These are at best challenging economic times! When I think about the pace of change, demanding customers and increasing competition, I think sometimes it is easier to find Waldo than it is to find new business. Add to that the expanding regulations and threat of changes (up or down) with interest rates, it can be even more difficult to get our prospects to make a decision and to actually get them to close the deal.

There is so much that can impact our ability to bring in new business which is out of our control, but that still does not change the fact that we have goals to meet, business that needs to get done, and bottom lines that need to be built. Despite all of the economic challenges and uncertainty we are facing these days, I still do believe this is one of the best times to grow your business and bring on new clients. You just need to understand this new economy, and understand what it takes in today’s highly competitive market to open more doors and close more sales!

First you need to understand this economy is not up or down– it is different, radically changed. This is an economy where the consumer, your prospect, is in control. They believe they can buy anything they want whenever they want, wherever they want and from whomever they want. That makes what we sell, what we offer, no matter how amazing or different we think it is, to the average prospect it has become a commodity. When our products and services become a commodity, it is not what we sell, but how we sell it that makes the difference. It is the how we do things that gives us our competitive advantage.

So how do we sell in this economy? How do we open more doors and close more sales? Here are three strategies you need in this economy to turn more of your prospects into your long-term customers.

3 Strategies To Turn A Prospect Into A Customer

#1: New Sales Funnel

First you need to understand that today’s sale cycle is dramatically different, the sales funnel has changed from an actual funnel to work more like an hour glass. In years past our sales strategy was to call aggressively on prospects until we got them to buy one product or service, and then we declared them a customer and moved on to the next prospect.

In today’s economy moving too aggressively will push prospects away, and not staying actively involved once they become a customer will send them to your competition. So the sales funnel you need to work today is different and the actions you take unique. It starts with relationship building and pulling the prospect into wanting to get to know you. Remember the only thing differentiating you from your competition is your ability to get the prospect to know, like and trust you, and to do that you need to give the relationship time to build and grow.

Once the prospect decides to buy a product or service with you, you need to understand this is your moment to shine. The prospect has moves in the neck of our new sales funnel and they are “trying you out”, giving you a shot to win their long-term business. The first experience your prospect has with you will determine if this is a one-time transaction or a long-term relationship. If you do it right, if you deliver an amazing experience, your customer/prospect will slip into the base of the funnel. And the base of the funnel is where trust is built and the selling process begins.

In today’s economy, once customers trust you, they are ready to buy from you and they are ready for you to aggressively sell. With the relationship built, customers expect you to proactively suggest products and services.

#2: Invest Before You Ask

In today’s economy is not what the prospect can do for you, but what you can do for your prospect. When it comes to sales we hear so much “me” language, and we learn so many skills about how the customers can help us achieve our goals. To sell today you need to slow the sales process down, invest the time to really listen to the customer and hear what is important to them and what they need. Doing that accomplishes two things, first it tells the customer you care, you are interested and that this relationship will always be more about them than it is about you. Second, it gives you the exact information you need to actually sell the customer. If you listen to the customer, invest in them, they will tell you exactly what they want and need. All you have to do is take action.

#3: Follow-up & Follow Thru

The chances that you are going to call on a prospect at the exact time they need your product or service are slim to none. So if you want to turn more prospects into customers you need to follow-up and follow-thru. In other words you need to stay in the game. The goal with sales is to again build the relationship, but then continue to add value to it in a way that ensures you are the person your prospects think of when they are ready to buy!

So yes, these are challenging economic times, but it does not mean it is not a great time to grow your business. If you understand this new economy, understand how your prospects and customers have changed, and follow these three strategies then you will open more doors and close more sales. Remember, it is not what you sell, but how you sell it that is going to turn your prospects into customers.

Most everyone has heard the expression that patience is a virtue. Through the years when someone asks me to describe the major difference between A Players (superior) and B/C Players (average) salespeople in one word, my response: Patience.

