Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Sep 07, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
If you do online demonstrations and webinars, you know very well that in spite of your great product offering, superior questioning skills, and good delivery, you sometimes come away with a promise for future business, or a flat “no.” In other words, no order. You can still get a “win” out of it, though.
To preface the rest of this post, ensure that you’ve read my whitepaper on conducting a successful sales webinar, so that you haven’t left any bases uncovered when you did your due diligence and made your presentation. It’s free, and I’ve gotten some very good responses on how it’s helped sales reps to get closer to making a sale.
Today, I’d like you to consider taking one more step after you’ve finished your unsuccessful demo or webinar, a technique that comes right out of my inside sales training courses. Your contact, in most cases, appreciates the time you’ve taken, and knows that because he or she hasn’t given you the business, it’s a loss for you. That’s a great time to invite him or her to be a LinkedIn contact for you. A great way to approach this is to say “John, I’ve had a great time showing you what we can do for you, and even if we can’t move forward today, I’m going to invite you on LinkedIn so we can stay in touch.”
As soon as you’ve gotten off the phone, send the invitation. Don’t wait a day, do it now, and the prospect will probably LinkIn to you. Now you have an additional contact that likes you, appreciated your professionalism, and knows your company. And thus, when you check your new prospects’ LinkedIn profiles before calling them (you do that, right?) you’ll be able to warm up your cold calls by referencing people you both know. Within a relatively short amount of time, you should have a pretty good network of prospect contacts. In a given vertical, the world is very small. These people attend the same conferences, and know each other professionally, and sometimes socially, too.
Here’s a caveat: be sure you know why your webinar or demo prospect didn’t buy. It could be money, timing, changed requirements, anything. But if the prospect didn’t buy because he or she thought your solution offering was decidedly sub-par, he or she is probably not going to want to LinkIn to you. So again, take my approach when your prospect loved you and your solution, but decided not to buy for unrelated reasons.
Some of you may be thinking “why don’t I just ask for a reference to someone at another company that might need my product, instead?” Good question, I’m glad you asked. Many people are reticent to give out names, that’s why, and if you get a “no, I don’t feel comfortable giving you other names” that’s two losses. Asking for other references is always easier after the prospect becomes your customer. On the other hand, using a LinkedIn invitation is easy, especially immediately after you’ve taken the time to work with the prospect.
So go ahead and get yourself a “win,” even when you walk away without an order. And add this technique to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 08, 2008 @ 03:12 AM
Frustrating. Annoying. Unusable. These words are three of the most common used by prospects to describe a product or service that isn't working well for them. And they're using these words because they're talking to you about potentially changing to your offering, and telling you why they're unhappy with what they're using now. Many inside sales reps, though, ignore these clue words, and instead of asking the prospect to elaborate on the pain point, begin feature dumping all over the place, describing features and benefits like crazy, but failing to use the clue to begin the process of quantifying the scope and return-on-investment (ROI) value of the problem. Let's talk about how to fix this.
Here's an example of how it shouldn't be done. The prospect is a Testing Manager:
Prospect: "It takes forever to build scripts with our current regression tester, and it annoys the heck out of me and the team, because we're getting pressure to get out the new release. How soon can you get me a demo?"
Salesperson: "I think you'll find that our GUI is terrific, and you'll be able to build scripts faster than your current solution. I can fit you in for a demonstration webinar next Wednesday. Work that work with your schedule?"
Prospect: "Yes, I'll get the team together to take a look."
Salesperson: "Terrific. I'll send you a confirmation email, along with a dial-in keycode. Anything else I can answer before I let you go?"
The problem here is that the rep doesn't know about the problem (he or she didn't ask), and is just going to deliver another unqualified webinar. Maybe the webinar goes well, and the rep keeps calling, but after 2 weeks, there's still no PO. Not only that the rep can't reach the prospect, and the rep's calls aren't being returned. Sound familiar? It should, because it's probably happened to all of us (me included, what I was a junior salesperson). So how do we fix this, and accelerate the sales cycle? By asking the prospect to better explain the problem, instead of jumping prematurely into delivering a demo/webinar. How about improving the call so it goes like this:
Prospect: "It takes forever to build scripts with our current regression tester, and it annoys the heck out of me and the team, because we're getting pressure to get out the new release. How soon can you get me a demo?"
Salesperson: "Tell me a little about that new release, and the internal pressures you're running into."
