“Success is about moving from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill said. This phrase is very true in outbound sales by cold mailing. It involves, in a nutshell, selecting a few hundred people to reach out to. As a result, about 30% to 50% of them will give us a response, mostly ordering us to more or less finesse away from the respondent’s esteemed persona.
However, a portion of 3% to 19% will choose to talk to us if we have an interesting value proposition related to the product or service offered. This effort must be monetized in the form of closed contracts for our efforts to be meaningful. At AutomateMeUp, all product and service sales close in a 15-minute conversation with a lead.
There is a finite list of conditions that make this possible. I don’t claim to be a recipe for selling everything, but I can tell you that when comparing my own sales to those of my clients, the most successful outbound campaigns are those whose sales processes look very similar to ours.
I have gained a lead! Now what?
When I write “got a lead” I mean getting a style response as a result of the message sequence sent:
“yes, let’s talk.”
“please put a 30-minute meeting on our calendar”.
“let’s make an appointment tomorrow”.
Every time I read this, I get as happy as a child, and it doesn’t get old, despite reading such a response every day, several times a day. You, or your salesman, may feel the same way. I applaud you! You are getting leads and making appointments. But is it a success? Of course not, it is just the beginning of the work.
Leads are subject to selection. The more leads you have, the less time you have for good quality lead handling. The more leads, the more skillfully you have to select them. The colder the leads, the less time for selection. The more leads, the more the selection relies on your “whim” rather than conforming to the rules of the sales process. And you can make both selections and sales in one go. The key is to plan your lead’s entire sales cycle in advance. Without any special effort, you can boil down the entire selection to a 15-minute conversation, with as much as 10 minutes of the lead talking. Why do I think this is enough? Because once a week a lead tells me directly that this is the best and most specific sales conversation he has ever had. Can you check it out? Of course, schedule a consultation and judge for yourself
The meeting has been arranged, how to schedule it?
“What can be said at all can be said clearly,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Logico-Philosophical Treatise – this phrase is the basis of all sales, in which the customer feels that he has done the right thing by making a purchase. This is how you should plan every step in the sales process. Whatever you put out there, it must be understood by the customer. And to be understandable, it must be… simple.
Did I mention that meetings at AMU usually last 15 minutes? Each of those minutes is scheduled, and exceeding that time gives our salespeople a concrete indication of how to qualify a lead. How it’s done:
- The messages the lead received before the meeting predetermine the topic of conversation. We don’t have people at meetings asking what we are going to talk about.
- The number of meetings is predetermined: 1 introductory meeting + a maximum of 1 clarification meeting if there are too many questions per email. For every 100 introductory meetings, we have 2 clarification meetings.
- The meeting agenda is set and is dutifully presented at the beginning of the meeting in 3 to 7 seconds. We tell the lead directly what happens one by one in the meeting, who speaks first, when feedback occurs, when it is time for questions.
- Product/Service presentation is within 2-3 minutes
- The lead refers to the presentation in his questions – and this is where we get to know his situation, without asking follow-up questions like: are you going to buy a similar service in 2 to 8 weeks.
- Thanks to this, the demo/further conversation is already about the problem of Leada
- Lead speaks 90% of the time Vendor speaks 10% of the time
- The conversation ends with the presentation of a plan to the lead, according to which he will be able to make a purchase decision that is as safe as possible for him. During the conversation, we do not suggest a purchase.
During the conversation we prohibit phrases such as: will you be willing to buy, how convinced are you to buy, I offer you, how much time do you need to decide, by when do you want to buy. The conversation always aims to establish the buying situation of the lead and put in front of him a finite list of steps, after which the customer can make a decision.
Elements of presentation checklist
A presentation, like an interview, should be planned every second. This is not as difficult as it seems. All you have to do is abandon the repentant approach among salespeople, according to which the basis of a presentation is to list the advantages of a product and speak in the language of benefits. This can help, but usually ends up boring the recipient. You can easily recognize such a presentation; during it you feel like you’re listening to a verse from Wojciech Sokol and WWO (hip-hop artists) that sounds like this:
“Blade knives and scissors halberds and files.
