A lot of businesses are using sales processes that are inefficient and will make you hate your job.
It goes something like this:
- Pester as many random people via LinkedIn or email as possible.
- Feel small and oddly numb as you get more and more polite rejection (or downright rude responses telling you to go spam someone else).
- When you do eventually get a sales meeting booked in your calendar, you’re exhausted and not 100% present because of how much the prospecting has taken out of you, so you kind of fluff the call and are back to step 1!
This is a bad way of doing sales, obviously. I know because it’s what we used to do when we started Inonda.
I’m going to show you the seemingly simple shift we made to increase sales by 600% in under 12 months.
You can use the same tactic to make sales effective, enjoyable and mind blowingly easy compared to how you’ve been doing it.
Case in point, I just had a month off work because my second child was born. To be honest with you, I was chomping at the bit to get back into doing what I love: talking to customers who are keen to get expert help filling their calendar up with qualified sales meetings.
Why on Earth would I be excited to get back to sales of all things, I hear you ask?
Because in our second year of running a business, we made a one tweak to our sales process that completely changed the game.
When I started Inonda, Andy and I would find our own leads. We’d explain what we did, get people onto calls and talk to them. If they were interested, we’d send a proposal and get a contract signed.
It seemed like all was pretty good.
We were busy but doing alright. But skip to when we stopped doing things that way, and it turns out the way we’d been doing things was not ok at all. After we changed, company revenue blew up in a very good way. In 12 short months, we grew our revenue by 6X.
What had happened?
We brought on a business veteran at Inonda and we carefully listened to what he said we needed to do.
Instead of us each doing the whole sales process from beginning to end, we split it up. Andy would be doing all the prospecting and nurturing of leads, all the way up to booking meetings into the calendar. And then I would do nothing all day but sit down with people who are booked in for calls.
It seems like a simple shift, doesn’t it?
But when we did this, it felt like we’d switched sales to easy mode. I started converting way more sales conversations into excellent business partners. And Andy was able to focus on prospecting and nurturing to book appointments. He went deep and became quite frankly absurdly good at it.
Our rate of signed new business deals went through the roof, and we hadn’t added any new sales reps or anything. Same level of resources, six times the results. Mind. Blown.
This concept goes way deeper than this. At the right time for your company, you actually split the sales process into about seven steps:
- Prospecting
- Preparation
- Approach
- Presentation
- Handling objections
- Close
- Follow up
Try it out. I guarantee it’ll make things more effective and efficient. The easiest way to do it is to outsource one or both of these parts to separate teams or people.
I’d be remiss not to mention that we’re multi-award winning in our done-for-you lead gen offer: booking your calendar with sales calls with qualified prospects interested in talking to you. All you need to do each day is sit down at your desk, open your calendar, and turn up to calls with warm engaged prospects who know who you are, what you do and are actively interested in talking with you