Sales 2.0

Four reminders

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I am continuing to report on findings from my new sales project. The project has already thrown up a few reminders I see time-and-time-again in the sales world.

To remind you of the story so far. I am taking over a sales territory from a salesperson that has recently left the client’s company. I am looking for some quick wins in this situation as this will help keep the project going. I have been looking through the “old dusty files” to see if the previous salesperson left any qualified opportunities that could be quickly closed.

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Finding Quick Wins in a Haystack

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I’ve started a new sales project, and I need some quick wins to show my clients that they made the right decision.

If you’ve ever started a new sales job, or been given a new territory, you will recognize this scenario. I’m going to be writing about how I tackle this situation, applying my sales strategies, and letting you know how they work out (or don’t).

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Why make it any harder?

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For most companies finding new business is hard. So many things must fall into place to find a new client.

​The research suggests that about 5% of a market is looking for a solution at any given time. So just by the law of averages, if you proactively approach people you will need to speak to 20 people to find one that needs your solution.

That’s a big enough challenge, but then there’s the issue of speaking to anyone. We have too much to do and we don’t believe what cold callers are telling us, so we’ve made it harder and harder to reach us. In 2020, 12-17% of outbound calls were answered by a person, today that number has dwindled to 3-4%.

When you multiply these effects together you can see why you must make a lot of cold calls to get anywhere. If on 4% of people pick up the phone, and then only 5% of those are in the market for your stuff, you need 500 calls just to find one opportunity.

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What conferences are really for

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Your potential clients are inundated by emails, unsolicited messages on social media and cold calls. They have become better than ever at ignoring unwanted messages.

Here are some recent real numbers from the front lines of selling that sales expert KD Dorsey just shared. These metrics show how cold approaches have become less effective even over the last four years (and this decline has been going on for a couple of decades.)

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Relationships will be critical in the AI age

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Sales is not getting any easier. Buyers have become even better at screening out salespeople.

When the Internet arrived, buyers’ need to speak to a salesperson to get basic information was eliminated. Buyers could go online and get all the information they needed.

About a decade ago, certain subject matter experts came up with a solution to this problem. The solution was do more. If buyers were not inviting salespeople in, the best response was to ask to be invited in more often. Many salespeople becoming mass email marketers.

Buyers adapted to this onslaught of email with improved “defenses”. Email metrics have dropped dramatically over the last ten years. The most important metric, actual responses and people wanting to talk to you, is now super low for most cold emails.

Today we are in the age of generative AI. This new technology allows us to create content at a huge scale. Some people see this as a new way for salespeople to generate even more outbound email (and social media messages). I predict buyers will react with their own AI defenses to this fresh tsunami of unwanted outreach. What should you do then if you want to sell your stuff in the age of AI?

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Cover the bases…or you’re out!

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In my last two posts (this one and this one) I described a framework for progressing larger sales opportunities that I have had a lot of success with. It is a process described in Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman’s book “Strategic Selling” (now called New Strategic Selling.) In this framework there are four types of people involved in a sale.

  1. The economic buyer
  2. The users
  3. The gatekeepers
  4. The coach

I described these four types of people and gave you some tips on how to find the fourth type of person a “coach”. The “coach” is the one type of person you don’t get for “free”. Having a coach is one of the most important factors in winning bigger deals.

Knowing how to sell to a “buying committee” like this is becoming more important as getting in the door gets harder and every opportunity more critical.

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