Czech apparatus pins nails
Sticks rugs and buttons
Trumpet tooth pumps and Christmas tree baubles
Nails spars bare babes all just for fun
Ties are tied I’m removing pregnancies….
So how to do it right? You should start from the premise that what matters to a potential customer is not the product or anything related to it. What matters is describing the results your previous customers achieved when you worked to solve their problems. Use the following scheme:
- History of the company and why it was founded – 1 slide – max 2 lines of text
- List of key customers for this service product – 1 slide
- Product slide: What basic problem are customers solving with us and what is the expected minimum success – max 2 slides
- What average results you will achieve and what they will translate into (what profit or savings)- max 1 slide
- What results will you get compared to your competitors – 1 slide
- How you can minimize your buying risk (demo/analysis/consultation) – 1 slide
- How the implementation is going – 1 slide
- Other relevant information – 1 slide
Adding 1-2 slides with statistics, a cover page and a conclusion with contact information will give you a beautiful 12-slide presentation. During the talk you have to talk about a flood of 9 of them, which gives you at 3 minutes as much as 20 seconds per slide. Would you say that’s not enough? Consider that an adult’s concentration drops by 40% after 10 minutes of talking (http://psycholog-zawitowska.pl/2017/12/03/ile-moze-trwac-koncentracja-uwagi/). You, on the other hand, are not simply talking to a person or even a lead. You are talking to an investor. If you treat a lead as a potential investor, since every purchase is an investment that brings profit, savings, or loss(when the purchase is misguided), know that the average investor spends an average of 2 minutes and 44 seconds on a pitch deck (https://mycompanypolska.pl/artykul/przeanalizowali-320-pitch-deckow-oto-co-sprawdza-sie-najlepiej/10189) after that time he already knows whether it is worth pursuing the topic further. This is also what your lead will do. His goal is not to learn something about the product you are offering. If he comes to the call, it’s to assess whether it’s worth the risk of investing in your product.
Minimize purchase risk
How do we decide whether a product/service is risky to buy or not? By trying out the solution for free for a while. We buy clothes from a chain store and have up to 100 days to return them, we order a 100-inch TV online because we can return it after 14 days. We sign up for trial versions of software, make an appointment for a demo. Do services have it worse in this regard? You can also provide the service for 7 days for free. You are in Software Hous then you know that customers can often benefit from a test task order. Do you have a service that cannot be tried in a similar way? Then surely there is a way to determine the expected effects of its performance before the customer proceeds to purchase, but in such a way that the customer has to interact with you. You optimize the fast performance of the website, require output from the customer to prepare a prediction of the result . At AMU, we make a report of the expected results of the campaign.
The idea is to make the test/demo/report/analysis a mandatory part of the purchase. A service quote alone is not enough. Give the lead such an element of the product/service that allows him/her to make sure on his/her own that he/she is choosing well.
Result
For how many leads will this work right away: at AMU, this process converts right away for 25% of leads. We include the remaining leads in the lead nurturing campaign, on a quarterly basis, until they convert or have us remove their data from the database.
Does each conversation really last 15 minutes? It doesn’t:
- When it lasts less than 15 minutes, we know the lead is not ready to buy
- When it lasts evenly for 15 minutes, we know that the lead will move on to 2 of the 3-step sales process and there is a 75% chance of conversion, then when it is clear from the conversation that they have dealt with cold mailing in the past
- When a conversation lasts more than 15 minutes, the probability of a sale is highest, and if it does not happen right away, such a lead will convert between the 2nd and 3rd lead nurturing cycle
- For each call, we provide an additional 15 minutes for the leads most interested in the call
Have doubts whether a similar process can be planned for your offering? Make an appointment for a consultation d.d@automatemeup.pl