Tag: sales

Keep Your Audience Engaged With this Simple Trick

It’s hard to communicate what you’re offering if you can’t keep your audience’s attention for more than 10 minutes.  

Imagine you are getting ready to give a presentation. You walk into a conference room with 4-5 people, get out your laptop and begin your talk. You have all of their attention for a few minutes, but then you notice that you are starting to lose them around the 10 minute mark. They start checking their phones, looking out the window, or getting a glazed look in their eyes. What do you do?

In John Medina’s book, Brain Rules, he shares some insight about the attention span of our prospects and customers. After about 10 minutes, your audience’s attention starts plummeting, causing them to use extra effort and energy to stay with you. They desperately need something to be done in order to hook their attention and keep them engaged.

The Hook

The solution is ECS (emotionally competent stimuli), or a hook, which triggers a response towards the speaker and captures their attention again. Hooks can be so compelling that they push you through that 10 minute barrier and keep your audience engaged throughout your whole talk. There are 3 principles that can make a hook successful.

  1. Trigger an emotion. Whether it’s fear, laughter or nostalgia, emotions work well not only to hook attention, but it also helps your audience retain more information. Telling stories is a great way to do this, especially if you share a personal story about yourself and tie it to something that is important for your audience. 
  2. Make it relevant. Audiences can be really good at detecting disorganization, and you don’t want them to think you are trying to just entertain them to keep their attention instead of providing valuable information. If you make your hook relevant to the provided content, your audience will feel engaged rather than entertained. 
  3. Place hooks evenly throughout your presentation. There is flexibility with where you can place your hooks during your talk. It’s best to add one about every 8-10 minutes, but you can also start with a forward thinking hook, or end with a hook that summarizes your material and repeats an important aspect of your talk.

There are several different techniques you can use to hook your audience’s attention. You can tell a story, use props or use number or word plays. When creating your hooks, always start with the end goal in mind. What problem are you trying to solve for your prospect? Think of examples that relate to their problems or goals and tie that in to the hooks that you use.  

Now imagine giving your 60 minute sales presentation, and you’ve been able to keep your audience engaged and attentive the whole time. Did you solve an important problem in your prospect’s world?  Did you communicate value? There are always ways to improve your selling conversations. Now that you know how to keep your audience’s attention, take some time to fine tune your messaging.

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We understand that it can be difficult to know where to start when improving your sales messaging. That’s why we’ve created a Sales Conversation Roadmap “Cheat Sheet” that you can download here.

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Please leave your feedback in the comments section.

3 Levers to Pull to Increase Sales in 2019

It’s the new year, and sales leaders are starting to make goals and plan out new strategies for 2019. At this point, you’ve seen your sales reps experience fatigue in prospecting, and you probably need a good boost in conversion rates.

Before you do anything, take some time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t over the past year. Then, list some goals and objectives you have for the next year. There are three areas you can focus on to help you meet these goals and increase sales in 2019.

1.    Business Development

By this time, your sales reps are experiencing fatigue in cold calling and sending emails. According to SiriusDecisions, it takes an average of 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. The average sales person gives up after only 2 attempts. It’s important to re-energize the team and find new and creative ways for reps to engage with prospects.

Creative Prospecting

One creative way to reach out to a prospect is direct mail. You could find a 3D object to send to prospects with a message tied to the value your product/service provides with an ask for an appointment to discuss the value. Send a pizza at lunchtime to a prospect with a note inside saying, “Looking to get a slice of your time”. Get the team together to brainstorm other unique ways to stand out and get prospects’ attention.

Social Media

There is an opportunity with social media to move beyond the status quo. All too often, social media is either miss-used or overlooked. Forbes states that 78% of salespeople using social media outsell their peers.

The key is to find ways to provide value to your network as opposed to just asking for leads or referrals. Publish articles with helpful content, post industry tips and advice, and contribute to conversations via social media.

2. Increase Conversion Rates in the Sales Process

If your conversion rates aren’t where you’d like them to be, do some digging to identify where in the sales process the majority of your deals are getting stuck. Then, assess the underlying cause.

