked asset for business people.
In this episode, I give you five reasons that you should explore getting involved in a small group. The next year is going to be difficult as we seek to reinvent ourselves and our businesses and you need people around you who can keep you grounded but keep you dreaming.
How much of your life is your creation?
In this episode, Bill discusses the personal agency that we all have in our own lives. These are the things that we are in control of. Are you making the most out of these areas?
Bill gives a few ways you can regain control of your life.
On this episode, Bill takes a listener question from Jonathan who is feeling a lack of clarity in his career.
Bill gives him several areas to work through to become on his goals and purpose.
If you’d like to be a part of the next LIVE Coaching Session, Thursday April 1st, go to https://resources.billcaskey.com/high-achievers to save your spot now!
In this episode, Bill takes a section of a recent LIVE Coaching Session called “The High Achiever’s Dilemma.”
He addressed five fundamental shifts that high impact players will have to make. If you’d like to be a part of the next LIVE Coaching Session that Bill does, go to https://resources.billcaskey.com/high-achievers to save your spot now!
Nobody starts a business and doesn’t think of growing their sales revenue. The only question is how to go about achieving the growth you envision for your company. Joining this episode is the CEO of Business Success Factors, Doug C. Brown, to share part of the knowledge he’s gained from growing thousands of companies. He drops some hard truths that business owners need to be facing and addressing when it comes to processes, systems, and the goal they’re trying to reach. He also talks about the necessity of assessments and audits, even if it’s something that everyone does not embrace. Also, learn the simple formula of business and realize how easy it would be if you can manage to detach yourself personally from the resulting outcomes of your process.
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I talked with a guy by the name of Doug Brown who works with companies in sales revenue. He’s a growth expert there. He’s worked with enterprise nationwide, Tony Robbins, Intuit, P&G, CBS, a lot of great experience, but he has a system that he talks about. His company is Business Success Factors. I thought it would be good. I don’t usually have people on who are in the same business that I’m in because I don’t want to confuse everybody because I have a very specific philosophy and I want that to come across, but he has similar philosophies. I wanted to have him on. I think you’ll enjoy it. Doug Brown, Founder of Business Success Factors.
I was always building businesses on the side, whether they were small businesses or trying to make them large. I’ve done about 35 of them and some of them have led me into some interesting roles as, let’s say, independent president of sales and training for guys like Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, and Russ Whitney. I’ve done a lot of the backend for a lot of the trainers, built them sales teams, and things of that nature. What’s led me to where I am now is, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of businesses and I’ve discovered one thing. They all want to grow sales revenue but most of them don’t have a process or a system to do it, so I created that.
When I go into a business, whether it’s a $5 million or $500 million, you would even think the $500 million businesses would have good processes, and they don’t. Some do but it’s not given. When you talk about a process, that can mean a lot of different things. Give me your definition of it.
We can take sales methodologies and talk about them, whatever it might be. The system itself is about ten different facets in sales revenue growth and then the processes are those sub things within each one of those facets that make the facet work optimum.
Can you give me a hard example?
Get an assessment and audit the process. Audit sounds like a bad word, but the reality is, it reveals things. Share on XMost companies that I’ve worked with myopically focused on 1 or 2 facets. Let’s say they’re focused on usually getting new clients. That’s the big one for everybody. What they’re leaving out is, “How do you increase the buying frequency of that client or the transactional value of that client? How do you get that overall retention up? How do we increase the number of people selling for us?” Things like that. The speed to purchase, margins, prices, even things like meaningful communication, how are we communicating with our clients internally and externally? How are we improving the skillsets of the people that are within there? There are all kinds of facets within these processes, within the facet that a lot of people though are myopically focused on that 1 or 2 things, and they’re missing simple things a lot of times.
I like to say that people love to talk about the outputs and hate to talk about the inputs. What’s it going to take for us to get a new client? We resort a lot of times. As you say, “What are the behaviors? Let’s pound out 100 calls a day.” “Let’s do that.” Then that doesn’t work. We’ll go, “How about 200 calls a day?” We’re working on the wrong end of the problem a lot of times. You mentioned something about this idea of once we get a client, are we getting all we can go out of them and are they getting all they can out of us? How do we take our 1,000 clients that are doing $20 million and get that to $40 million? Maybe that would resolve our problem of pressuring our people and hiring a bunch of people to make 200 cold calls a day that doesn’t work on the front end?
