“I think that’s something people misunderstand is you’re not necessarily selling them on the product. You’re selling them on the sales process to evaluate your products.” – Misha Jessel-Kenyon in today’s Tip 1236
Are you selling them the process?
Join the conversation below and check the full interview with Misha!
SalesLoft
Misha Jessel-Kenyon on LinkedIn
Misha Jessel-Kenyon on Sales Success Stories Interview
2022 Sales Success Summit
Prescriptive Selling: Leading your Prospective Customers Through their Buying Process – Justin Bridgemohan
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’ve got another clip from my conversation with Misha to build on yesterday’s tip about not focusing on closing. Here’s a bit more from SalesLoft’s #1 rep in Europe:
Misha Jessel-Kenyon: I would say your overall sales process, I even step you take customers through is far more important than the individual conversations that you have. And I think too many reps focus on conversational tactics or language around influence connect. It’s all about the conversation-type focus. I’m going to convince them in this conversation that they should buy where I’m selling. And I think if you focus too much there that you can very quickly become in authentic if you’re not practiced or mastered properly in those areas, and that inauthenticity is poison to your deals, it makes it difficult to build trust, which makes it hard to build Champions. And if you don’t have a champion, you don’t have a deal, and ultimately can be a huge detriment to your success. So I’d say use conversational tactics precautions like individual conversational tactics are not really that useful when you compare it to how impactful being strategic about the process you’re taking them through can be.
Scott Ingram: And how does that manifest? I mean, are you educating your prospect around the process? Is it about kind of constantly driving towards the next step? What does that actually mean?
Misha Jessel-Kenyon: It’s about educating them about our sales process, saying this is typically how our sales process works, and this is why we take you through this process and showing them that it’s in their benefit to follow our process. Of course, we still need to take into account the nuance of the organization and then adapt it based on what you’re learning and then propose a slightly different sales process. If there’s information that shared, that means that kind of the standard process isn’t going to work. But it’s very much about convincing them to go your way and then also saying no when they want to go in a direction that you know isn’t going to be fruitful for the party. And a good example of that is a core part of our sales process is building a business case, and we call it a business value assessment and a big part of how we educate the customer on it. Is it’s in your benefit to go through this. Because not only will it help us quantify the impact and show you if this is worth doing or not, and we’re not going to ask you to sign off on this until we know if it’s worth doing or not, but it’s also going to provide us a map on how we deliver value and enable you to hold us accountable for what we’ve agreed to deliver.
And so it’s not just how you choose, it’s how you get a good outcome of implementing the software. And that’s just one example. But there’s plenty of things like that where if you let the customer be in the driving seat, you can very quickly kind of go down routes that kill deals and unintentionally from customers. If customers don’t haven’t bought what you sold, you’ve sold it a lot more times than they bought it. And so you should very much be in the driving seat.
Scott Ingram: Yeah, this totally reminds me. I don’t know if you’ve seen it because it was quite some time ago. At the very first Sales Success Summit, Justin Bridgemohan talked about sort of this and he sort of had this epiphany. He really dug in and was like, Okay, when I win, why do I win? When I lose, why do I lose? And he realized it all came down to this. It all came down to I win when I run my process and I bring the client into sort of this idea and it’s really teaching them and educating them and selling them on the process. It’s helping them understand that this works. I’ve done this way more times than you have, right? I know how to make clients successful and we are successful when we do it this way. So you just kind of need to trust the process.
I’m going to quickly interrupt myself here to share this video link with you. I just went back and set the video I just mentioned to be free just for you. You’ll find links at Top1.fm/145 or Top1.fm/misha. And while you’re there, do yourself a favor and click on the link for the Sales Success Summit. If you think these interviews are valuable, imagine how much value you’d get from being in a room with a few dozen of the top performers you’ve heard on this podcast. Plus, we have a lot of fun here in Austin, so top1.fm/145 to get access to Justin’s video and Top1Summit.com to sign up to join us this October.
Misha Jessel-Kenyon: Yeah, exactly. You’re selling them on the process. I think that’s something people misunderstand is you’re not necessarily selling them on the product. You’re selling them on the sales process to evaluate your products. And a lot of the other supporting people that you’ll bring in on the deal will often help you sell it and you will be selling it later on in the process. But at the very beginning, it’s all about selling the process, telling them to commit to your process.
Scott Ingram: Once again, for links to connect with Misha and for my full interview with him, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1236. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!