“I believe that friction applied in the right way at the right time can improve our effectiveness as sales professionals.” – Chris McNeill in today’s Tip 1047
Do you apply friction in your sales process?
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Chris McNeill on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Here’s Chris McNeill again with Part 2 of his 2 Part series that he started yesterday in tip number 1046. Here he is:
Chris McNeill: Yesterday talked about friction and the role it plays in ensuring that our ideas and opportunities have traction with our buyers. I believe that friction applied in the right way at the right time can improve our effectiveness as sales professionals.
Let me give another example.
When I was selling SaaS solutions to small business owners, collecting a credit card to get started wasn’t really an issue, and it definitely sped us through the transaction as virtually all small business owners have company credit cards. As I moved more and more upmarket, I found that requiring a credit card for payment has actually become a hindrance to some opportunities.
Most of my buyers either don’t have corporate cards or aren’t permitted to use them for my type of solutions. Large companies have complex spend to manage, and they have to be careful about how they do it, so they don’t typically allow everyone to randomly use credit cards for large purchases. If the company I work for only accepted credit card payments, I would actually have lost a lot of opportunities. So removing too much friction would have actually hindered me.
Between the tip yesterday and today, the point is that we need to think about our buyer and align the friction that will occur during the sales process to their journey. If I’m selling to an organization, especially a larger one, I should expect that I’ll run into security questions, legal questions, and invoicing questions. If I plan for that, I can use those points of friction to ensure that we are moving forward with our prospects. If I don’t plan for them or try to eliminate them entirely, I’m impacting my ability to build traction and close opportunities.
So that’s the tip.
Think about your buyers and the journey they go on. Design your process to apply the right kinds of friction at the right time.
Scott Ingram: For a link to connect with Chris, and links to some of his other tips, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1047 You won’t find much friction there in signing up for our listener list as well. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!