We could reduce our expenses and improve our profitability on the top line. A lot of times, they’re not thinking about farming the account, but the system is not set up. The whole customer journey is not set up as a sale system. It’s set up as 1 facet, maybe 2. Marketing sort of and then sales. They forget things like customer service. Customer service can be a huge source of sales.
The customer journey stops when the first transaction happens than the customer journeys are. It was like, “That’s where it is? That shouldn’t be where it begins.”
They should be looking to expand the sale at every single turn throughout the whole customer journey, and they don’t. That’s why companies are poor at things like referrals, follow-up, and a bunch of things. They all have blind spots. You had mentioned $5 million, $500 million, or $5 billion. Every company has a blind spot. It’s usually only a few things that will unearth the revenue and get them that untapped revenue coming back into their lives. The wonderful part is they’ve usually spent the marketing money already, so that’s sitting there. It’s pure profit.
Sales Revenue Growth: All want businesses and sales revenue to grow, but most of them really don’t have a process or a system to do it.
There’s one thing to say that there’s always a blind spot, but I have my impression of what stops. Let’s say, it’s a $100 million company. You got a VP of sales, 4 or 5 sales managers, 30 or 40 people. What stops them from shining the light on their entire system of generating new clients and generating revenue from existing clients? There’s got to be some stopper or several.
There are several. One is they truthfully don’t know where they want to go. They’re honest, but there’s a difference between honesty and truth. The truth is the objective measurement. They truthfully do not know how much they want to grow by in the next twelve months. They get a number in their head. They go, “We could project this. We could do that.” There’s not this concrete, “This is going to be hit, and we’re satisfied being there. If we exceed this, great.” Most of them don’t know that benchmark. The second thing is people have emotions. A lot of times, even leaders in companies or divisions don’t want to be exposed to a certain group within. They might be doing things that they want to either cover-up. The third thing is they don’t know what they don’t know. They’re not investigating that because they don’t know. They can’t see it. It’s blind.
There’s one also that probably fits into one of those three that you mentioned. There’s a resistance some for some reason to, and it’s sexier than hell to talk about, “Let’s grow from $20 million to $25 million. Doug, here’s your quote. It was $1.2 million last year. It’s $1.5 million this year. Everybody, good? We’ll see you back here at the end of December.” There was very little attention paid to, “How are we going to do that? How do we get from $1.2 million to $1.5 million?” It’s easy to say, “Doug’s always done it before. Post pandemic, maybe there’s a different strategy or Doug strategy could get him to $2.5 million, but he’s bicycling around his territory trying to pick up leads or whatever the old antiquated thing.” There’s a reluctance to getting down and dirty into how are we going to make that happen? Do you concur or is that part of the clarity?
It’s part of the clarity from my definition, but I do concur because it’s not only part of the clarity, but it’s part of the blind spots in the process. Let’s say Doug is exhausted. Why is Doug exhausted at that point? What is causing the issue of exhaustion? Is Doug not leveraged properly on his abilities, his skillsets are not there, or is it the system that he’s within the of the customer journey? There are all kinds of reasons for it, but I fully agree with what you said.
When I bring people on, I always like to ask them a pointed question about, I’m a VP of sales or a CEO, founder of a small company, either way, you’re talking with Doug Brown, who is both CEO and Founder of Business Success Factor. What advice would you give to a VP of sales or president of a company who has read and said, “We might have an issue?” What would be 1 or 2 pieces of advice to begin the process?
Behind every corporate agenda is a personal mission. Share on XI would sit down and get truthful. Do we want to do something about this? A lot of companies talk about it but they don’t want to do anything about it. They’re uncomfortably comfortable. If you’re uncomfortably uncomfortable, then the next step is, “What is that true north? What is the goal that you truly want to achieve?” Most goals can be achieved. The resistance in the planning part of this is the key. Once the goal is set out, “Let’s get it assessed. Let’s find out where we’re at. Are there any impedances? Is there good stuff? What’s happening, that’s great?” Let’s get the whole picture, get an assessment, and audit the process. I know audit sounds like a bad word, but the reality is it reveals things. Once we do that section of it, let’s take the goal, take the assessment, where we want to go, where we are, and let’s build a growth plan to get there.