Mistakes sellers make stem from their impatience

Once goals or problems are shared, many sellers immediately try to rescue buyers by telling them the solution, a phenomenon I call “premature elaboration.” Sellers are well intentioned but there are two problems in jumping to the rescue:

• Sellers are shooting blind because they have no way of knowing if their generic “solution” will address a buyer’s needs.
• Buyers aren’t ready to be rescued until they and the seller calling on them understand the shortcomings of how things are done without the offering being discussed.

Taking a step back, if buyers knew why desired business outcomes couldn’t be achieved they would try to address them without help from salespeople. The “hurt” amounts to asking questions to help buyers understand what’s broken in the way they currently operate.

Still, B/C Players often get into premature product discussions. Once product is mentioned, many buyers will ask: “How much does it cost?” This often begins a death spiral because if no value has been identified, any cost will seem high.

I believe there are a several reasons sellers dive into product too soon:

• Their companies provide extensive product training.
• Many sellers and vendors believe part of a seller’s job is educating buyers (even though few executive buyers want to learn all about offerings).
• Talking about offerings is a comfort zone for salespeople.
• Asking relevant questions and responding to buyers’ answers is challenging.

Sellers should earn the right to talk about offerings by having buyers conclude early in sales calls that they are sincere and competent. In order to avoid boiling the ocean it would be helpful for sellers to go into calls with a menu of business outcomes that are relevant to the title they are calling on and can be achieved through the use of their offering. Sharing title-specific Success Stories and asking some probing questions are ways to have sellers share business goals.

Having buyers share a business goal is a watershed event. Both seller and buyer now understand a desired outcome. Once again, however, patience is necessary. Many B/C Players dive right into their offerings. The downside of doing that is that it will be a “spray and pray” exercise without knowing a buyer’s requirements. “A” Players begin asking diagnostic questions to understand why the buyer can’t achieve the desired outcome.

After doing so, they can present only the features/capabilities of their offerings that are likely to be relevant to the buyer.

One further caveat: Sellers should uncover areas that are broken that can be addressed by capabilities within their offerings.

Having the patience to ask relevant diagnostic questions allows sellers to:

• Understand the buyer’s situation before discussing their offerings.
• Share only those capabilities that address barriers to achieving the desired outcome so that they share specific rather than generic solutions.
• Help buyers quantify the potential value of achieving the goal being discussed by finding out how much problems cost buyers that are uncovered.

Being patient can be especially difficult for experienced sellers. They’ve had these conversations several times before and therefore see “solutions” long before buyers do. Understanding it’s the first time through for buyers can allow sellers to do thorough diagnoses (hurts) before earning the right to present solutions (rescues). Buyers want to know how things are broken, the specific capabilities they need to address them and the value of fixing them.

Ben Franklin said: People are best convinced by reasons they themselves discover. As it relates to selling, I would tack onto Franklin’s phrase: “and by answering relevant questions posed by patient salespeople.”

Patience in earning the right to discuss a seller’s offering should provide superior buying experiences for Key Players and result in more closes.

It’s not one thing. There’s no Hail Mary pass or silver bullet that will vault you from an average salesperson into a mind blowing success with results that stagger the imagination.

But these 20 things worked for me. And they will work for you if you give them an honest try.