Prospect: "We have an important upgrade that will fix a lot of the problems in our last release, and included is a new feature set our customers have been asking for. We've got hundreds of customers lined up to buy this upgrade, and they won't buy additional licenses until the old problems have been fixed. Our current regression tester has blown up on several tests already, and the VP of Sales is putting pressure on engineering, because she needs the revenue this quarter."
Salesperson: "Do you have a sense of what kind of revenue is going to be generated when the new release is ready to ship?"
Prospect: "Well, it's conservatively 2000 licenses, and we're charging $495 for the upgrade."
Salesperson: "That comes out to $990,000, does that sound about right?"
Prospect: "Right, and the quarter ends in 60 days."
Salesperson: "I can see why the VP of Sales is concerned. If we divide $990,000 by 60 days, it looks as though there's a lost opportunity cost of $16,500 per day. That's a lot."
Can you see what we're doing here? We're now fully understanding what the ramifications are of not finding a solution. Now you can do your demo webinar. So why hasn't the prospect called us back after the webinar? Busy in the lab, trying again to get the old product working, broken ankle in a pickup game and he or she is out for 3 days, could be anything. But now you have the power to call above the Testing Manager, maybe to the VP of Engineering (and you did begin the sales process by calling high and getting passed down, didn't you?) You can tell the VP that you know that his or her company is losing $16,500 a day in delayed sales, and the VP can accelerate your sale again.
In each telesales training course I teach, we spend a lot of time talking about clues, and how to address them. The clues commonly begin with words like "annoying," "frustrating," or "unusable." When you hear these words, or those similar to them, perk your ears up, stop "selling," and ask for elaboration. It's your key to getting important ROI information that will get you the sale faster. This sales technique will increase sales, and help you to understand your prospect's situation more fully. Add it to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Oct 27, 2008 @ 12:01 AM
I got a call from Eileen the other day, concerned because her month was ending and she hadn't yet met her sales quota. She wanted to know what I'd suggest to accelerate the sales process. It turned out she had several prospects on 90 day product evaluations and they weren't scheduled to be up for two more months. In fact, 90 days was her company's standard evaluation policy. And because of that policy, many sales were delayed two months beyond what they would be if the company instead only offered 30 day evals. Let's do a little probing into the issue, and come up with a better way to increase sales faster.
Whether you call them evaluations, pilots, or proofs of concept, the idea is to let the prospect "try and buy." It's a great closing technique, because sometimes prospects need to test user interface, ease of use, requirements compatibility, and other elements. We discuss closing by evaluation in our sales courses, too. But rarely does it take them more than 30 days to do it. In fact, they can usually do it in less than a week. Sure they'd love to take 90 days on an eval, because they get to use it free or can let it sit on the desk for a few weeks, no reason to buy!
There is no logical reason to offer a prospect a 90 day eval, even if your prospect needs to show it to others on the decision team. Instead, make it your (and your company's) policy to offer a 30 day eval as standard. If the prospect asks for more time after the 30 days is up, I usually will grant the prospect 48 more hours. I tell him or her that during that time, I can provide unlimited tech support and access to me (the same he or she gets in the 30 days, by the way). I also mention that evals are on allocation, and that since my company can realistically handle only a fixed number at a given time, extending my evals prevents other prospects from getting theirs in a timely fashion. This provides some urgency, and builds the value of my product in the mind of the prospect. If the prospect insists on more time beyond that, and I don't consider the additional time a valid request, I'll suggest stopping the eval and firing it up again at a future date closer to the time needed for implementation. This prevents the prospect from using my eval to finish a project then not buying it, even though it performed to spec.
I've already blogged on techniques to close an eval, and if you missed it, it's at www.alextrain.com/inside-sales-telesales-tips-blog/?Tag=Evaluations+%26+Demonstrations , and well worth visiting if you use evaluations as a closing strategy. Of course there are times when a prospect will need more than 30 days to see a product, but these should be the exception, not the rule. By shortening your eval time, you'll compress your sales cycle, add urgency to the sale, value to your product, and prevent prospects from using your product rent-free. Add the 30 day maximum evaluation period to your Best Practices playbook to reach your sales quota faster.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Oct 20, 2008 @ 03:00 AM
I got a great call last week from Paul, a subscriber to my blog. He called because he had a dilemma. Much of his selling is done through webinars, and his conversion rates weren't where he wanted them to be. We discussed what he was doing in terms of pre-qualifying, setting up the webinar, and following up. The call took nearly 45 minutes, because I realized that he was facing the same challenges that many of my clients face, namely that many webinars are geared to providing information rather than selling. The sales techniques for improving webinar sales success that I gave to him are now available to you, because I've written a webinar whitepaper that you can now download.