That’s a good point there about the clarity of where we are going. I don’t think companies, at least the ones I’ve worked with and I can’t say much about it because I don’t want to give away anything but there is a reluctance to set a goal out in the future and say, “By the time 2022 ends, 2 or 3 years out, we’re going to be this company, doing this business, and market with these kinds of people.” There’s such a reluctance to do that because it’s like, “We’d been through a lot in 2020. Maybe you had this clarity of focus. Maybe 2020 would have been an awesome year instead of an average year?” There’s this reluctance to get deep into clarifying where are we going and what does it look like when we get there?
We have to detach personally from the outcomes a lot of times. That’s the hard part because for a lot of business, especially who started their own companies organically or whatever and they’ve grown them to high proportions or they’re trying to grow them to high proportions, they have a lot of their own personal self invested in the business itself. The reality is that business is simple when you remove people from the equation.
Tell me more about that.
Think about it. It’s a simple formula. It’s money out, money in, equal something. That’s business. We all want the equals to be a plus sign. When we get people in there, they start getting thoughts coming into this. A lot of thoughts are great, but there are some non-serving ones that come into it. That’s where I think that reluctance comes from in a big way, especially if the owner has been the one who’s grown the company. She or he has their identity tied to the business, or internally the vice-president of sales or president of a division, they’ll tend to defend that even if they don’t want to.
Sales Revenue Growth: We have to personally detach from the outcomes in business because the reality is that business is very simple when you remove people from the equation.
A lot of companies equate it to the Super Bowl that was played in the US where Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl. As you look back to, when he left the original team, because he’s with a brand new team in 2021, Tampa BAY, only two teams came after Brady after he said, “I’m leaving New England.” One was Tampa Bay, who got him. The other one where the LA Chargers. Nobody else wanted him. Why? Because he was too old. “Why would I want a 42-year-old quarterback?” All these teams are saying, “Our goal is to get to the Super Bowl.” Here’s a guy who’s been there six times. If he wasn’t full-time quarterbacking, couldn’t he give you a little insight on how he got there? We are black and white sometimes. I start to wonder, “Did teams want to get to the Super Bowl, or is that just lip service?” I don’t want to take you into sports, but I think the same thing applies. We want to get to $12 million, but we’re not willing to do what it takes to get there, but we’d like to get there. “You don’t want to get there.”
Since I’m a New England Patriots fan, I grew up in Massachusetts. The thing is that Brady left for probably other reasons that we don’t know, but also he was offered, I think it was $6 million or $7 million more at his career place. Why not take it? A thought occurred to me in equating this to business. A lot of times, companies look at top-line revenue and go, “Our budgets were in-line. We are here. Everything’s working,” but then a guy like yourself, or I come along and go, “That’s nice. You grew by 22%. How do you know it shouldn’t have been 34%?” They’re like, “We take a look. There’s another 6% here. Another 2% here and 1% there.” For the same amount of money out, they could have been bringing in more money. I still will anchor myself that a lot of times, it comes back to the personal agenda because behind every corporate agenda is a personal mission of some sort. That’s how it works.
I can go from $22 million to $28 million if I buy my way into the extra $6 million and give away my products. Back to your original equation, cash in versus cash out equals something. It’s not just the top line. It’s what we are delivering to the bottom line. A lot of what you talk about delivers that, not to the top line but also in the bottom. Shortened selling cycles, understanding our customers better calling on the right people, instead of people who don’t fit. I presume that’s in a lot of your work. Doug, you said you had a checklist that our readers could access. Can you tell us how we can get ahold of that?
It’s a marketing and sales checklist. It’s a self-audit. It’ll give you an idea of how you are doing. You could email me at [email protected]. I’ll be happy to have one sent out to you. It’s an eye-opening experience if you’re going to do this because it will poke holes in your current playbook but it will show you some good stuff as well.
He’ll send the checklist back to you. Doug, it has been a real pleasure. We need to do this again later in 2021. I’ll catch up with you again. Thanks for taking the time to be on.
Thanks for having me, Bill. It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate being here.
