“If that prospect comes out of that meeting, knowing that they made a decision, even a snap judgment at that moment, that meant 10% would be a game-changer.” – Aaron Bolinger in today’s Tip 370
What are your prescriptions to accelerate your sales cycle?
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Aaron Bollinger on LinkedIn
Kronologic
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host. Since today’s guest is self introducing, I’ll just let him take it away:
Aaron Bolinger: All right, this is Aaron Bolinger. I’m chief revenue officer and co-founder at Kronologic, that’s kronologic.ai. And my daily sales tip is the power of prescription to accelerate your sales cycle or more colloquially the art of the straw man. So with the amount of noise in the market today, accelerating sales cycles is one of the most valuable things that sellers can use to improve their results. And yet, I consistently see many sales professionals at all different levels, not using the art of the straw man, not doing a lot of prescription early on. And it’s just super, super powerful in moving the deal forward. And so while doing discovery and learning things about your prospect is important, there are many decisions in which thinking of an answer or making a decision is difficult.
And so before you just simply go; Hey, I’m going to ask, you know, all of these questions in discovery and just record all of the answers there are, if you have questions that are key to moving deals forward, consider not asking open-ended questions or even close-ended questions, but actually proposing and prescribing the way that you might handle it and then letting them react to that. It’s just super powerful. I do it all the time. I do it in meetings. So at Kronologic we talk a lot about the average value per meeting. And when you calculate an average value per meeting, you look at the average ACV of a deal and then you look at your average close rate and then you look at your average meeting to opportunity rate.
And so I, at first I would say like; Hey, you know, what is your qualified opportunity to close one conversion rate, like a ballpark. And I notice that people will go; Oh, well it depends why blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just takes forever to get the answer from them. And I started saying; Okay, then now I need qualified opportunity to come to close one conversion rate. Is that about 20% for you? And then just I get an immediate fire back; 20% no, no, no, we’re a, I wish, I wish we’re actually closer to 12 or actually no. You know what, we actually will do an over 33% you know. And so I get back these very specific answers very quickly. Whenever I prescribe something or put a straw man out there, I also even do it in my proposals. So I’m looking, I’m thinking about proposal right now where I have, you know, I list, here’s the primary use cases of working with Kronologic and then I have a section that says in every proposal that says; What does success look like? And there are absolutely sales cycles where I’ve never able to get a straight answer from them as to specific defined success metrics before we reached the phase where they’re like, I want a proposal, I’m interested.
And so in the proposal itself, I will put, like I’m looking at one right here, increased by more than 10% lead to meeting conversion rate and generate more than a hundred new leads per month from these two lead channels that are currently underutilized. And I did not get those from them, but I’m suggesting them, I’m putting it in paper and then I scheduled a proposal review and when we get the proposal review, instead of taking a long time and creating a bunch of discussions, I’m able to just say; Hey, success metrics, I’ve proposed a 10% increase leads to meeting conversion rate and I’ll figure out really quickly actually that wouldn’t do enough for us or man, that would be a game-changer 10% across the board. Wow. That would change our business. So I just think prescription, even when you don’t, even when it’s scary because you don’t know exactly what to prescribe. Don’t waste time by leaving it open-ended. If that prospect comes out of that meeting, knowing that they made a decision, even a snap judgment at that moment, that meant 10% would be a game-changer. They’re going to remember that when they go back and think about how they’re going to prioritize their budget for their sales tech stack for the year.
So I just highly recommend everybody listening to this. Do a lot of prescriptions to accelerate your sales cycle. Use the art and the power of the straw man, and thanks for listening. Thanks, Scott for having a son. Bye-bye.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Aaron and Kronologic, just click over to DailySales.Tips/370
Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Scott Leese.