Delivering a Sales-oriented Webinar is a whitepaper that may very well change the way you deliver prospect-facing webinars. Much of the material is right from my inside sales training courses, including sales tips on questioning and closing skills, and quite a bit on presentation skills, time management, and attendee management, too. Topic areas addressed in the whitepaper include:
- Informational vs. Sales-oriented Webinars
- Pre-qualifying the Sales-oriented Webinar
- Setting up the Sales-oriented Webinar
- Delivering the Sales-oriented Webinar
- Fine-tuning the Webinar process
If you've ever been involved in presenting a webinar, this whitepaper is for you. It's full of great information you can use today, and it can be read in 5 minutes. After reading it, my guess is that you'll want the rest of your webinar team to read it as well. And I'll bet that your next webinar will be different. Download it today, and add it to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Aug 26, 2008 @ 12:44 PM
Although many companies are demonstrating products through webinars, a significant number still send out evaluation software or hardware. If your company does, you can save a significant amount of time and close sales faster by adopting some best practices for evaluations. The process I'm going to describe could generate dozens of new sales leads for you, too.
Selling by evaluation and on-site demonstration are two great ways of giving prospects necessary "hands-on" experience with your product before purchase. Yet many companies are thoroughly frustrated with the poor evaluation-to-sale ratio, to the extent that they are considering stopping the program altogether. Big mistake. If your team takes the approach I'm going to describe in a second, your ratio will skyrocket and you'll close sales faster, although the number of evals you actually send out may actually decrease.
Here are some ideas that can benefit you immediately:
1) Always ask for the sale with 30 day right-of-return prior to suggesting an evaluation. The number of prospects that will actually place an order when you ask the question may surprise you... if your accountants can't figure out how to handle the occasional charge-back, invest in a college-level accounting course for them.
2) Send out an evaluation only to those who will buy if their requirements criteria are met. Note their requirements, use the "if we could, would you?" question, and set the expectation for purchase if the eval fits their pre-stated needs.
3) Call the day after the expected arrival of the evaluation. Make sure it got there, and help him or her with the installation process if necessary.
4) Call a week later. If their expectations have been met, ask if you can "wrap up the paperwork" right then and there. If not, get tech support involved proactively to get the prospect's requirements taken care of.
5) Follow up after tech support has called them. Repeat step 4.
6) If the prospect wants an eval to continue beyond 30 days, negotiate! Here are some ideas I've used successfully:
a) explain that your evals are on allocation. Ask if he or she would be willing to make the decision in two more working days, provided you'll agree to putting the full force of your tech support group behind getting it to perform to their expectations. That way, your prospects can be productive right away, and they'll be doing a favor as well for other prospects in the same situation by freeing an eval slot for another company (stated professionally, this type of statement will build value for your product).
b) if he or she simply can't get around to installing it, ask if the prospect can allocate another person to look it over. Work with that new person. If you're convinced your eval is going to sit on the shelf, ask the prospect to send it back. Convincing the prospect that you (and, by extension, other customers) consider your product to be a valuable item will assist in building the value you'll need to get in the door again. In addition, if your eval gathers dust on someone's shelf, it sends a signal to the entire prospect department that something must not have been up to snuff.
7) Don't call the enterprise while the eval process is underway. It's OK to get the rest of the prospect's department involved, but don't tell the whole corporate entity about it until the evaluation has turned into a sale. Here are a couple of problems that could occur should you broadcast it too early:
a) a Detroit associate of your Cleveland prospect calls to ask how the eval is coming... right when Cleveland's discovered a frustrating bug that only 1% of the customers ever see. Problem is, tech support hasn't gotten back to him yet, so Cleveland tells Detroit about the buggy software and lousy tech support. An hour later when the patch arrives, Detroit has already called your competitor for an eval of his product.
b) MIS in Philadelphia gets mad that Cleveland is trying to evaluate a solution without Philly's blessing! Result: eval on hold and Philly wants to make a point with Cleveland by forcing a competitive product on them ... and you lose the sale!
8) After the eval is successful, leverage it by calling every single same-company prospect in your database and telling the user story. These are people who, at one time, were interested. Maybe they'll have renewed interest when they find out someone at their company is using your product successfully!
OK, now you have a template for selling by evaluation that should improve your sales performance dramatically. This is what I teach in my inside sales courses, and it works. Give it a try, and let me know what you think.