Last week Flume headed to the Sales Innovation Expo at Excel in London’s Docklands. The event was packed with expert speakers, industry leading exhibitors and live demos that left us all buzzing with ideas.
One of the speakers to take to the stage was our very own Founder and CEO Raoul Monks. In case you missed the event or if you were there but would like a recap, here is a quick summary of two of his talks.
From Good to Great: How to turn your core performers into high performers.
In most businesses, the top 20% of sales reps are responsible for bringing in 80% of the revenue.
In his first seminar at SIE, Raoul asked: what are the top 20% doing differently from the crowd and what can we learn from them to turn our average performers into high performers?
It all starts with purpose.
Raoul suggested that the average performing rep’s purpose tends to be ‘to make as much money as possible for themselves’.
This purpose leads to behaviours and sales approaches that make it difficult for a buyer to buy.
Simon Sinek famously said, “people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it” and if your ‘why’ is to hit your bonus next month, then that’s not a compelling reason for a buyer to say yes.
The highest performing reps typically have a more authentic purpose:
“To make a positive difference to the people and companies they work with.”
This more altruistic and attractive purpose, leads to behaviours and approaches that make these salespeople easy to buy from.
Raoul put forward three core behaviours that high performing salespeople demonstrate consistently over their peers.
- Personalisation: High performing salespeople always put themselves into their buyers’ shoes to tailor their approaches. They understand that one size doesn’t fit all, and everyone has their own goals and motivations.
- Education: High performers educate themselves constantly on their buyer’s market, their buyer’s competition, and trends. By doing that they put themselves into a position where they can educate their buyer on blind spots and best practice. Thus, becoming a useful trusted partner.
- De-Risking: High performers understand that it’s often difficult for buyers to make decisions and to sell on solutions internally, so they proactively anticipate buying barriers and increase confidence in the purchase at every stage of the buying process.
From Silence to Connection: Tackling Customer Ghosting Head On
Raoul’s second talk focused on customer ghosting. With more than half of all deals ending in inaction, this has quickly become one of the biggest challenges facing salespeople today. In this session, Raoul lifted the lid on ghosting and provided some easy to use and powerful approaches salespeople can action right away.
Why buyers ghost salespeople.
Buyers are under more pressure than ever before to ‘do well’ in their role, in these turbulent financial times, businesses are laser focused on ROI and that makes buyers risk averse.
Here are Raoul’s top three reasons buyers Ghost.
- Risk aversion – preference for the status quo
46% of inaction is down to a preference for the status quo, to keep doing what they’ve done before because whoever got fired for doing that?!
- Buyer indecision – buyers don’t know how to choose
54% of inaction is due to buyer indecision. Thanks in part to the global digital economy, buyers have more choice than ever before but that makes choosing the right solution very difficult. They want to do something different but are paralysed by choice, they don’t know how to choose.
- Time, Effort, Embarrassment.
With an average 11+ stakeholders involved in complex B2B buying decisions, your contact needs to put in a lot of effort to get deals signed off. Unfortunately, your solution might not be the most urgent thing on their to do list, so you get put to the back of the queue. When weeks go by and nothing has moved forward, buyers are often embarrassed to reengage with salespeople and admit that no progress has been made or that they have fallen at the first hurdle.
Raoul listed three things that high performing salespeople do to avoid being ghosted.
- Overcome status quo bias – coach to a commitment to change.
High performing salespeople coach their buyers to see that staying in their status quo will lead to problems in the future. By doing this, by increasing the buyers perceived risk of doing nothing, the salesperson will lead their client to a commitment to change.
This commitment to change will drive positive action from the buyer and they will be more likely to put the effort in to get a solution signed off.
- Overcome buyer indecision – de-risk the path to purchase.
Optimise confidence in the purchase, by offering justified recommendations based on the results your buyer needs.
Use your experience to anticipate and proactively address any worries or concerns before your buyer brings them up.
- Take control of the process
Establish personal buy-in e.g. make sure your buyer is completely sold on your solution before moving forward.
Map out the decision-making process with your buyer, find out who else will be involved, ask what their roles are, and what their personas are like.
Agree a shared plan, make it a collaborative effort, build, and agree a plan together as to how your contact will navigate their decision-making process, who they will need to speak to, what they’ll need from you for each interaction and how long the process is expected to take.
Finally, always give your buyer permission to give you ‘no news’ or ‘bad news’ upfront.
We had a great time at the Sales Innovation Expo and met up with loads of fantastic people. If you would like Raoul to speak at your next event please get in touch. Follow us on LinkedIn where we regularly post new sales insights and tips.