I am Doug Brown, CEO of Business Success Factors. I started working for my families business at the age of three, since that time I have started and built over 35 companies. I have three college degrees, and I am America’s number one expert in revenue expansion and sales optimization. During college at Berklee College, Northeastern University, and Salem State University, I supported myself by selling music equipment to colleges, universities, corporations, and some of the world’s biggest bands such as Aerosmith, Boston, Billy Joel, The Eagles, Extreme and others. I served 12 years in the US Army, during which I was awarded the battalion’s most distinguished soldier award graduating 2nd in my class and was then enrolled at the Massachusetts Military Academy.
After my service, I worked at and became the top-selling sales representative for a 2-billion-dollar company. These experiences laid the groundwork to form my own consulting and auditing company.
I have traveled to 47 out of the 50 US states and 14 countries where I have consulted, coached, advised, and trained thousands of people in business, some of those companies include Enterprise-Rent- Car, Nationwide, Intuit, Proctor and Gamble, CBS Television. I have also served as an independent president of sales and training for companies of Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, and Russ Whitney. My efforts have collectively generated over 500 million dollars in sales—my last client-generated 3 million dollars in new sales in 5 weeks.
Are you able to distinguish your opinion from reality? In this episode, Bill Caskey helps you rethink the world as he makes the case for questioning your opinions and assumptions if you want to grow your business. Certain beliefs create assumptions. Bill shares three common beliefs that are driving your unconscious behaviors, and that you need to question for yourself and your company. Tune in and learn how you can grow your business by reinventing your opinions.
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I’m going to share with you some things that I’m working on. It’s always interesting to get a little behind the scenes when I listened to a speaker, an author or a podcaster and find out what they’re working on. I will share with you something now that I’ve been knee-deep in and it’s going somewhere. It’s not just an exercise in writing, although I enjoy that. This is designed to help you rethink the world. That may sound like a bigger bridge to cross than a guy like me would want to pursue. I have come to the belief and you’ve heard some of it here on the show. We have certain beliefs and these certain beliefs create assumptions the way the world is, “I believe this therefore I assume that.”
A lot of times, I hear that from my clients when I first start working with them. I start to share some of what I will call counterintuitive ideas, things that go against the norm. They will get up in the air, get their back up and say, “That wouldn’t work in our business. My boss would never let me go for that. Our customers would not tolerate that.” That’s all opinion. How we have come to believe dictates the assumptions we have about life and then that creates opinions. Not to get into the psychological makeup of it but I’m going to give you three here now. These three will tee off this idea in your brain about the question that you need to ask yourself, which is, “What else do I assume about the world?” That might just be an opinion and might not be reality. Let’s go with this.
By the way, if you are a high achiever, I want you to go to BillCaskey.com. At the top banner there’s a colored banner there for a waitlist. I’m pretty sure we’re going to do a High Achiever’s program. That’s for people who earn $200,000-ish and up and want to level up, pursue, leverage their assets and get to a whole new level. I’m assembling a group of those people. If you’re interested in at least knowing more about it, I’m probably going to be doing a webinar or a little get-together here soon. That’s no obligation. This is not any high-pressure thing. I only want people in this program who are truly committed to growing.
There are no sales at all involved. I’m opening it up first to my blog readers. Nobody even on my email list has heard about this. If you are interested, go to the website. Also, if you are interested in changing the game of selling, there is a document on the website below the banner. It’s called Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game. Download that. It’s a PDF guide. It’s about 10, 12 pages. It’s got some videos with it. It’s good. If you want some free stuff from me that’s more tutorial-focused, that’s a good way to start.
How you do anything is how you do everything. Share on XWhat are these beliefs that we have accumulated? I will consider these erroneous beliefs or industry norms that I’m not sure are even right. Let me go through these. I’ve got 29 of these and I’m only going to go through three. A lot of this comes in my programming and coaching. I believe that I can only teach you so many sales tactics in how to handle it when the customer says X. What happens when the prospect decides not to buy? What happens when you get resistance? I can only teach that for so long. Frankly, I get a little bored with it because at some point that’s not the difference-maker.
