“By putting in the time upfront to set the processes in place, it will give you the best chance of being efficient, effective, and hitting goal every quarter.” – Andrew Barbuto in today’s Tip 1788
Do you have consistent sales processes?
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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 Andrew Barbuto. Andrew is a seasoned digital media sales professional with a proven track record of winning new business and building long-term customer relationships. Over the last 8 years, he has been a top-producing salesperson at two leading digital media companies, closing hundreds of services and software deals with agencies and advertisers worth over $250 million in revenue. Here he is:
Andrew Barbuto: Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about the the importance of having consistent sales processes. What do I mean by consistent sales processes? I mean a set of tests that you do the same way on a regular basis. A few examples of what my processes would be, once a week, I’ll dedicate at least a few hours to conducting research to find new qualified prospects. I’ll conduct research on Mondays, email those prospects on Tuesday, follow up with them on Thursday, and on Friday. I’ll begin my day with email outreach and the day with LinkedIn Sales Navigator outreach. If I don’t hear back from a prospect for a couple of days, I’ll give them a call, leave a voicemail if they don’t answer, and then follow up with an email.
Knowing exactly what to do at each stage of the sales cycle is critical, so that way you know exactly what comes next and can guide your prospect from one stage to the next. I’m talking initial meeting, follow-up meeting, demo, proposal, contract. Knowing at each stage, every conversation, where you need to go to be able to progress the deal is very important for you to consistently be moving deals forward and not having a ton of stalled deals.
Who you prospect, how you identify your ideal customer profile, and what you say to describe your company and your offerings. I believe it’s important that you’re consistent about these things so that way you’re not constantly switching it up. It’s important to do the work in upfront to make sure that you’re identifying what the best processes are. How are you defining your customer profile? You should be looking for the same qualities in every prospect that you reach out.
And there’s a few reasons why that you want to have consistency between these processes. The first one is it saves time and energy, and it allows you to build good habits and spend no mental energy doing things that you’ve already identified as the best way of doing them. So instead of spending a lot of time coming up with outreach to reach the masses, you’re able to say, All right, I already know the email that works the best when I’m sending out my initial email. You can just go right to sending out those emails. This will allow you to spend less energy on more low-value tasks, and so you can dedicate more of it to the more strategic tasks, which I’ll talk about in just a minute. Identify what is the most effective way to describe my company, and then say it every small time.
And the reason why you want to do that is so that way you could spend more of your mental energy on your prospect. You want to spend more time thinking about them and not about you. Since you’re working at one company, you should be able to be consistent about how you’re describing it. That’s what I’m really referring to here, spending most of your mental energy on strategic things that require your mental energy while making everything else just come second nature to you. This also allows you to get out as much emails as possible because you don’t have to spend any time thinking about what to put in there.
The second reason why you want to be consistent is because it ensures that you’re using the best possible message that you can use. Once you figure out what works, stick with it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, then you can revisit it. But once you make a decision, you have to give it enough time to see whether it actually works or not. You’re not going to be able to tell whether a prospecting sequence works after just doing it a few times or a week or even a couple of weeks. You need to give it a few months. That is the only way that you’ll be able to tell.
Once you send it out to at least 500 people, then you can make a determination based on your response rate, whether you have to tweak it or not. But if every time you’re prospecting, you’re spending some time coming up with what to write, and this is just for cold prospects, you’re going to spend a lot of mental energy and time that’s wasted that could be spent on warm leads, ones that you should be spending more time in doing more research and finding out how you can move those deals forward. This also ensures that you will be able to spend the same amount of time sending out 100 emails as you might send out 5 or 10 of them. You’re able to be more efficient with your time.
By automating some of those processes, if you have the option of either working with a business development associate or if you’re able to utilize a prospecting automation tool, I highly recommend you doing those within my ideal customer profile. That way I’m able to ensure that I reach the right person at the right time. Time management is critical to be effective in sales. We only get so much time a day, just like we only get so much energy to spend. How we use our time is going to have a large impact as to whether we’re successful or not. We have to allocate our time to give us the best chance of hitting our quarterly and annual goals.
By having consistent processes, you’re able to form these positive habits which just comes second each to you. Prospecting, research, proposals, sales meetings, how you conduct these, you want to conduct them in the best possible way. This allows you to move faster, be more strategic with your time, along with things like scheduling emails. It ensures maximum effectiveness and efficiency because you’re predetermining the best time to do something, and then you’re completing those at those times. You also don’t have to spend a ton of time thinking about, How should I be spending my time today?
I make a to-do list every single day. I do recommend having at least a weekly to-do list so that way you can check things off as you go. This allows you to be more strategic with your time. You can and should refine these processes over time when necessary. But by putting in the time upfront to set the processes in place, it will give you the best chance of being efficient, effective, and hitting goal every quarter.
Scott Ingram: To learn more about Andrew, join the waitlist for his book, and receive a script to secure next steps in meetings, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1788. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!