Clip from Episode 27: Selling Professional Services – Reed Clarke of LeadMD:

The next big piece of my process is making your prospect do something and make them show that they actually want to be engaged in this. So I like to give homework. These are the types of things that I want you to do by the next call. Provide me a list of the three most important things you got out of the conversation and you know really give them a deadline that hey I need to have this back before our next conversation or does it make sense. And then most importantly in your entire sales process is stick with it. If you say you’re not going to do something unless something else was done. Don’t do it. It’s fine. Don’t be afraid of them saying hey we’re not going to do business now and cancel the meeting. If that happens maybe they weren’t the best prospect for you in the first place. Even worse wouldn’t have been a good client for your company overall. Would have cost the company money overall. So getting people bought into your process is very important. So give them some homework to make sure they do it. Stick with it.

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Clip from Episode 27: Selling Professional Services – Reed Clarke of LeadMD:

Lots and lots of qualification at the beginning like we spoke about. Really understanding before I’ve ever talked to a person of. Is this a good buyer for me? You see the spam emails go out. You know we’ve worked with hundreds of companies just like you and that’s a really an empty promise when it comes down to it because you haven’t had any conversation with anybody yet. So being personal finding out about people and treating that first conversation as hey I want to get to know you. I hope you want to get to know me. Let’s go through this and do some light discovery to see if it makes sense for us to continue talking and if at any point you’re not seeing value out of this conversation. Let me know and we can go on our way. You know being very honest from the beginning and people appreciate that because you know you’ve taken time out of their day everyone’s very busy. Calendars are always tight and tough for everyone these days. You know being honest and saying hey I want you to get value out of this. Let’s get to know each other and see if we want to work together because that’s the most important of any time you don’t fully understand what’s going our separate ways and that type of honesty generally opens up. So you know that may be a quick intro call of 10 to 15 minutes. Lots of times that turns into a full discovery process where we may talk for an hour plus. You know if you can build that trust where they want to continue the conversation you know maybe they’re going to skip their next meeting or go go over a little bit to be late for their next meeting because you’re meeting. That’s a pretty good sign that they’re engaged.

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Clip from Episode 27: Selling Professional Services – Reed Clarke of LeadMD:

When you have your own business you have to sell and you’re really selling yourself. All day long every day you’re out there making relationships and selling whatever you can possibly sell to try to get business. The part of that that didn’t appeal to me was how do I now have to produce what I’ve sold. So I was spending all day selling and all night producing and as an entrepreneur. That’s great. But can be very tiresome. So what I realized was that part of being an entrepreneur I really liked was selling. So from there I have an opportunity with one of my clients who was an upcoming tech services company who was helping bring companies to the cloud so pre everybody being SAAS they were really helping companies who didn’t have enough development or dollars to be able to take their software from an on premise solution into the cloud but still needed the availability for hosting that product for their people around the world to be to use that product. So we helped lots and lots of companies take their product and put it in the cloud. But still not lose that functionality that they had from an on premise software. So in that I got to sell and learn about lots and lots and lots of businesses. Lots of services from the IT world learning about software which then led me into the SAAS software world for a little bit actually selling SAAS software as that grew. But really I wanted to get back to key roots which was marketing helping businesses from a consulting angle but also having kind of the tech feel to it as well. So the selling services around Salesforce and Marketo with LeadMD has been a perfect fit for everything I’ve wanted to do and based on my history of employment previously.

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Clip from Episode 27: Selling Professional Services – Reed Clarke of LeadMD:

When it comes down to it I had a lot of sales experience I’ve sold services before in the past and I really when I came to the organization challenged it of how can we sell to better clients and bigger deals. And one of the thing that was really my goal from day one is how can I come in and be different than the other sales people we have. How can I sell larger accounts where I can really focus on a smaller number of accounts and kind of get away from the spray and pray a little bit and focus on. We’re going to do bigger engagements. More strategy less tactical and be able to grow those account over multi-phase approaches. It’s just something I’ve done in my past life and it really just felt like it would work here as well so I really made that my goal from day one.

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