The difference-maker is how you think about yourself, company, value, customer, role on the planet and purpose on earth. Those are the big issues. Why would I want to continue to work on the minor issues? It’s called majoring in the minors. Forget about the major issues, which is how one thinks about oneself and identifies in this world. I’m going to share with you three of these that are common beliefs that we have accumulated over the years, maybe or maybe not. Maybe for you, not all of these will apply but we’re on the spectrum at least of having these beliefs drive us and some of our unconscious behaviors.
Number one, your eagerness leads to more sales and to an eager prospect. The more eager you are and we see this a lot of times in hiring salespeople. A sales leader will come to me and say, “I want you to interview this person. We’re thinking about bringing him or her on. We want to make sure it’s the right decision. I want to get your set of eyes on it.” It doesn’t take me long. I don’t even have to do a profile test. It doesn’t take me long to look at that person through the filter of a prospect. If this person is going to be out working with prospects, I put my prospect hat on and ask myself the question, “What do I want this person calling on me?” If they’re too eager, not listening to a word I say, not thoughtful in their responses or too quick on the trigger to say something or answer a question, I know if they’re that way with me, they will be that way with prospects. How you do anything is how you do everything.
Eagerness is not a virtue. I want you to be committed. I want you to be all-in to your job but eagerness is a different animal. I don’t want you to be eager. I don’t want you to appear eager. The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out if the problem the customer has is something we can solve. It’s not eager to sell and it’s certainly not eager to talk about yourself and how great you are. How is that helpful for the prospect? They don’t give a damn about that. This idea of eagerness has been misconstrued and we’ve taken it as a virtue. I don’t see it as a virtue at all.
Question Your Opinions: The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out the problem the customer has.
I see it as something that will get in the way. I would rather have you take measured eagerness, be interested in the prospect, what they have to say, be curious about their pains, problems and circumstances but never be eager either to make the next call, set the next meeting or sell anything. Let that happen organically. There are a lot of things to do right there. If you do things right, your close rate goes way up because you’re not trying to make anything happen. It’s happening because the prospect wants your solution badly.
Number two, pressure is good. The more pressure you feel, the more likely you are to excel. Pressure is an interesting animal. I do think there are times when the need to get things done is there. You do what needs to be done. If you are out talking to a prospect and they have an interest and part of your process is putting together a proposal framework. I don’t want you to feel pressured to do that. It just has to be done. If it’s part of your process, it works, it’s going to help the prospect make a decision and help you decide if they’re the right people then you do it. You don’t feel pressured to do it. Most of the pressure that we feel comes from self-imposed sources. We put pressure on ourselves to be perfect, to be the ideal soldier, to be effervescent and magnanimous. We feel pressured to have people like us and take us seriously. That kind of pressure is a losing game because you’re pressuring yourself based on someone else’s opinion of you. It’s hard enough to influence let alone control it. Pressure is going to be a losing battle there.
Another thing about pressure is when you feel it, you exert it. When someone is putting pressure on you, you will put pressure on someone else. It’s a pass-through. You’re the pass-through mechanism. If your manager is putting pressure on you to make more sales, where do you think that pressure is going to go? It’s going to store it inside, a little bit of it if you will. A lot of it, you will pass it onto the prospect and they won’t even see it. It’s not like you’re saying, “I got to make a sale this month or I’m going to get fired. My boss is on my backside. Can you please help me?” You’re not saying that but it’s the small vibes that you give off that the prospect feels even subconsciously. They decide not to do business with you because they say, “This is about them, not about me. I think I’ll find another supplier.”
Pressure is not good. Getting things done is but when it turns into pressure, you’re not free to be at your best. I see this a lot in a business where a business owner has been working in his or her business for twenty years and they’re tired of it. They’re burnt out and they want to do something else but they’ve built this machine that they can’t get away from. Every day they feel pressure to do something that they don’t love. That is a recipe for illness and disaster. If you have a little bit of that, you don’t need to be a business owner to experience that. If you find yourself, “I’m not into what I’m doing now as I was several years ago.” The pandemic and disruption of 2020 spurred that on for a lot of us. It accelerated some insecurities and might even accelerate some skills and competencies but it changed things. You’ve got to ask yourself, “Do I love what I do?” When I get up in the morning every day, “Have I fallen in love with what I do with my customers, audience, market and whatever?”