1. Take a long term view of the client. Don’t treat them as short term cash generators. Focusing on the next 30 days forces you on the client and creates product flogging behavior. An approach with little longevity.
2. Sell on value not cheap prices. Clients want value at reasonable prices. If you can’t sell value get out of sales!
3. Sell the client relationship. Engage with no end point in sight but rather a series of value exchanges that benefits both the seller and the buyer.
4. Buyers rely less on sales for information they need to make purchase decisions. They do much of the research themselves. Enable them to do it better. Don’t fight it.
5. Take a punch when you screw up (and you will). It’s not about the mistake. It’s about how you recover. Fix it and SURPRISE the client with what they don’t expect.
6. Offer someone else’s solution when you don’t have one. An amazing relationship building act is losing the sale!
7. Don’t let tactics drive you. Know your organization’s strategy intimately and let it determine your priorities.
8. Know more about your client’s business than they do.
9. Voraciously learn new stuff. Build learning into your personal brand.
10. Muzzle your ego when things don’t go your way.
11. Engage with the client, don’t pitch at them.
12. Be the champion for you’re on the inside of your organization.
13. Discover client “secrets” ; needs are not enough. If you know something intimate that no one else does, you have the advantage.
14. Have a personal audacious growth goal with no idea on how to achieve it; keep it in front of you.
15. Let logic set your destination; let your feelings determine how to get you there. There is no right way to achieve anything, it’s a matter of what works with people and their emotions.
16. Listen and shut up. The best salespeople I know listen better than anyone else.
17. Take notes, copious amounts of notes when engaging with a client. It shows you think what they are saying is important.
18. Constantly ask the client for feedback on your performance and LISTEN.
19. Honor your marketing team for their support. They supply the arrows for your quiver.
20. Have a “serving” mindset. You are there to serve your client, not sell them. If you serve them faithfully, they will buy.

Not rocket science, but then nothing that works really well in a profession dealing with people ever is.

So you have closed that sale… Congratulations are in order!!! So you may be asking yourself, now what do I do? Is that it? Is there more? Well this is a tricky question, because it really depends on what your ultimate goals are and what type of product you are selling. If the product is a one-time sale, or if you think it is only a one-time sale, you may be inclined to say thank you and move on to the next prospect. But in my experience, this is a mistake and it could prove very costly to you in the long run. But if the product you have just sold is something that is more than just a single component to your company’s catalog, then you have a lot more work to do. You now have an enormous potential to make many more sales. But, and this is a big BUT, the first most important threshold has been crossed. You have earned the customer’s trust enough so that they have made that first purchase.

In order to continue to make sales, you have to continue to keep that customer’s trust. How do I do this, you may ask? Well it is pretty simple really. You have to continue to build on the relationship you have started with the customer. And even if the product is just the one, you should keep building on that relationship because you never know about the future. Here is a personal example: I began my sales career back in 1990 in the water conservation industry. I made many sales to many different people in the same industry of water conservation. I was at this company for three years before I moved on to another company in the energy industry. So here is what I am trying to say. Many of the customers that I sold to at my first company, I was able to bring over to my new company and re-sell them. Given that the product I now sell is something that they buy each month, some of the clients that I moved have now been with me for 20 years! 20 years! Think about that for a minute. These clients that have been with me for that long I now consider friends. We are now at that point… where when we speak on the phone, we rarely even discuss business. It’s now mostly how’s the wife and the kids and things like that.

Here is the secret to this long term success, they became my friends, or more importantly, I treated them as if they were my friends. From the very beginning because
when they gave me their trust and chose to work with me at my company, they became people that were now my friends. They could have chosen another company or another salesman to work with, but they chose me, because they trusted me and what I was saying to them. They believed that I was being honest and straightforward with them, and that I wasn’t just looking at them as a paycheck.

So in conclusion, it is my opinion that when you make it more of a personal issue with your prospects, when you treat them as if they were your friends, you will be more successful. In this world today where you are being assaulted constantly by scamsters and shysters all trying to get you to sign on the dotted line, or even worse to steal your identity, a little trust can go a long way.

Account-based sales development (ABSD) is a sales strategy that is growing rapidly in both adoption and best practice creation. According to TOPO, 30% of all sales development teams are implementing ABSD and that number is growing steadily. Having refined our own account-based prospecting techniques over the past 15 years, we have found that one fact above all has become overwhelmingly true for our own process as well as the sales processes of our clients.

