Ramp Up Your Sales Call Mojo

Get in the right flow and make your prospect go from hello to lets go!

Author

Tim Kilroy
26 Feb • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

In Today's Missive:

A Sales Call Flow

You’ve probably seen people selling “sales call scripts” and all of that jazz. Even if those “scripts” ever work, they aren’t truly representative of you and your agency. So I want to give you a way to think about your sales calls.

The goal of a sales call isn’t to convince or pressure anyone into anything. The goal of a sales call is to systematically get more information from a prospect, and show them how your skills, services, way of thinking and attitudes make you a strong fit to solve the challenges they face. And you should never, ever move to the next stage of the call until it’s clear that you have accomplished the mission of the stage you are in…

Let’s start with the start of the call…

1. Building Rapport

This is a needed step - being warm and inviting makes it easier for the other side to engage with fewer reservations. Don’t over do it though - any more than establishing a baseline of “I am a decent human being/you are a decent human being therefore we can converse…” is asking for a level of trust and intimacy you haven’t earned yet. Keep the war stories and chats about your dog for later. This shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. The signal that you’ve created rapport is that you now know what your prospect looks like when they genuinely smile, and they know what you look like when you genuinely smile. Hit that mark and you are off to the next step!

2. Establishing Agenda/Issues To Be Covered

This is where you can establish some ownership of the meeting - but basically let them know what to expect in the next 30 minutes. (It’s especially good if you’ve already put the agenda in the meeting invite…). Ask your prospect if there is anything that they want to add to the discussion or issues they aren’t ready to speak about yet. Once you have mutual agreement, you’ve actually just completed your first “trial close”. So you can move ahead.

3. Discovery

As agency leaders, we are often so in love with what we do that we want to blab about it all the time. Don’t do that here. Discovery is about you understanding the prospect. You need to know ALL of the things that you need to know about the prospect in order for you to assess:

  • Can we help them with a meaningful problem?

  • Will they be able to understand the value we deliver?

  • Can we create a business relationship that is fair to both sides?

  • Can our approaches and cultures mesh well enough to become partners?

Some of the things you need to know are revenue, team size, problems they face, what benefit does a solution to their issues represent, how do they measure the impact of the problem and the solution, is this a truly meaningful problem for the prospect and do they understand the benefit of a solution, are you compatible in terms of sophistication, are you compatible in terms of budget, are you compatible in terms of timelines and expectations, are you compatible in terms of communication styles? Etc.

Don’t ask things like “What’s your big why?” or “What keeps you up at night?”. This is about business issues that they can’t solve. Sales isn’t therapy. But once you have all the details you need, you can move to the next step.

4. Restatement & Understanding

After you’ve uncovered all of the issues that are relevant to the intersection of your prospect and your service, you 100% need to restate the problems and get the prospect to agree that you understand them AND that you are able to prioritize them appropriately. The only way to do that is to prioritize them based on your assessment of the impact of a solution, and then re-articulate them to the client. Then you have to ask, explicitly, if that is a good understanding and priority list. The prospect HAS TO SAY YES, or you can’t move past this step. If they add nuance or help you understand something more deeply, ingest that and then restate it to them again. Once they say yes, you may move ahead. (And BTW, you just took a HUGE step towards closing a deal…)

5. Systematic Solutions and Stories

In this phase, you are going to take each issue that the client has and explain how you’d go about solving the problem, and tell a story about how you solved a similar problem and what the results of that solution were.

This does require some thinking on your feet, but you absolutely can walks through your service offerings, tie each service or approach to a problem to a prospect challenge and share some proof that you have experience, insight and success solving it.

It is crucial that you own the conversation at this point and guide your prospect through your ability to solve those problems backed up by stories - they don’t need to be case studies slides, just stories that you tell.

You can leave this section when you ask your prospect if they understood how you might be able to help them solve their issues. If you have any chance of closing a deal, they are going to say yes…and ask questions, throw some challenges at you…how you field those is critical. You can move to the next step when they prospect tells you that they understand your approach and agree that it has efficacy.

6. Next Steps

It is rarely helpful to have an offer ready to go during a discovery meeting. You are in the process of discovery, not closing. So at this point, you have to be bold and make your biggest “trial close” yet and ask “What are the next steps? Tell me how you make partnership decisions and where you are in your decision making process.” This is scary because you’ve basically asked them for a grade - if you got an A, they will tell you and you will then set up next steps. If you didn’t make the grade, there will be some pleasantries about “getting back to you” or something.

But you have to push more next steps - proactively offer a follow up meeting, or additional information, like case studies, or research into a problem they have. The clear definition of next steps and the decision to take them is all that you want from a discovery call. You aren’t going to close a deal during discovery, but you sure can lose one….

Want Some More Sales Ideas?

You can find some sales posts on my blog, some previous Agency Inner Circle posts, and some books that I think really grab the right way to sell:

And if you are interested in improving your sales process or getting out of the sales process entirely, book a meeting to chat about Founder Free Selling….

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