Are you not seeing the kind of numbers you want to see? It’s not the clients fault, it’s not that the product sucks, it wasn’t “the wrong time.” What was the common denominator in every failed sale? YOU were! It’s high time you recognize that.
What have you done today to make yourself better? Find a podcast, a book, a mentor. If you don’t devote time to improving yourself and your toolbox failure is inevitable.
Hold yourself accountable.
Working in sales is like going to the gym. Everyone has that one friend that complains they aren’t losing weight, they’re not seeing results, they must juts have a genetic predisposition towards excess body fat. Yet this same friend goes to the gym twice a week, and when they do get there they spend more time changing the channel on the TV screens than actually working out. Working out is a grind. You need to show up, you need to put in the work on the front end, and you need to put in the work behind the scenes. Eating right, kicking bad habits, not allowing outside influences to change your course.
Sales is the same damn thing! Everyone lives for the sexy commission check, but very few people want to put in the work. If the checks are the washboard abs cold calls are the pushups of the sales world. Getting hung up on or told to take a hike over and over again sucks at first, but the more you get used to it and the more progress you start to see the more you realize “Holy shit! This actually works.”
But just like the gym, that’s only half the battle. Now you’ve got to master your follow up. Make sure that those prospects remember who you are. Are they interacting with your content? What do you have that would add value to their lives? Do your research! Sometimes that means working more than eight hours a day, but the work that you do today is not going to pay off tomorrow, or the next day, but this time next year when you’ve got a full docket of clients and your friend is still shaking their beer gut in the bathroom mirror you can come let me know if it was worth it.
You’ve got to be able to play the long game.
Breaking up is hard to do…man I love cliches.
If we are being honest with ourselves we know fairly quickly whether something is going to work out in our favor, right? So why do we insist on dragging out something that is clearly going to fizzle before the nightcap?
There’s clearly no spark, but for some reason you just can’t let go. Because admitting that we’ve failed sucks more than allowing ourselves to continue to live in the delusion that we can make it work if we just try a little harder; maybe make those changes we’ve been promising we are going to make.
But think about how awesome it would be if the very next day you finally find someone you really connect with. You’re laughing…they’re laughing…and boom…commission check arrives a week later.
That’s never going to happen unless you learn to dump the prospect.
Look, I get the general sense of loathing that comes along with the word “Spam.” Hell, our mailboxes even have a folder labeled “Spam” where it filters all the crap that it thinks we don’t want to look at.
But let’s think about this for a minute…all spam is is the mass dissemination of the same piece of content. Isn’t that exactly what social media is? Am I wrong here? I mean shit…If you don’t put it out there who’s gonna see it?
We recently had a prospect turned client who legitimately said “Man…I never responded to your outreach because I thought you were just spamming me!” to which we replied:
“We were!”
“How the hell else did you expect us to get in front of you?”
What is a cold call if not a contained piece of spam? Don’t you make the same call over and over and over again until it yields results? In today’s world of content overload it is simply par for the course. If you want to be in the game you need to get in front of your audience. Make the calls, send the emails, gain front of top of mind awareness. You know what that means for you?
Be a spammer!
Master the two line email.
It’s short, sweet, and gets a response.
Best Regards,
Snarky
Unless your product sucks people want to buy it. The idea that if you come into a conversation assuming the sale you are “playing hardball” or “going in for the kill” drive me up a wall. Why the hell would we be having a conversation with a prospect if they weren’t either A) Mildly Interested or B) A damn good fit for our product (in the case of a cold-call).
In my humble opinion if, in the sales conversations you are having with a prospect, it feels like you are trying to convince them of something it is not going to end well. You need to bleed confidence in your product. These people are coming to you because you offer the solution to their problem. They need what it is that you have, and all you are doing is making sure your product delivers. There is nothing sleazy, nothing unethical about this practice. Your confidence is transferrable, and when the prospect feels that they are infinitely more likely to move forward.
Assume the damn sale!
“I swear to God Barbara if you tell me one more time that you followed my directions exactly I’m going to drive across the country and snap your laptop in half. If you followed my directions we’d have fixed this problem by now…and by the way…. who the hell still uses Internet Explorer?”
Customer support can be a real joy, but unfortunately it is arguably the most important part of any successful sales position. In today’s era of instant gratification it is even more important that customers be able to either resolve their issues on their own, or with as few phone calls or emails as possible. This is where you need to be on the offensive. If you don’t have a procedure in place for how you are going to handle the vast majority of problems that are going to come up the probability of losing clients just because they can’t get an issue resolved will skyrocket.
