Hacking Sales. Altschuler Max
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Название: Hacking Sales
Автор: Altschuler Max
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Зарубежная образовательная литература
isbn: 9781119281672
isbn:
A lot of books claim to have all of the answers, which is, of course, impossible. In the end, all companies are made differently. Different variables such as industry, country, deal size, deal cycle, and target buyers affect outcomes greatly.
While I don't promise to serve you the answers on a silver platter, I will put you on the path to find them for yourself. I'll talk about problems and solutions as generally as possible; just understand that parts of the process vary greatly for different companies. The timing of sending out e-mails and other communications that I explain later in this book may be drastically different from what yours should be, for many reasons. There are so many variables at play. Take this book as a guide, but don't blindly follow it. Always test and optimize suggestions to find what's right for you.
Most of the book will focus on outbound sales. However, much of the advice will work for inbound sales as well; for example, segmenting, messaging, and lead research are relevant to both.
Regardless of how many inbound leads you have, you should be doing some level of outbound selling. Always be on the hunt. If your inbound leads are good, you'll have cash to pay the base salary for an outbound seller. If people come to you and want your services, others who haven't found you may show the same interest. Go upstream, aim high, and go get them!
Visit www.SalesHacker.com/library for more resources and bonus material on each section in this book.
CHAPTER 1
DEVELOPING YOUR SALES STACK
The Sales Stack is the technology you use throughout the sales process to engage potential buyers and to facilitate them at each stage of your pipeline. This should be a repeatable and scalable system that runs from the top of the pipeline down to the hand-off after you have signed a contract.
Where Do I Start?
To get started, ask yourself two things: “What stages of the pipeline matter most to me?” and “What are the milestones that I want to hit along the way?” Don't list too many stages, as they can confuse you as you scale your business.
Your pipeline might look something like Figure 1.1:
Figure 1.1 Pipeline
I recommend that each stage has its own checklist. For example, in the “Closed” stage, make sure you ask for referrals. In the “Proposal” stage, you may want to use a product to track in order to see what page of the proposal the customer is looking at, and follow up on it.
The main things that matter when you are managing a pipeline are the following:
● Total number of deals in the pipeline
● Average deal size
● Percent of deals that move from stage to stage until they are closed
● Average time a deal stays in the pipeline
You'll want to find baseline numbers to measure each stage of the sales process. Be extremely diligent about staying on top of these numbers as deals move from stage to stage. Using a good customer relationship management (CRM) tool should help you to keep tabs on the health of your pipeline. See Chapter 10 for suggestions on CRM platforms.
Qualifying Leads
At the end of the day, all selling starts with leads, which is why outbound selling, along with a good lead generation and prospecting process, is so important. Keep in mind the following:
● More leads at the top of the pipeline will result in better numbers at the bottom.
● Targeted leads at the top of the pipeline will provide better, faster results. These targeted leads are also known as your “low-hanging fruit.”
Aaron Ross, who created the outbound sales model at Salesforce, talks about the various targeted lead types in the highly recommended and best-selling book, Predictable Revenue, which he coauthored with Mary Lou Tyler. In this book, he breaks down these leads into three categories: “Seeds,” “Nets,” and “Spears.”
To quote Aaron:
● “Seeds are word-of-mouth leads, usually from prior relationships or happy customers. These are how companies get started and where most of your first customers come from.
● “Pros: Highly profitable, word-of-mouth leads are the fastest to close and have the highest win rates. There's nothing better!
● “Cons: It's almost impossible to proactively grow them. You just have to do your best and be patient.
● “Nets are your marketing leads, such as internet marketing, events, webinars, white papers, advertising, and the like. You're casting a wide net, so this is about quantity over quality.
● “Pros: Easy to generate. Some kinds of marketing programs are scalable, you can generate leads from everlasting content, and they are highly measurable. There are ways to generate leads at almost no cost.
● “Cons: Not sure what will work, most leads aren't a fit, low conversion rates, mostly individuals/small businesses, small order sizes, a lot of cost and effort to build, optimize, and maintain.
● “Spears are when you have salespeople or business development people reaching out to specific targets, lists, or kinds of companies. It's a specific, targeted approach, driven by a human, with a goal of quality over quantity (the reverse of marketing Nets)…To be effective and scalable, you need a team of dedicated reps who only prospect – they don't close, manage accounts, or respond to inbound leads.
● “Pros: Very predictable results, enables a very targeted approach to ideal prospects at executive levels, fast is-it-working-or-not feedback cycle, creates a pool of sales talent.
● “Cons: Not profitable for small deals or customers, hard for old school companies to get the culture right (must avoid boiler room mentality), may be hard to get executive commitment to specialize and hire dedicated prospectors.”
Good targeted leads provide you with a good start, but achieving success is all about how you guide those targeted leads through your pipeline. Look to design a streamlined process, which will act as lubrication for your pipeline. This lubrication consists of automation and acceleration tools, outsourced help, and all sorts of tactical and strategic sales hacks to speed things up.
A good sales process is a science, and science is the new art.
What's Your Sales Stack?
Developers and marketers have had their sales stacks for years. Developers have the benefit of being able to build their own sales stacks, and marketing has been fairly technical about building them for quite a few years. Finally, there are now enough sales tools for salespeople to build their own sales stack.
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