We’re pleased to welcome DealPoint.io’s CEO Tom Williams onto the podcast. Tom joins us and brings a ton of ideas on how top sales reps can be their best-self and make those small tweaks that really make the difference. We’re talking small tweaks to how you find the right prospects, how you run your calls and how you follow up. Nothing that any sales rep can’t do.
Like us, Tom wants top sales reps to keep honing their craft to become even better every day. If you want to do that, this is a podcast episode for you…
In This Podcast You’ll Learn:
- Establishing Transparency & Trust
- Finding Your Best Customers
- The “Mutual Action Plan” Follow Up
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Establishing Transparency & Trust
John Barrows: How do you breed transparency throughout the sales process?
Tom Williams: So it’s all related to becoming trusted because the transparency isn’t going to come through on the first call. So the step one I think is show them that you really are interested in helping them. It’s a fundamental shift of I’m not trying to sell you my thing and show off my thing.
Then letting you figure out how to use it. I am genuinely coming to this to hear about your issues, see if I know anything about it and see if I can help you solve your problem.
It’s scary how much time we spend on each stage of the deal, how much time we spent on deals that ultimately don’t close. If you add that up into more prospecting time, you can 5X your revenue easily. It’s because you don’t know which ones to disqualify upfront, but the better you are at it, the more you can trend towards only focusing on winning deals.
But part of that is understanding what the priorities or initiatives are of the customer. So if you genuinely start with “why did you take my call?” – is there was something in your cold call or a marketing email or something that was the reason for them being willing to spend time with you. That’s a big help in how you can continue the call with transparent reasoning.
Finding Your Best Customers
John Barrows: So with Morgan, I hired him a couple of years ago. Instead of saying, Hey, here’s our ICP, I said, here’s our 10 best customers. Go figure out the characteristics that make these our 10 best customers. Interview them, look on their websites, do some research and find the commonalities. We talk to VPs of sales, CRO is and VPs of enablement.
Go figure out what these people care about. He’s never sold to VP’s of enablement before. He came on board with me. So he did some research, but he also went on LinkedIn and he said, Hey, I just joined JBarrows sales training and our main persona is VPs of enablement. I’ve never sold to VP’s of enablement before. Would anybody be anybody out there who’s a VP of enablement would be open to jumping on a call with me and just giving me some insights is what your day to day life is.
He’ got about 50 people jumping on board. So now when he’s calling VPs of enablement, he’s not reading from a piece of paper.
Tom Williams: I don’t know why but I recommend the exact same thing in terms of going to look at 10 successful deals. My big thing is proactive disqualification. So go look at deals and on a successful one, see what did you know at various stages throughout the deal.
And then look at some ones that you thought were gonna close and ended up choking. See if you can see is there a consistent choke point. You never got the VP of finance’s name, whatever it is. Now you have some data to the profile of a good looking deal. But again, it’s all about going back to the real deals or the real customers.
The “Mutual Action Plan” Follow Up
John Barrows: Let’s talk about the mutual action plan because I’ve never personally used a formal mutual action plan right now. Also, just as a caveat, my ACV is, you know, 30 to $40,000, you know, sales cycle is 42 days on average. I have two to three stakeholders. I’ve never sold a massively complex enterprise type of deal, stuff like that. So that’s probably why I’ve not really done it, maybe only a very slimmed down version of it.
I see a lot of companies with all the reps sending a summary of the discussion, but they’ll just send it as a note-taking exercise. Okay, thanks for the conversation. Here’s what we talked about.
The key here is making sure that you tell them what’s coming. Hey Tom, send over this. Could you respond back? Right.
Even when you do that, you only get about, I only get about a 30% response rate on that. But I’ll tell you right now that the ones that I get that response right on, I’ve got a 90% close ratio.
Tom Williams: It happens after you get the “great, I’m interested, I agree with you”.
In my opinion, you’re actually at one third of the deal at this point because now you’ve got to get to the nitty gritty of what buying process is going to be. Is there a parent organization that’s going to sign off on a deal this size? Is there a conflict with your ERP that’s going to get in the way? There’s a million things that can kill the deal even though your champion wants to buy it.
So, you’ve done this before. Your sales team knows what the standard operating procedure is to buy your thing. So present that to them because you want to get out in the open that there is going to be some work that your side has to do to buy my thing.
And if you get out in the open, you grow that credibility even more. It tells them that you’ve done this before. I’m not going to be laughed at because the biggest risk to a buyer is not the budget that they spend with you. It’s that you leave them high and dry and they look like a D*ck for having brought you into their organization. You screw them and the CEO doesn’t get mad at you, the vendor. They get mad at the guy who brought you in.
Your number one job is to keep that person safe and make them feel safe that you are a good bet to go with and an endorse. These are the steps that are going to have to get done. So they feel that you know what, you know what to do.
That’s a wrap. Join us next time
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