“If you do this right, especially in this remote selling world that we live in, you will be able to serve your customers better, build closer relationships with your customers, grow your deals and accelerate your sales cycle.” – Irfan Jafar in today’s Tip 1102
Do you get yourself on your customer’s internal collaboration platform channel?
Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!
VMware Website
Irfan Jafar on LinkedIn
Irfan Jafar on Sales Success Stories Interview
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Irfan Jafar. Irfan is a passionate individual and a top-performing sales professional who is always striving to become the better version of himself. His focus is on helping and guiding his customers to become more successful. He loves helping his colleagues and friends with his learnings while staying humble and hungry. Here he is:
Irfan Jafar: Today’s sales tip is about getting yourself on your customer’s internal collaboration platform channel. Maybe Slack, Clip, Teams, or any other platform your customer might be using. If you do this right, especially in this remote selling world that we live in, you will be able to serve your customers better, build closer relationships with your customers, grow your deals and accelerate your sales cycle.
Now collaboration tools have been there for some time, but what I found that just like me, many folks in sales were not leveraging these tools to their potential for external customer engagements where you as a vendor are on your customer, Slack Channel as an example.
Now here are a couple of things to consider when making a request to the customer to get access to their internal collaboration platform.
- Make it about them and share with them how you and your team will be able to better serve them. If your team will have access to their internal collaboration tool. Help them visualize the value of your ask.
- Make your ask at the right level on the customer side with someone who can make it happen and will be able to get this done and get you the access.
Once you do get access and you are on their collaboration channel, focus on at least these three things.
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- Customer service. Be there for them and be available if they have any escalation going on as an example. Remember to focus on their needs first and not yours.
- Customer alignment. Make sure you have your team and even your executives in certain cases on customer’s collaboration channel aligned to your customer’s key contacts. Selling is a team sport so don’t forget that.
- Deal progression and close. This is where the collaboration tool can really outshine as you can get a blow-by-blow update from the customer on how a deal and approval process is progressing without sounding pushy.
You will be surprised as you are working the deal to close before quarter-end, how many questions your customer may have on their mind that you can quickly answer and remove the roadblocks and clear misunderstandings.
Just last quarter, as an example, I closed a 300K ACV deal that would have missed the quarter and deadline if my champion and I were not connected on the collaboration channel. My champion/decision-maker had to provide some clarifications and answers real-time to his finance team before they signed off. Plus one of the documents had a typo and also needed minor corrections so we fixed the document in real-time, shared it over the collaboration channel and all of the issues were taken care of quickly and both sides moved at a speed that met our quarter-end deadline.
So that is my new sales tip. If you haven’t used this or not doing this on a consistent basis then learn how to do it. Apply it and let me know how it worked out for you. Good luck.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Irfan, and for a link to the interview we did together on the Sales Success Stories podcast, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1102.
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!