~~The Introduction: An Introduction to Introductions or Lauren Valentine, You Mean There’s More to New York than the City?~~
Lauren Valentine was a former client of Sandler who fell into sales by accident and had no idea what she was doing. She’s an extroverted person who talked to anyone at networking events, but without a process, she found herself wasting a lot of time without prospects who weren’t capable or interested in doing business with her.
She spent two years in the Sales Mastery program and credits Sandler Training with all her success as a salesperson. She found, with a process, that she loved what she did, but wasn’t in love with her company. After her success through the Sandler System she decided to join the team and has spent the last two and a half years working with the process and the team who helped originally introduce her to the training.
Lauren spent some time looking over her sales numbers and realized that while she was hitting her goal of business she wanted to sell, she wasn’t earning what she wanted to be earning. She looked at two key pieces of the numbers: shortening the sales cycle and changing the payment model from installations to an upfront payment. To do this she began with the belief system that her cycle was too long and it was in her control to shorten it. She had to build up the foundational belief that instilled in her the ability to have confidence in her process.
She journaled regularly to reinforce the belief structure and used these behaviors of journaling to change her attitude in order to develop the mentality necessary in order to guarantee success in the process. By taking time to inventory what’s working and what’s not working, Lauren was able to establish what she wanted to change in her sales cycle. The sales cycle is the point from the initial contact with a prospect to ultimately closing the sale, the close being a yes or a no on doing business together. Very often sales cycles are prolonged because there’s no clear definition up front of what it takes for a client to get to a close.
~~The Conceptual: BATs of Getting Paid, Getting Paid Upfront, and Getting Paid More or You Mean I have to Plan?~~
From a behavior standpoint, a tactic to establish to success with change is journaling. It’s not easy to create a new habit and using a journal to establish what your attitude needs to be and what you need to focus on can help facilitate and focus what behaviors will modify your mindset.
For Lauren, the most important aspect, was creating a pre-call plan. Lauren found it next to impossible to close a sale in one meeting or shorten her process if she had not done a planning meeting to think through the upfront contract, the questions she needs to ask, what she’ll be asked, and what the ultimate goal that she’s working toward. For Lauren, to do a good job at planning and writing it at, she typically spends half the time of the meeting on the preplan. That means for an hour meeting she spends about 30 minutes working out what that meeting will look like. How much time do you waste on the backend because you have to schedule multiple meetings, or you have to follow-up with someone, or you missed something important that allowed the sale to fall cold?
Since the first meeting is an audition, everything we do to prepare for the role mandates more preparation than we currently spend on effort and investment into understanding and building a plan that helps facilitate a call to action for the prospect. For Lauren, in order to find success in cut down the time of her process, she needed to follow a consistent selling process. Without that process we can’t shorten it, because we have no way to figure out what’s working well, and what isn’t. As important as it is to follow a process, we also have to keep it moving, so using the Sandler process allows for a forward progression that naturally ends with the end result that you’re looking for.
People can get caught in the weeds of the details. Building a timeline of the coming meeting and determining what your progression through the conversation will look like allows you to line out the systematic approach to move you through a sales call efficiently and effectively. Without a plan you might find that you end up in good conversations without the result that you’re looking for. The plan can save you from getting into your car afterward and thinking, “oh I should have asked XYZ or I should have done that when they did this.”
If you shorten your sales cycles it helps you close more sales and leads you to getting paid more, but for Lauren, she’s also found success creating strategies around the budget steps that forced her out of her comfort zone. By engaging the upfront payment she developed a system through fostering and facilitating silence. People are able to say if they can pay upfront or if they need to break it into installments. By moving around the status quo financing options, Lauren was able to find the sort of success she wanted at the rate that she wanted it.
For Lauren, she realized it’s not just salespeople who don’t like silence, prospects don’t like silence either. Usually if she finds a silent moment then her prospects will generally start talking again and in the industry where we’re looking for more information than we anticipate giving then it’s important that we do not overindulge or pour out information.
The conversation about money is difficult because of how we’re culturally raised, but the conversation ahead of a proposal saves time and energy and can allow you to disqualify a prospect if they don’t have the necessary means to work with you. That conversation helps qualifying or disqualifying a prospect. There is a difference between what individuals hear and what you say; telling someone how much something costs can likely be heard as a quote. You should ask your prospect first about how much they’re willing to invest. If someone is interested in making a purchase, they’ve probably given some thought in advance about how much they can invest or how much they’re willing to stand. It’s important to clarify how much thought they’ve given to what sort of resources they would be willing to allocate out of their budget.