When you feel pressure, you exert it. Share on XNumber three is one of my favorites. That is the idea, “I need to do more of what I’ve always done to get to the next level.” I’m putting this High Achiever’s program together. It’s a personal coaching group and that’s a lot of that group. What we’re going to do there is focus on, “What got you here may not get you to the next place.” In fact, it’s almost assured not to get you to the next place because things have changed. The world, market, internet, digital communications and a lot of things have changed. A lot of us are hanging on. I put myself here, too. Even though I talk about this a lot and consult with the client’s coach, there’s still a little bit of this that I am holding onto the old way. I remember we used to fax out invitations. We’d fax them out and 25 people would show up. I’d love to have that now with my knowledge. I would close twenty of them but that is not the way anymore.
There’s not a lot of fax machines hanging around waiting for my fax. I can wish and hope all I want that things go back to normal or the way they were or whatever normal is. The fact is that what got you to where you are now is probably not going to get you to 2X where you are now. If you’re a high achiever, I don’t care what kind of achiever you are. It doesn’t matter. There’s got to be a realization on your part and maybe now is it. It sounds like I’m preaching, “Come up to the front afterward.” At some point, there’s got to be a realization. There’s got to be an awakening inside of you that says, “I can’t keep doing the same things in the same way and expect to get massively different results or expect to get the same results and work less.” This is not only always about 2X-ing everything. Your income and revenue are not always about that. I want you 2X your quality of life, your sense of fulfillment and what you do. Often, what got us here won’t get us there.
The questions for you are, “What is there? What does there look like? What will get me there? Where am I going? How am I going to get there?” Those are the questions that will allow you to get out of this old mindset of, “I just do more of what got me here.” I’ve witnessed people who have changed and reinvented themselves. They have new energy and inspiration. They reignited the fire underneath them. It was like, “I used to do it this way. We’re not going to do it that way anymore. We’re going to do it this way.” There are tweaks along the way. A lot of times, there are infused energy in the psyche when you change things and say, “We’re going to get to a new goal but we’re not going to do the same things that got us here.” Take a look at those three things. As I talk about them, hopefully they resonated with you to the point where you start to examine, “What are some new beliefs?” New beliefs are awesome if you can start to believe something new.
I was listening to a psychologist talk about the disruption of fundamental axioms. In other words, it’s just disruption of things that you’ve come to believe are true. These three things are part of that. When we disrupt those and start to look at them, we can go in 1 of 2 directions. We can either go in awe and say, “If I could get out of this whole belief, look at the future that could be created for me. That’s awesome and awe-inspiring,” or we say, “That’ll trigger us, that shock. There’s no way. I think it won’t happen. It isn’t going to happen in my lifetime. There’s no way that would work on my world.” You go into a runaway from mode.
When I introduce things to you, I probably will lose readers because some of you will say, “Enough, Caskey. You’re crazy. You’re on crack. You’re doing something weird behind the scenes. You’re talking about stuff that I don’t even want to talk about.” We need to talk about it because if you’re like me, you have quite a few years of productive life left and you don’t want to keep repeating the same mistakes. Anyway, I hope that helps you. Go to BillCaskey.com. There are lots of free stuff there. Get on the waitlist for the High Achiever’s program if you’re not on it already. Also, the PDF guide, Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game is on the website. See you next time. Bye.
Everything is easier when you’ve figured out the smooth and tight-knit process that works for your business.
In this episode, Bill Caskey helps you achieve that as he shares the six steps to creating the perfect sales process. Understand how you can trigger an event that will lead people to have an interest in your product or service. Learn as well the pitching strategy that million-dollar producers are obsessed about. In addition, Bill shares an approach that he found to receive less resistance when talking to a client regarding the problems you’re trying to solve.
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We’re going to talk about the perfect sales process. We talked about this a little bit before, but we’re going to go deeper here.
Whenever I start working with either a coaching client one-to-one, which I don’t do a lot, or The 2X Group, one of my small group coaching programs, or my leadership group, I always ask the question, “What is your vision for your business? What’s your ideal outcome?”
It’s hard sometimes to answer that question. I’ve talked about that before as well, but I want to talk about the ideal sales process. Forget about your income five years out. I’m not talking about that. We’re talking about the ideal sales process.
