December 7, 2024 | Read online
Helping elevate the people and profession of Sales by sharing authentic conversations, practical tips, expert advice, relevant tech and real-world lessons from my experience selling every day. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
Sorry, it’s been a minute.
For the past two months, I’ve been heads down rewriting all my training content so I could go back into the studio 2 weeks ago to rerecord everything.
This is all to prepare for the launch of my new membership site in Q1, which I’m super excited about.
Now that my part of the heavy lifting is done, I can get back to writing content for the newsletter and preparing for the New Year.
I wanted to share a few tips for this week's newsletter that will hopefully help you close out this year strong and start the new one with some momentum.
I also have a story about me getting sold to and the respect I have for this Sales rep’s game.
Let’s make it happen!
TACTICAL TIPS: A Sign Your Deal Will/Won’t Close by Year End
SALES RESOURCES: Prospecting Research in Seconds
SALES FROM THE STREETS: Respect the Game
TACTICAL TIPS:
A Sign Your Deal Will/Won’t Close by Year End
Year-end is always brutal in Sales.
When I worked at Xerox, I wouldn’t get credit for the sale until the copier was plugged in and made one copy so it could register in the system.
Some of these copy machines cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, so the commission on them was not insignificant.
That’s why, in both years I worked there, on December 31st at 11:55pm, I was in a dingy/dusty/dirty copier room with the implementation engineers, sleeves rolled up underneath or behind the copier, begging for it to start working so I could make a copy and collect my commission check.
I don’t miss those days, for more reasons than one (including my sense of style….)
Since then, I’ve learned a lot about not putting myself in that situation anymore.
That’s why I push hard at the beginning of the year and summer when everyone else tends to slow down, so the only stress at the end of the year for me isn’t about hitting my quota, it’s about by how much.
I’ve also learned some specific tactics that have helped along the way.
Here’s one of my favorite tips that I started doing a while ago to figure out which deals were actually going to close by the end of the year and which ones were in trouble.
It’s a version of my favorite nugget, the Summary Email, which I’ve shared with you before.
This time, though, it's a retroactive Summary Email.
The ideal scenario is that you’ve been using the Summary Email throughout the buying/selling process to ensure expectations are aligned while holding the client accountable.
If you’ve used it and the client has responded and confirmed it along the way,, you should feel pretty good about the opportunity at this point.
The reality is that most people don’t use it or take that approach, which is why we can use it retroactively right now.
The specific use case is for a client you haven’t talked to in over a week but think will close by the end of the year.
All you need to do is send them an email that goes something like this:
_________________
Hi,
Since our last conversation I’ve been reviewing all my notes and wanted to make sure we were on the same page. Could you let me know if this is still all accurate and if I missed anything?
- (brief line about their current situation and the problem they are trying to solve with your solution)
- (the impact of the problem on their business)
- (their decision criteria - prioritized)
- (timeline/go-live date)
- (next steps)
__________________
If you get a positive response to this email, you should feel great about it closing by the end of the year.
If you don’t get a response, I’d be a little worried and would start strategizing with your boss on ways to reconnect with them.
SALES RESOURCES:
Prospecting Research in Seconds
One of the other challenges about the end of the year in Sales is that even though the majority of our efforts are focused on closing deals, we still need to pay attention to building pipeline so we’re not starting from zero in the New Year.
To make things worse, prospecting is harder than ever right now.
The spray-an-pray, mass blast cadence days are over.
If we have any chance of cutting through the noise and getting someone to pay attention to us we need to be more personalized and relevant than ever with our approach and messaging.
That means we need to do more research on our prospects so we can understand their business and ideally develop a hypothesis or perspective on how we can help address some of their challenges or align with their priorities.
This type of research typically takes a lot of time….until now.
I’ve been working with someone to help develop GPTs to support my training like the 10k Analyzer and Buyer Persona GPT that I’ve shared with you before.
This time he created one to help research all aspects of a prospect including the company history, the services they offer, their revenue model and how they make money, competitors, company news, industry news and more.
It even gives you suggested messaging you can use in your outreach efforts.
Check out this SDR/BDR - Sales Research & Sales Message Generator and let me know what you think.
SALES FROM THE STREETS:
Respect the Game
One of my favorite training sessions is the one I do on negotiation.
I consider myself a pretty decent negotiator when it comes to people buying things from me.
However, when it comes to me buying things from others, I’m a total sucker.
This couldn't have been more evident than when I went to Vegas and got WORKED by a timeshare pitch and then wrote this blog about it.
I think it’s mainly because of my empathy for Sales reps.
As long as a sales rep isn’t a complete douche, I respect the game and want to see them win.
Well, it happened to me again this past weekend when I went to the Mall with my wife and daughter to do some Christmas shopping.
If you want to see Sales in one of its purest forms, pay attention to the Sales reps at the kiosks in the middle of the Mall.
Most of them aren’t great, but every once in a while, you come across a straight-up hustler who knows how to play the game, and we find one who did.
The kiosk was for bamboo pillows and bedding... not exactly something that was on my holiday shopping list.
The way he got our attention was brilliant. He had two small white Terriers sitting in their little doggie beds on the main shelf of the kiosk. The picture below isn't them, but this is exactly what they looked like.
Obviously, my daughter couldn’t resist. She ran up to pet them, and my wife was right behind her.
I was across the hall looking at something else, but as soon as I saw them with the dogs at the kiosk, I knew I was in trouble.
By the time I got there, the rep was already talking about the dogs and his family, where he was from, and something about leukemia that missed the details on.
He said his brother was the one who manufactured these sheets, which was why he could charge less than everyone else without the middleman involved.
He asked my wife enough questions to find out she was an Environmental Scientist and then went into how environmentally friendly these pillows and blankets were, including their sourcing and supply chain.
He was personable, funny, relatable, engaged with all three of us and wasn’t pushy at all.
He then took one of the pillows and put it in our hands so we could touch it and feel how supportive it was.
I reference this in my training when talking about Neuro Linguistic Programming and engaging all the different senses when selling - Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic.
After we responded positively, he literally took a pillow still in its packaging and put it in my wife’s hands without even asking.
He was smooth as shit.
Then came the upsell for the second pillow at a discounted price and a bundled offer if we wanted to add the sheets.
He was following the Sales playbook to a T and knew precisely what he was doing at every step of the process, but he made it seem so natural that it didn’t feel like we were getting sold even though I knew we were.
Needless to say, we walked away with two king-sized pillows and a king-sized set of sheets for the low price of $250.
Like I said, I respect the game, and that kid played it well.
By the way, does anyone need some pillows and sheets? I have a great deal for you 🙂
ADDITIONAL WAYS YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR SALES GAME
- The JB Sales Membership is where you’ll get access to my live training, workshops, AMAs and OnDemand catalog so you can level up your sales skills every day! 3000+ Sales pros have already joined. Are you next?
- The industry-leading Make it Happen Monday Podcast where you’ll get insights and inspiration from some of the most interesting and influential people in the world of Sales and business. (this is where you’ll hear the Guy Kawasaki episode on May XYZ)
- The JB Sales YouTube channel with practical tips that you can apply immediately to drive results along with interviews and content that is guaranteed to get you to think differently.
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