Being able to collect as much information from your clients as quickly and efficiently as possible when your clients have an issue will prevent you from having to go back and forth with them multiple times. I promise you that if they have to send you more than 2 or maybe 3 emails your client will be pissed. Apart from this you also need to either be an expert in troubleshooting whatever you’re selling, or be able to get them in touch with an expert immediately.
If you can’t fix your own problems you’ve already lost.
I occasionally catch some flak for the amount of time that I spend dealing with current customers instead of prospecting for new ones. However, I am telling you right now that this is hands down the best way to maximize your sales. If I receive any type of inbound contact from a current client my goal is to get them an answer within 20 minutes. If that is completely impossible I try for an hour, with the very last resort being the end of the day. If this cuts deeply into prospecting, which it certainly does on the busiest of days, then so be it.
Here’s my philosophy: The people buying your product don’t know crap about it. It’s your job to make sure they get what they need as soon as they need it otherwise your product becomes useless. If you think about every client this way you might start to better understand the importance of instant feedback. We live in a society where we have almost every answer to every question we could ever have at the tips of our fingers. If you don’t blend seamlessly into that same model you are going to struggle.
So what if you don’t spend 2-3 hours a day prospecting. I sure as hell don’t and you know what…my average sale is 3x the size of company average. You want to know the reason for that? Most of them come from current clients. Because these people know that I am going to get back to them right away with an answer to their problem they come to me before consulting the Google. Think about the power in that. Apart from now having monstrous upsell and add on sale opportunities think about what happens when these folks get together with their colleagues and talk about work. Whose name do you think is going to be top of mind for all of my clients?
When your clients prospect for you your job gets a whole lot easier.
Client: “Welllll…..I just don’t know if we’ve got room in our budget for this next year.”
Snarky: “Sure, I understand. Times are tight, cutbacks are happening. *silently* …I mean maybe cut down on the 47 legal pads you blow through in a month and try writing on both sides of the page for once Jimmy…*aloud* so how do you plan on moving forward to solve problem x?”
Client: “We aren’t really sure yet. We are considering various options.”
Snarky: “Well, why don’t you just let us handle everything. Soup to nuts. We’ve got this great product you might be interested in that builds on what you currently have. Cost is 3x what you’re paying now. But…are you ready for this magic? If you buy 3x we will give you your original product for free!”
Client: “Hmmm…that is interesting…send over a proposal and I’ll get back to you.”
**1 Week Later***
Client: “Snarky! Sign me up for 3x! We love it! But the original product is still free right?”
Snarky: “Well…if that’s what it’s going to take…you got it Jimmy.”
People just want free stuff. It is truly incredible to me the lengths that some people will go to feel like they’ve gotten something for nothing. I want to know where all that extra cash miraculously came from! Are the growing it in the backyard? Now…it is obviously important to make sure that the product delivers on that value, but I promise you that budget issues are very rarely budget issues. You’ve just got to be creative.
Why the hell haven’t you responded to my email Judy? You’ve opened it 17 times, Salesforce tells me so! I mean I know you didn’t come back to it or forward it to your co-workers just for kicks and giggles. “Hey guys, check out this completely uninteresting, spammy email I just got!” Said nobody ever…
Does this drive anybody else nuts? If I see that an email gets more than 3 opens I cannot help but check in on this prospect obsessively. But does this mean I should reach out? The unfortunate answer is: maybe. As a general rule of thumb I won’t drastically increase or decrease my usual outreach based on email opens. At the risk of seeming totally creepy I try and avoid anything that indicates too strongly “oh by the way…I know what you’ve been clicking ;)”
What I will do, however, is hang on to a prospect a little longer than usual if they are consistently coming back to old outreach. Maybe try and mix in an additional phone call or two, or potentially try and get in touch with someone else in the organization who might have decision making power.
Unfortunately there is no good benchmark for how many touches are going to be necessary to close a sale. I had two prospects finally close last week. The first had 5 touches starting Oct 1. The second had 87 freaking touches starting Sept 15. There aren’t even 87 days in that stretch of time!
The takeaway? Some prospects are cool with Netflix and chill, and others wont put out for anything less than the Surf n’ Turf. How badly do you want it?
The Snarky Salesman 