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.

—

Listen to the podcast here:

The Perfect Sales Process

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.

1. There’s a triggering event of some kind in the prospect’s world. It could be that they’re talking with a friend and the friend says, “I’m closing 80% of my deals. How many are you closing?” He says, “I’m closing 10%. How are you doing 80%?” You need to check out this content or this podcast or this person. I’m not talking about me here, just anybody.

   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.

2. Search and seek. Once I have some interest in something, I might go check things out, probably online, or maybe with my peer group or friends of mine or colleagues. I go on a little mission to search and discover more. Who is this person whose blog I’m reading or whose video I’m watching? Who else is in the market? Who else has similar content? Who else should I be thinking about when I ask people to bid or start to engage people. It was always a search and a seek part of the buying process.
3.  Get invited in. Sometimes this can be you’re sitting there, doing nothing at 8:30 in the morning and you get an email from someone and they say, “I checked out your website, your blog, whatever, and we’ve got a problem here. I’d like for you to come in.” That’s the ideal where they invite you in. It’s not where you’re banging on their door trying to get in but where they are inviting you to the party or the table.

   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. Click To Tweet

4. When you get there, they reveal everything and you get out of the way. You do not sell, pitch or convince, you listen. I was on a call with one of my leadership clients. They’ve got twelve sales leaders in the program. One of the ladies on the call said, “This is our biggest problem. I phone shadow people. I’m listening to their calls and we don’t ask enough questions.” We start pitching too early. She said, “When I’m hearing it, I’m signing to the person who’s on the phone, ‘Stop, cut it. Don’t talk about your solutions.

   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.

5. Once they go through that and tell you and reveal everything to you, then you go back to your den, to your office, to your studio and you create a solution. Everybody knows that it’s a presentation, a proposal, a solution. I want to make sure that I have time and that the prospect knows the process I’m going to go through. Once that meeting is done or several meetings, I know this is not a one-call thing.

   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.

 

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.