Finding the Cause

One cause could be lack of qualification early on in the process. Hubspot provides this list when qualifying a prospect on an organization-level:

  • Is the prospect in your territory?
  • Do you sell to their industry?
  • What’s the company size?
  • Does the account fit your company’s buyer persona?

After answering those questions, reps need to determine on an opportunity-level whether the prospect has a specific need or challenge your business can satisfy and whether it’s feasible for them to implement your particular product or service.

Lastly, determine if the point of contact can actually pull the trigger on the purchase decision. If at any point the prospect is not qualified on any of these levels, they should be disqualified.

Another problem area with the sales process is with demos. It may be hard to even get to this stage because your reps aren’t communicating enough value to get to a demo. And when they do, it might look more like a training exercise as opposed to providing proof that the value is real.

It’s also worth looking into if your reps are giving too big of an ask from one stage of the sales process to another. One example of doing this would be asking to do a trial too early in the sales process.

Lastly, it’s important for your reps to stay persistent and connected during the entire process. According to Marketing Donut, 80% of sales requires 5 follow-up calls after the meeting, and 44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up.

Find a Solution

After you’ve found the underlying cause of a low converting stage of the sales process, you need to identify the best practice to solve it.

Prospective customers only have time to focus on a handful of priorities at any one time. So try to push the task, “evaluate this solution” toward the top of their priority list. Point out that every quarter, month, or week that they try to stumble along without a new system is costing them money, losing customers, adding risk, or otherwise hurting their business.

Stay in front of these prospects, but not by pestering them with “Did you get my last email?” notes. Instead, send along helpful educational materials, invite them to webinars, keep them on your email list, or use other cost-effective ways to stay in front of them.

To get prospects through the entire sales process, you need to guide them every step of the way. This takes persistence and willingness to go the extra mile.

3. Hold a Sales Training Event

Now that you’ve identified the best practice to solve the underlying cause of your low converting stage of the sales process, the next step would be to implement a solution. One way to do this is to partner with a sales consultancy and hold a training event for your sales team.

When talking with other sales leaders about the goals of their sales training events or annual meetings, we hear that they want their reps to engage with the content and walk away equipped with skills to lift their sales performance.

Salespeople are always looking for fresh, relevant content and techniques. You need a sales trainer that teaches fresh content that is tailored to your reps and company. The content should be focused on value-based selling and using techniques backed up by recent discoveries on behavioral psychology.

One way to keep all of your reps engaged is to create a whiteboard during the event that they can start utilizing right away. According to Forrester, practicing a presentation, learning a whiteboard, or anything that involves doing something and receiving feedback about it will have a much longer-lasting effect than passively listening to a speaker.

Partnering with a sales consultancy can allow you to refocus on the new year and start implementing solutions to low conversion rates and burnt out sales teams.

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If you have a training date on your upcoming calendar, we would love the opportunity to be a part of the discussion on how we can partner together to help you and your team achieve your goals. The content of our training workshops is taught by a 35-year sales veteran who specializes in elevating value by understanding the science of decision-making. Every rep will walk away with mastery of a conversation framework scientifically proven to communicate high value in every conversation they have with prospects and customers.

Let’s talk.

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We’d like to offer you a free e-book on how to communicate value in your sales conversations. Click HERE to download.

Call: 678-561-6260, Email: dkurkjian@mastermessaging.com or instant message David Kurkjian on LinkedIn to start the conversation.

The 3 Pillars of Pipeline

7 months ago I was moved from Product Development to Director of Business Development for our sales consultancy and given a 1 year quota that represents 87.5% year over year revenue growth.

Not one to waste time reinventing the wheel, I began gathering insight from authors and sales leaders like Tony Hughes, Graham Hawkins, Lee Bartlett and John Barrows.

To be honest, I was looking for a silver bullet activity to make an immediate impact on revenue in our organization.

I wondered, “what was the single best activity that I could engage in to get some quick wins and create a big, fat pipeline where it was non-existent?”

Would it be Inbound Marketing? Maybe an Outbound Call Campaign? Or should I just get busy with Social Selling?

The answer… Yes!