What is it? You must develop and lay the foundation of your account-based sales development strategy first and then choose the best technology to complement that strategy second. So, with that being said, we’re assuming that if you’re reading this article, you’ve nailed down the basics of your sales strategy. If you haven’t don’t panic, we created a playbook with PersistIQ that may interest you. Check it out here to help get you and your team set up for ABSD. Otherwise, keep reading if you’re interested in learning about some of the tools that will help you best execute on your account-based prospecting strategy.

Hone in on your target accounts with data-driven insights

As part of your account-based strategy, you should have more than just an idea of what your ideal client profile looks like and the type of companies that would be a great fit for your offering. At this stage in the game, you should be focused on obtaining the best contact data to fill these target accounts and kick off your prospecting with your best forward.

Data management and enrichment technology is crucial at this stage in the game. It’s necessary that you find a solution that can help you to build your database, cleanse or append existing datasets, and gather important business and marketing intelligence. QuotaFactory makes this a priority so within the platform we have chosen to use InsideView’s API to combine prospecting, sales and marketing intelligence, and data management best practices into one technology.

To supplement the data and business insights gleaned from data providers such as InsideView, LinkedIn is a fountain of useful and up-to-date information to complement your existing data. Use your LinkedIn network or LinkedIn Navigator to find decision makers within an organization, build relationships, uncover relevant speaking points, and stay current in company and industry updates.

Personalize your prospecting emails at scale

Prospecting into target accounts requires a higher level of customization than contact-based or spray-and-pray models of business development. A common objection here is time management. How can you possibly personalize every single individual email being sent to your top 250 target accounts within a reasonable amount of time? To accomplish this, it’s important to have a technology that supports this endeavor. That’s where tools such as Persist IQ’s cold email generator come in. SDRs can develop cold outbound campaigns containing multiple touch points at scale.

When adopting an account-based sales development strategy, communication can be customized by segmenting your accounts and subsequent contacts into buckets based on specific criteria. Create industry-specific messaging, or messaging that addresses the pain points of individual job titles that you are prospecting. It doesn’t have to be as time consuming as individual personalized emails (though customization on individual contact emails are always welcome). Additionally, providing your reps with competitive technology that provides insight into prospect’s technology stack such as HG Data’s installed technology tool allows SDRs to personalize their messaging based on their prospect’s unique business environments.

There are many other tools that can assist in your efforts to provide customized emails at scale to your target accounts. Free tools such as the hemingway editor or tone analyzer can aid in perfecting the flow and tone of your messaging. And to give you a jump start, take a look at our 10 best sales email templates to revolutionize your sales messaging.

Combine dialing technology, proven methodology, and best-in-class analytics

Once your database has been populated with accurate data and your messaging has been customized at scale, it’s time to implement robust prospecting technology. Your reps need access to automated preview dialing technology, automated prospecting workflows, and task campaigns to stay focused on what they’re being paid to do, sell.

According to The Bridge Group, automated dialing software enables reps to have 30% more conversations daily, a must-have for sales development reps who rely on the phone and their inherent sales skills as their number one prospecting tool. Also, empowering SDRs with automatic daily schedules created for them based on the metrics their sales managers require allows for less time spent on manual administrative tasks, and more time focusing on selling. An all-inclusive platform such as QuotaFactory’s Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) platform combines these functions to provide greater visibility into the sales process, initiate a higher level of SDR accountability and create a more accurate forecast.

Once your reps have access to the right tools to do their job, the issue that many managers face – transparency into the sales development function – can be addressed. Help your sales managers take back SDR accountability with a technology such as Ambition which allows them to track and measure SDR performance over time and improve SDR productivity through SPIF and Fantasy Football-style competitions and leaderboards.

Keep your sales opportunities organized in a CRM

After your sales development reps have qualified an account, have them move the account from their prospect relationship management platform to an opportunity within their CRM. Having a universal process in your sales function is so important in maintaining organization for your team. Find a CRM that fits your sales process and helps organize and enable reps to push those opportunities to closed deals. It is essential to make sure that the flow of prospect information from your marketing automation tool, to your prospect relationship management platform, all the way to your CRM uses the same information fields to ensure that you’re capturing, viewing, and translating all of the correct information throughout the sales process.