~~The Technical: Applying BAT to the Budge Step, or Literally…You Just Ask…Surprising?~~
Lauren mentions budget in the upfront contract. Saying something like, “If we uncover that there are some areas that we might be able to help you, and we’re both in agreement, then we’ll have a conversation with what those investments would look like as well as a conversation on what it would look like to get started.”
“Lauren, it sounds like some of the problems you’ve helped me uncover are issues that I’d like to get some help with, but I’m curious, what’s it going to cost me?”
“You know Jim, that’s a great question, and it probably would make sense for us to talk about the types of investments you’d have to be willing and able to make if we did decide to work together. You know, before we even talk about money, should we talk about the time investment that would be necessary if we decided to work together?”
“Sure”
“Most of our clients are typically engaged with us over a longer period of time. Most of our clients are spending a couple hours a week or a month on a year to three year period to work to make a lasting impact to these areas that we’ve identified that we’d like to make these changes in. So would you like to take a couple hours a week or a couple hours a month working on resolving these issues that we’ve identified today?”
“I can see investing the time it takes, I’m just having a hard time finding where I would get that much time, it seems like I’m late to every meeting as it is now.”
“Would it be helpful if maybe one of the things we worked on was having some greater structure around your sales process and figuring out some of those things that are happening in your week that happen to be time wasters, and helping you to be more effective at the behaviors that you are doing so you begin finding some additional time that you didn’t have before?”
“Yeah if that’s part of the services you offer I would certainly make time for that because I know that I’m not very efficient.”
“Okay. I think we can probably help you there because I know we have that structure, so I think we can probably find that two hours somewhere within your week.”
“Okay, good. So in addition to time…what else do you need from me?”
“Well there is a financial investment if we decide to work together and Jim, I want to ask you, have you given any consideration on how much you’d be willing to invest from a financial standpoint to address the areas that we’ve identified today?”
“You know I really haven’t. Frankly, we don’t spend anything on training now. We should be. I take my step to conferences and we see seminars every two years, but we don’t do anything on a regular basis.”
“Okay, would it be helpful if I gave you a ball-park idea of what most of our clients are spending, who’ve been in similar situations as you and maybe that would help you out?”
“No, that’d be very helpful.”
“Okay, well Jim, you know, based on what you’ve been telling me about your sales organization, it sounds like you’ve got some pretty aggressive growth goals here and you’re a little bit frustrated that your sales cycle is taking longer than you think it should be and your people are accepting a lot of think it overs. Or they’re putting a lot of quotes out there, but they’re never really getting a firm decision and they’re spending a lot of time following up on those and you’re thinking that it’s probably causing you upwards of a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue that you should be getting. Probably if we were to work together on these areas over a twelve month period, you’d be looking at somewhere around 20,000 dollars to address these areas. Does that seem reasonable to you?”
“I’m not sure reasonable is the word I would use, it sounds like a lot of money, but when you put it in terms of the money that I’m wasting it sounds like a little amount of money. I guess maybe it is reasonable. I’m not sure where I’d come up with it.”
“Okay, well Jim, most of our clients do pay us upfront.”
“Wow. That’s a lot to pay upfront. What if I don’t like it?”
“Well, I’ve yet to work with someone who didn’t like it or didn’t find it helpful, but I wouldn’t force you into a contract. I wouldn’t gain any benefit out of that. If three months in you find this wasn’t useful for you or your organization at this point we can terminate the contract.”
“Alright, well, not that I want to terminate the contract. I’m just skiddish. So what if I can’t see the way to find twenty thousand dollars?”
“Well, would it be helpful if we broke this into a few installments?”
“Yeah, over what period of time.”
“Well, maybe I’ll ask you Jim, you probably have a better handle on your cash-flow and your finances than I do. From a cashpoint standpoint if we were to break this into a couple of installments, what would you be comfortable with?”
“Well if I could make a quarterly payment that would probably work for me. I still need to find it, but based on what you’ve told me it sounds like you’re going to help me find the money.”
“Yes. So if we did a 25% deposit to start and then broke the other 3 into quarterly installments that would work for you?”
“Yeah, that’d be great.”
“Okay, then we can start.”
After the conversation regarding the budget step they should be ready to figure out what the immediate step to selling themselves should take place.
You should end it with:
“Is there anything else you need to see or hear from me at this point to feel confident at getting started or are you ready to pick a date and sign the contract here?”
Lauren took us through the process of the budget step and used pain by numbers by quantifying the cost of pain. Comparing 200,000 to 20,000 is looking at 10%. Through her process she walked through the one-call close and Lauren helps us imagine the payment plan before we’ve even signed the contract.