Do you ever wonder why you have a lot of “great prospects in the funnel,” but not a lot of closed sales? It could be because you don’t have a clear understanding of the sales process, and how to use it to move the right opportunities forward and weed out the rest.
This 16 minute video sketches out the five steps in the sales process that I learned from Skip Miller, a past client who wrote ProActive Selling. Really understanding this framework totally shifted my feeling about selling, and led to a great increase in clients and profits.
Get a handle on the sales process — and close more business from Pamela Slim on Vimeo.
Referenced in my talk:
5 ways to calculate the value you provide with your services
Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and Snap Selling.
I would love your feedback and comments on this framework, and suggestions for how to make us all more confident, capable and successful salespeople.
Building a community is great. Creating great content is wonderful. Building a great community by creating great content while closing sales of very valuable products and services is nirvana.
Very informative video.
These are very helpful tips and advices.
Thanks for sharing.
agreed – listen listen listen and then provide various alternatives of how you can help.
Helpful video Pam. Thanks! I do think the strategy of letting the prospective client do more of the talking is a good approach since it helps to flush out the ways in which you can provide value to them. It also is an approach I would feel more comfortable with as “hard selling” is not something I feel comfortable with either.
[…] Or watch it on Pam’s site here. […]
This is amazing and makes everything seem so clear! I’ve been aganozing over gow to proceed after a meeting yesterday, and this has put everything in perspective. Thank you, as usual.
At the end of the video you talked about what to do with people waffling about making the decision to buy, and that you should go back to previous steps and try things. Why not ask the potential client directly about what they need to make it happen or what’s blocking them from making a decision? Does that kind of directness scare them off or something?
Thank you very much for the instruction video. Exactly what I need at this point in time. Making a sell about services instead of product has been a slippery slop. The 5-step approach puts it all into doable bits.
I thought the presentation was very clear and coherent. I loved that you stressed qualifying a client at the beginning (and not being afraid to let them go if they aren’t a good fit) and possibly at the end if they are “a maybe” and you can’t get them to budge. Once you have someone who is willing to talk to you, it can be so hard to walk away – but you have to realize that the wrong prospect can be a giant time-suck and your time is better off spent on some other prospect. Or project.
This was incredibly helpful for me. I can now see that I’ve been trying to cram the first four phases all into “justify,” because I’ve been letting my prospects drive the sales bus. Sometimes after a 2 minute conversation, or a vague 3 line email, they’re already asking for an estimate and proposal. These types of proposals are the ones that seem to spin out in “maybe-land” forever.
After seeing this, I feel a lot better about putting on the breaks and really making sure that I’m not skipping steps in the sales process. Thanks so much!
This was an amazing instructional video Pam! Definitely getting the book. I especially loved the script example you gave at the end. I would love to learn more about the initiating process because it almost seems like you have to do a bit of work before you make the first call or send the first email even if it’s just to boost your confidence. My only question is when/how do you ask for a referral or to speak to someone else in say another department if your initial prospect says no?
I appreciate the tip Stanley — I don’t know how much additional production I want to add to general posts like this (it is often all I can do to get it done and posted!), but I can certainly take the other piece off the board to have more room to write if I do something like this in the future.
Making a display graphic of the flow-chart for a few seconds per transition may help more (I’ve noticed the board has limited space for the legibility).