We spend a lot of time researching prospects, qualifying them, reaching out and demonstrating that we can help them solve their problems.
But if you’ve been selling any length of time, you know that the time between the demonstration of what you sell and getting buyer commitment is where many sales are lost. Prospects don’t return calls, emails, or social media messages, or they do – only to say they’re still considering whether to do business with you.
To help us understand how the best salespeople are systemizing how they ensure deals aren’t lost between the demonstration and the sale, we sat down with Brandon Bornancin, CEO of Seamless.ai. He shared with us the same system he coaches his sales team through to ensure they’re increasing their chances of doing business with the prospects they meet with.
Since 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: Brandon recommends triggering this system when you’re preparing for discovery with your prospect. You need to develop a list of the common reasons that you’ve had deals held up in the past so that you can ensure you bring those questions (and some potential answers) into your sales demonstrations. Some questions that have held up deals:
Besides yourself, who else will be evaluating/reviewing this decision?
What are their typical questions?
What do they need to see to say yes?
Why have they said no in the past?
What have they said before about products/services like this in the past?
R – Repeatable: Once we’ve mapped out what’s stalled deals or caused them to be lost after the demonstration, Brandon says some repeatable steps to follow are to map out your introduction, discovery, and presentation instead of trying to remember what worked last time.
Then, work out how you’re going to ask for your next step – whether it’s a proposal, accepting payment, etc. – and what possible responses you could get from your prospect. Map out how you’ll investigate or respond to those potential responses ahead of time so you’re not trying to innovate solutions in a high-stress, high-stakes environment.
I – Improvable: To improve this system, Brandon says it’s critical to track the responses you’re getting during and after your sales demonstrations. Until we’re closing 100%, there’s something we can do to take what we’re learning from our responses and change how we’re qualifying prospects, running our demonstrations, and converting business.
A simple way to improve using data is to record who is taking the next step and who isn’t in a way you can see at-a-glance. That will reveal information you can use to ensure demonstrations lead to better results.
Another way to improve is to examine the reasons you’re being shut down and develop new responses or turnarounds to try in future calls.
M – Measurable: To measure the effectiveness of a system that ensures deals move from the demonstration to conversion, Brandon says we need to first track average interactions with prospects who go from initial contact, through our demonstration and become clients. With that average, we’ll then know with this system if we’re getting better results by mapping our prospect responses and developing better responses.
Another thing to measure is how many times prospects push your deals forward by saying, ‘We can’t do business now, but reach out in X weeks/months’. With a tighter process for moving from demonstration to closed business, we should see a decrease in the number of deals that prospects push forward.
Brandon has opened a special offer for readers of Bulletproof Selling who want to try the service his company offers – seamless.ai – by going to seamless.ai and using the code ‘Bulletproof’ and receiving $500 in user credits.