There are six steps to it, and it’s a framework. I want to share it with you because it’s important that we look at our own sales process and say, “Where are we off? Where is it not working?” My belief is that you should be closing 50% of the deals you’re proposed. If you’re going to get 50%, sales process had better be buttoned up.
There’s got to be some kind of triggering event. Sometimes a triggering event is you send out an email and it causes people to think. It’s that first step where you’re trying to create some interest in your product. If you think about it as the human nature element of the sales process, at some point, a person has to have an interest. They don’t go from no interest to buying. They go from no interest to interest. The triggering event is supposed to be that.
The reason they’re inviting you in is that they have a problem. If you do the right job on that first initial contact, that first initial conversation, it gets a whole lot easier for them to justify inviting you in. The key thing here in terms of strategy and attitude is don’t oversell. Listen to what they have to say. Listen to their circumstance or their dilemma if they have any. What are they trying to accomplish? Why did they decide to seek now? What is there about now that makes it important for them to pursue some engagement or some more information. The getting invited in step is number three.
In our world, we are very quick to pitch and very slow to ask, so be curious. Share on X
You haven’t found the problem yet.’” In our world, we are very quick to pitch and very slow to ask. Be curious. I always say that the highest achievers I know, the million-dollar producers and more, they are obsessed with understanding the prospect’s circumstance.
They want to know all about it. Why did you happen to do that? When did you try to get that fixed? What if you don’t fix this? What’s the cost of the problem? They’re obsessed with that. There’s something that stops us. I don’t know if it’s ego, probably a little bit of ego or if we’re impatient. We think sometimes that if we ask too many questions, it’s going to slow the sales cycle down. It will do the opposite. The more questions you asked and they got to be the right questions. They can’t be intellectual questions and manipulative. You’ve got to truly be curious about their circumstances.
You might have several meetings where you’re understanding the issues. You then go back and you return with a recommendation. I don’t like the word proposal. It sets up too much resistance. I like to think of it as a recommendation. Step five, you return with a recommendation and recap the problem. If you have dialed in with the prospect on how much the problem costs them to have, then that’s got to be in there too.
Perfect Sales Process: In terms of strategy and attitude, don’t oversell. Just listen to what people have to say and their circumstances.
Another thing that you do there, and we’re not going to talk about much on this episode, but you’ve got to have a success path. You’ve got to be able to look the prospect in the eye and say, “If you follow me on this journey and you engage me, let me tell you what you can expect. Let me tell you what the milestones are. Let’s talk about how this is going to work.” We are terrible at that. We hope the prospect trusts us. I know that we spend a lot of time talking about trust and relationships and all that. I buy that. Unless you are laying out what working with you looks like, then how are they to know? Are they just to trust you? You’re still a stranger to them. Even if you’ve had a couple of meetings, they still don’t know much about you. It’s important when you return with the recommendation, you also return with a success path.
6. You begin work. You calendar something. You say, “If you want to get this done by the end of June, we’re going to have to start May 1st. Here’s what it looks like. I’m going to need an answer by the end of this week or next week or whatever.” You become very timeline-oriented and focused.
If they start to give you grief or you sense that you’re moving too quickly for them, you can always back off and say, “Do I move too fast for you here? Do you feel pressure because that’s not my intention? My intention is you said you have this problem. It’s costing you $14 million a year. I figured there was an emergency. That’s why I’m urgent because I sensed that you are urgent.”
Your urgency is not urgency to close the business. It’s urgent to get the problem solved and start working on the problem.
That’s the ideal sales process.
Some event causes them to search and seek. They find you, invite you in, and reveal everything to you. You return with a recommendation, and then you timeline the work together. Sometimes it’s hard to follow because if the triggering event is cold calling on your part, that’s okay. It’s still a triggering event. If you’re good at finding the problem and starting to understand the circumstance that they’re involved in, that could be the triggering event. This is not to say it’s not a cold call, but you’ve got to be careful with the cold call because typically, they’re not set up that way. They’re set up to try to get an appointment. I don’t want to run appointments if the person has no pain, no interest, no inkling at all to be curious about their situation, whether they can be helped by me or by anybody.