What I uncovered in my research is an almost universal agreement that a multi faceted approach is the only way to create Predictable, Replicable and Sustainable revenue growth over the long haul.

I’ve summed up these activities into 3 buckets I call, “The 3 Pillars of Pipeline”.

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Pipeline Pillar #1: INTERNAL

We were able to identify several internal activities that are giving us more opportunities to tell our story with warm leads and referrals from happy clients.

We started here and quickly identified over 100 new opportunities for business.

PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT – Identifying, creating and strengthening partnerships and teaming agreements with colleagues who have complementary product/service offerings to our own.

In this process, we inked a referral agreement that will be very lucrative for one of our partners and increase revenue to our organization as well. This is a true win/win activity, but it’s definitely playing the long game.

PAST CLIENT OUTREACH – Reconnecting with and updating past clients of recent product developments (custom sales playbooks) and additional service offerings (coaching programs) has created an abundance of additional selling opportunities.

1st DEGREE SOCIAL SELLING – My business partner and I both have good Networks. A LinkedIN Navigator search identified dozens of potential prospects from contacts that are most likely to answer and email or phone call.

Also, with turnover being what it is these days it simply means that many of our older contacts are now working for companies that need our services.

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Pipeline Pillar #2: INBOUND

We identified several areas we can quickly and inexpensively improve our ability to create inbound marketing traffic.

This was our second step in the process and with the proper systems and technology in place, is a relatively “set it and forget it” activity only requiring a couple hours a week to manage.

WEBSITE UPDATE – We’re constantly improving our core service offerings and adding new products in response to our client requests, so we should be updating our website to reflect these changes on a regular basis.

Our website will serve as the primary landing page for anyone searching for for services we offer and step 1 in all of our Inbound efforts.

CONTENT MARKETING – We’re sales trainers and have enough compelling science backed content to fill several calendar days that we share during our workshops and coaching sessions.

So why not break off portions of our IP that address and solve problems sales pros have and deliver them in small, easily digestible blog postings and white papers across a variety of social media platforms?

WEBINARS – We’re developing a 45 minute webinar that will address and solve a near universal problem our prospects face, “How to Sell Based on Value”

We’ll market via social media and serve whoever shows up to the webinar with something of real value. After the webinar, we’ll put them into to a cadence that hopefully leads them to become customers.

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Pipeline Pillar #3: OUTBOUND

Of course, a truly well rounded Business Development program would be incomplete without an outbound calling and email campaign to identify and engage LOTS of new prospects, quickly!

We moved this to last because the contacts are COLD.

2nd DEGREE SOCIAL SELLING – We don’t know each other, but we know some of the same people and some of them are willing to make introductions.

With a long history of giving, it hasn’t been that difficult to find contacts willing to make introductions to friends and colleagues on our behalf. But we did have to do the work to identify them and create targeted messaging that makes sense.

COLD CALLING – With the right messaging targeted to your prospect this really doesn’t have to be such a scary thing. We’ve received some great training and built out a system that works for setting up additional opportunities to sell via the phone.

EMAIL MARKETING – There are affordable and incredibly easy to use platforms for email marketing that introduce cadences like Growlabs and Salesloft. Again, the most important part of your email marketing cadence is the MESSAGING.

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All of these activities are crucial to create FAT pipeline with lots of new opportunities, but all the opportunities in the world won’t do you any good if you can’t speak the Language of Decision.

That’s why you need a First Call Playbook or a Sales Conversation Playbook with suggested scripts, from prospecting to proposal that will enable you to engage your prospect in a meaningful conversation that ends in a sale.

Good thing that is what we do for our clients 😉 As a result, we’re going to blow away our revenue goals in 2017… are you??

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QUESTION: What crucial pillars am I missing that are part of YOUR business development program?

If you enjoyed (or even disagree) with this article, please like, comment or share to your network.

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MasterMessaging is a sales consultancy that helps our clients increase revenue on ways that are predictable, replicable and sustainable.

Ask us how we helped an Atlanta software company take their first call conversion rates from 8% – 47% in one quarter utilizing our First Call Playbook.