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Written by Hamish Knox; President of Sandler in Calgary, Canada
Creating accountable, sales focused organizations in Calgary
Even if your sales funnel isn’t filled with sand or water, occasionally your sales team will have a magician sneak into their pipeline.
Like traditional magicians, the magicians in your sales funnel have disappeared often after one of your salespeople has spent time in discovery with them and possibly gone as far as putting together a proposal.
David Sandler’s rule related to magicians is, “there are no bad prospects only bad salespeople.” This rule doesn’t mean that the members of your team are bad at sales, or people, but that they either did or didn’t say or do something to or with their prospect to minimize the possibility that their prospect would disappear.
This happened to me last week. A prospect who committed to start working with me backed out at the last minute. I realized after the fact that I hadn’t addressed any potential buyer’s remorse after they committed to start when this prospect and I met the previous week.
Below are five tips to coach your team on to eliminate magicians from your sales funnel by either closing their file or closing the sale.
- Commit to a limited number of touch points before closing their file – there are plenty of articles about the number of touches it takes before a prospect will buy; however, remember that your salesperson already went through at least a discovery phase with their magician, which was a minimum of two touch points (an initial conversation and a discovery meeting). The only valuables your salespeople possess are their time and information so have them invest the former in pursuing real opportunities instead of leaving an 11th voicemail for a magician who they last spoke with three months ago. Best practise is 3-5 touches after a prospect misses a scheduled follow-up call or meeting.
- Separate yourself emotionally from the situation – your salesperson starting a communication (phone, email, text) with a magician with, “I’ve been trying to….” does nothing but kill rapport with their prospect. Yes, your salesperson is probably pissed that their prospect disappeared on them, especially if they were counting on that sale to hit their monthly/quarterly/annual target, but their prospect doesn’t care. They may be playing a game with your salesperson to get them emotionally involved so they’ll say or do things not in their best interest, like cut price without being asked, to close the sale.
- Be disarmingly honest – instead of “I’ve been trying to…” a communication that includes, “my sense is…” priorities have shifted, project’s been cancelled, things changed on your end (don’t mention budget cuts) “and you’re uncomfortable sharing that with me…” addresses their prospect at a human-to-human level, which increases the probability of them responding to your salesperson.
- Refresh your magician’s mind – your prospects, especially those in an enterprise environment, have many competing priorities for space in their brain. The reason why they started interacting with your salesperson may have been crowded out since the last time they spoke with your salesperson. Refreshing your magician’s mind about the business, financial and personal impacts of not addressing the problem(s) that caused them to start down a discovery path in the first place will help your salesperson determine if this magician could be turned into a real prospect again. Even more powerful is if your salesperson and their magician established a timeline for implementation and consequences for not sticking to that timeline.
- Get comfortable prescribing next steps if your magician commits – if your salesperson turns a magician back into a real prospect they must be very comfortable in taking control of the sales process at this point, the same way a fitness coach would prescribe the exercise and/or diet plan for a specific client. This isn’t a hard sell tactic because you would coach your salesperson to say, “are you comfortable with that?” after they laid out the next steps required to move their prospect to a client. Their prospect may not be okay with those next steps and that’s great news for your salesperson because they can politely close that prospect’s file and invest their time with prospects who are willing and able to work with them as equals.
As Wesley said to Buttercup in the Princess Bride, “life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says different is selling something,” the above tips won’t work 100% of the time. By coaching your team to follow your sales process and use the above tips to address the few magicians who do make it into their sales funnel you’ll spend less time having “whatever happened to…” conversations and more time celebrating closed sales.
Until next time… go lead.
Sales Process Workshop
What if you spent more time coaching your salespeople instead of remembering what each salesperson’s definition of 25%, 50%, or 90% “closed” meant?
What is a “Sales Process Workshop”?
- Purpose – design and document the “Your Company Name Way,” which is all the steps and check boxes your salespeople need to address to take a prospect from “hello” to “here’s a purchase order” to “this has been a great X year relationship. Look forward to working with you for many more.”
- Who attends – Senior leaders of functional units in your organization including CEO or Owners only.
- Where – our place or yours. Most of our clients appreciate the opportunity to disconnect from distractions at their place and hold this session at ours.
- Time – three hours.
- You leave with – a clearly documented common language and the tools to implement internally and hold your people accountable to following your Way. We may address CRM integration if applicable, but we aren’t CRM experts.
Organizations with a common language and process around their prospecting, selling and client development activities scale faster, grow consistently and can realize a higher exit multiple.
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