Truly connect the sales and marketing functions via sales development

Finally, marketing, sales, and sales development leaders need a way to tie their departments together and truly align their efforts to drive net new business. That’s where technology partners such as Bedrock Data are needed in order to seamlessly tie department systems together in order to push and pull data to all of the right places. This ensures that both sales and marketing functions will be working with the same data sets, gives each team visibility into contact and company information, along with aiding in overall reporting which is one of the most important factors.

Overall, a rockstar account-based sales development strategy requires a very specific and highly-specialized tool set in order to set your team and your managers up for success. No matter what vendors you choose, your tech stack should include a dialer, data, data appending and cleansing, email workflows, tools for organization, and a technology that strives to keep productivity and motivation at an all-time high. An account-based strategy works best when everyone on your team and across departments are involved, to generate an account-based everything approach. What technologies will you be adding to your account-based sales stack this year?

The relationships formed between salespeople and their managers is vitally important for businesses in the modern world. A good relationship can have a positive impact upon performance and job satisfaction rates, while a poor relationship can have the opposite effect. For this reason, sales managers training often places an emphasis on fostering a strong relationship with subordinates.

When it comes to developing a positive relationship, there are a number of important components, including the existence of common goals and mutual respect. However, one of the most important components is trust. So why exactly is trust so important to sales managers and how can trust levels be increased?

What Is ‘Trust’?

Trust can seem like an abstract concept, vaguely linked with ideas of belief and faith. However, in a study published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, authors Karen E. Flaherty and James M. Pappas state that the concept of trust can be viewed as having two main components:

• Credibility – The extent to which a person can be relied upon and believed.
• Benevolence – The extent to which a person cares about the well-being of another.

It is often based on ideas of ‘truth and ‘honesty’ and broadly refers to the level of confidence one person has in another. When people have established a level of trust in their relationship, they are more likely to engage in effective cooperative behaviour and are less likely to enter into conflicts.

The Importance of Trust to Sales Managers

Having the trust of subordinates is especially important to those in sales manager positions, as it can lead to a number of key benefits. For example, a report published by the Great Place To Work Institute found that companies whose employees report high levels of trust also experience far lower staff turnover rates. This, in turn, reduces recruitment and sales training costs, while achieving greater consistency of performance.

Trust between sales managers and salespeople can help to increase employee commitment to an organisation, which can also improve performance. The presence of trust can also enhance the quality of staff learning, promote creativity, encourage collaboration, build confidence and influence decision making in a positive way.

Without trust, people assume self-protective, defensive postures that inhibit learning and performance

Lou Solomon
Communications coach and the CEO of Interact.

Through establishing trust, a sales manager can elevate themselves to role model status, which can help them to positively influence employee behaviour. Moreover, when a sales team has trust in its own members, it is more likely to inspire trust in customers; something which is vital for improving customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Building Trust As a Sales Manager

In terms of actually building trust, a sales manager needs to possess strong communication and listening skills. Authentic communication is key, so managers need to be open to feedback and able to inspire confidence through what they say. It is also important to be transparent, so that staff members do not feel as though they are being left in the dark, or as though they are being manipulated in some way.

Consistency is essential, as few things shatter trust quite like mixed messages, hypocrisy or false promises. Meanwhile, sales managers need to also accept the responsibility that comes with their position. This includes taking responsibility for shaping the sales culture, but also taking responsibility for any failures.

Finally, according to Colleen Stanley, the author of the book Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success, personal competence of sales managers is paramount.

A key role for sales managers is training and coaching. If you can’t demonstrate high level selling skills, a salesperson isn’t going to ask you for advice. Competent sales managers earn trust and develop sales teams that are open to following their advice and guidance.