David Sandler famously said:
“If you don’t have a process for selling you’re at the mercy of your buyer’s process for buying.”
One of the biggest challenges startups selling to the enterprise have is keeping control and momentum through the sales process.
As a startup, when we're selling our new product, knowing our sales process is crucial to landing your next customer.
Why?
Because your prospects don’t know how to buy our thing.
They’ve never bought anything like it before. They know how to order new laptops and renew their CRM subscription. But they don’t know how to buy YOUR product.
Most startups sell products that replace spreadsheets… or manual processes… or Sharepoint… some antiquated system that was installed around the same time as Windows NT…
That means that it’s our job as sellers to lead our prospects through the sale, and that starts with the next call.
Remember that your prospects want to be led. This is your opportunity to take control of the sale.
This daily dose shows you a framework I developed years ago that works a charm every time, in every sales call.
Yes, really.
It’s called Confirm-Ask-Explore.
Confirm: Start every call recapping the last conversation or new developments that have come up since the last call. Then confirm the purpose and intended outcome of the meeting.
Ask: This is the centerpiece of your meeting — discover new information by asking questions. Showing your product and asking the prospect how they could see themselves using it – how it solves the problems and helps them achieve their business objectives. Ask about their key objectives and priorities.
Explore: Always leave time to talk about next steps — the next meeting with whom and when, how they'll share that sample data file and who’s responsible for getting it to you, and who else should be involved in the process going forward.
Leave every meeting with clear next steps - a mutual action plan.
Follow this structure and you’ll nail every sale call every time. Yes, really.
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BTW… If you want some help building more structure and repeatability into your startup’s sales process, I’d like to help.
Next week, I’m running a FREE Sales Masterclass for B2B startup founders & CEOs.
I’ll teach the core frameworks and systems that every B@B startup needs to implement to achieve a repeatable, scalable sales process.
Plus, we’ll do a diagnostic of your startup’s sales process so that you can see exactly where to focus on building repeatable systems in the next 3 months.
Here’s the link to our next Sale Masterclass: https://www.salesqualia.com/masterclass
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