Salespeople around the world are trying to shorten their sales cycles and sell more quickly. You’ve likely tried all the tricks they do: software, auto-dialers, and email blasts.
To truly sell more quickly, we need to stop focusing on how to save ourselves time as salespeople. Instead, according to Joe Malmuth, we should focus on how to save our prospects time.
Joe is an industry with a long sales cycle, so he and his team are focused on always finding ways to save their prospects time as they consider whether what he sells is the right fit. This benefits the prospect, but also benefits the salespeople as they qualify prospects faster and engenders trust as prospects learn you won’t waste their time.
Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: Salespeople need to first understand what their prospects are trying to create more time for. That will change depending on the prospect’s age, career path, job title and responsibilities. That means researching before conducting outreach to get an idea about your prospect’s priorities and then confirming or updating those once you get into a conversation.
R – Repeatable: To discover what our prospect is creating more time for, we need to understand it may take more than one conversation to drill deep enough, especially for high-ticket sales. Joe says that means laying out the road map for your prospects. Map out your customer journey and share it with your prospect by saying, “First, we’re going to do this. From there, we’ll decide if that is appropriate, and if so, they we’ll do that.”
This ensures your prospect knows what to expect along the way and allows you to show them you’re competent enough to guide them through the sale and begin saving them time before they’ve even become a customer.
I – Improvable: To improve the way you save your prospects time, Joe recommends looking at the sales cycle you currently walk prospect through and ask, “Where can I save my prospect some time here? What could I say or what resource could I provide that would shorten the prospect’s time in my pipeline, and my sales cycle?”
M – Measurable: To measure the time you’re saving prospects, start with new prospects and then move to current customers. For new prospects, measure how long it takes from any inquiry to the time a salesperson contacts them. Save them time waiting and watch how fast trust is built. For current customers, ask how you could have saved them time through their sales process. What information or materials did they need that it took you/your company time to deliver?
By consistently examining where you can create more time for your prospects, you can build trust faster and focus on serving them – and your sales!