Stay Relaxed and Ready to Sell: Part 1 of 5
This post is the first part of a five-part. You can see more details on how top sellers stay relaxed and ready to sell in The Seller’s Journey webinar.
How do top B2B sellers stay relaxed and ready to sell?
Structure, systems, and templates.
Scribbled post-its, old business cards, and trusting your memory have no place in a well-oiled sales pipeline.
And a well-oiled pipeline is key to staying relaxed and ready to sell -whether it's got 10 prospects or 50 prospects or even 100 prospects.
A well-oiled pipeline uses a clear and simple framework...
I hear a lot of coaches talking about the “Buyer’s Journey.”
Yes, mapping The Buyer’s Journey is an important and useful step in selling better.
But — and this is where I disagree with most other sales coaches— prioritizing the Buyer’s Journey above your own journey – what I call the Seller’s Journey - and you’ll be headed down a navel-gazing rabbit hole that will waste your time and hurt your brain.
So I’m going to outline a framework for you, including the selling stages that our Leads will pass through one by one until they convert either into new business or a warm Prospect. Using a simple framework like this is one way seller’s can stay relaxed.
The framework has eight stages - the five selling stages that form our sales pipeline - Qualify, Discover, Present, Pursue, and Close - plus three additional stages that are just as critical to long-term revenue growth but fall slightly outside the scope of selling.
The first stage in our framework we call Qualify.
When a deal moves forward it converts to the second stage called Discover.
Stage three is called Present
The fourth stage is called Pursue.
And the fifth stage is called Won / Lost. It could also be called “Closed” because, win or lose, the opportunity is no longer open to us. I’m going with Won / Lost for clarity’s sake.
Now when we add a new deal we can track it as it moves forward. We can measure how long it spends in each stage and other valuable data points.
These five stages represent the sales pipeline
Where does Marketing fit in? Marketing is very important to sales at it generates our leads, pushing new opportunities into our sales pipeline.
So naturally in the framework Marketing is located before the Qualify stage.
Accountability is critical to revenue growth, so we need to report the outcomes of our sales efforts to our team, to our boss, or to our partners. What are we tracking? How often do we update our team on outcomes? All of that and more is handled in Reporting.
Reporting is very important, but reporting can only show us our business through a rearview mirror. It can only show us what’s already happened. So, once we are decent at reporting then we wanna begin forecasting too, essentially predicting what we think is gonna happen business wise, and revenue wise – then also on the hours billed side we need to monitor our Available Billing Capacity to help us avoid burnout and keep our work-play balance in the healthy range. What happens to us if we sell more than we can deliver?
Reporting / Forecasting comes after the Won / Lost stage.
If you're interested in learning more about what and how reporting works, I have a lesson called Sales Reporting Basics. In that lesson I show you how to convert raw data into actionable information, or even into a formal report if those are needed in your business.
And finally, there’s the Upsell stage, which is most often handled by the people who regularly interface with our clients and are responsible for delivering what we've promised to our clients - the Account Managers or Account Executives or Consultants, Engineers, and Project Managers.
If you're interested in learning how to upsell, please ask about another course I offer called, very creatively, How to Upsell.
What are the five selling stages that make up a standard Sales Pipeline?
Qualify, Discover, Present, Pursue, and Won / Lost.
In part two of this five part post I talk about the difference between a Lead and a Prospect, and why it makes me crazy when people call either of those a Client.
Learn how to stay relaxed and ready to sell with The Seller’s Journey webinar