“The first thing you want to do is you’ve got to identify that person or that organization whom you’re going to speak with” – Mike Simmons in today’s Tip 57
What does your process look like?
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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 is part two of a series from Mike Simmons. This stands alone, but I’d encourage you to also listen to Tip 56 where Mike walked through mapping the customer journey. Mike Simmons is the founder of Catalyst Sale, a full-service sales operations and enablement consultancy. Here he is with today’s tip:
Mike Simmons: Last time we talked about the customer journey and we mapped it out on this whiteboard and that I’m sure you could see the one note if you’re watching the video. If you’re not watching the video, make sure you take a look at the video on Scott’s site. Today we’re going to talk about the sales rep process, and now this is not your sales process inside your organization. This is not what the company uses to create predictability and your revenue stream. This is how you go out and execute on a daily basis. When it comes to figuring out what that execution looks like, you should be able to identify some general patterns in the work that you do, and that’s the first thing that we’re going to start with to identify. So, the first thing we want to do is we want to identify the person who we should be speaking with. This person has a pretty big head, but this is the person that we want to talk with. We can identify that person by either finding them on Linkedin and finding them on Twitter or going to the about us page inside a company site, looking at the leadership inside the organization, going through your networking process. Heck, maybe your company has an inbound process and they do some great content marketing and you’re seeing all of that content. Those leads come into the organization, but the first thing you want to do is you’ve got to identify that person or that organization whom you’re going to speak with. Once you’ve identified them, then you move to this next step, which is engage. So, engage. Now, engagement could be a number of different things. I mean this could be, we’re going to go to Twitter and we’re going to engage with them on Twitter.
We’re going to do all this social selling stuff. Not a big fan. I do think it’s important to use those resources to get a better sense for who people are as human beings. But I’m not a big fan of fake engagement on social media with the purpose to sell something at some point in time. That’s not transparency, that’s not being authentic. So let’s engage, let’s just say that the first time we engage with someone, it is via the phone or maybe it’s an email and we’re able to set up some kind of a meeting. So let’s say the first time we engage with them, it’s an email that we send out and we ask them for some time. Okay? So, the first thing we do is we establish some clear next steps, some things that, some of some general objectives. And so, we’re going to go ahead and establish objectives or next steps. And you can look at that either way. In this instance, our objective is to get a meeting. So we communicate out to the prospect, we established next steps, and then we call them to action. The next thing we do is we try to get them to move from where they are today to where we want them to be, where we’d like them to be. So agreed to a meeting maybe except that meeting invitation. So the next piece is call to action. Call to action is a bit more direct than this established next steps piece. But as you can see we’ve identified a person, we’ve engaged with them, we’ve established some general next steps or objectives and then we’ve called them to action. And then this just loops right around where we engage with them again and we engage with them again maybe it’s on a meeting, maybe it’s an actual call that we’re doing, maybe we’re going to lunch, but we’re going through this constant looping process and at over time you continue to make progress further and further up the mountain that you’re climbing or further and further down this sales process. I think at this, we talked about the board game before or we talked about the game of life. In this instance, what I’m thinking about is what is something like monopoly where you’ve got to go around and around in circle and you’ve got to go through these gates over and over again, and in some sales cycles you may end up having to go through those gates 30 times, you have to make 30 labs, but this is a looping process that you have to go through each stage. And before you know it, you’re going to do is you’re gonna find out that you’re identifying more and more new people and then you’re just getting into the process of working with your new people again. But remember you want to identify, you want to engage, you want to establish next steps, you want to call them to action, and then go through the looping process.
Scott Ingram: What does your process look like? I love Mike’s Board game analogies and I’d highly encourage you to check out the tip page to see the video as well. All of that and more at DailySales.Tip/57 and I’ll talk to you tomorrow with another great tip.