I led 150 IT Sales Trainings. Here’s Everything You Need To Know

:: 00:00:00

Speaker 1

Here's the brutal truth about selling IT services. It is harder than it is selling a lot of other stuff and selling in other industries because your customers don't know how to buy, right? Like it's not something that they're frequently buying. This isn't like going out and getting a new pair of shoes that you do every few months. They don't know how to compare options, right?

:: 00:17:10

Speaker 1

Like they're looking at different providers and a lot of times are just it's completely over their head. You look and feel very much the same to somebody sitting on the other side of the table. They don't oftentimes even completely understand the value of what it is that you provide. They're trying to buy one thing and you actually provide substantially more, and they don't completely understand it.

:: 00:36:00

Speaker 1

And that ends up leaving you feeling commoditized and, you know, competing on price. And I know this because I've spent more than 15 years building sales organizations in a variety of industries. I was managing director of the US Chamber of Commerce and oversaw national sales teams and call centers and direct mail. I was CEO and lead sales turnarounds for investor groups and private equity groups.

:: 00:57:26

Speaker 1

And for the past five years, I have worked with hundreds of IT companies. In fact, last year alone, I led more than 150 sales training calls and sales training sessions with people who were selling IT services. Drawing on all of that experience, I've seen that there are nine red flags that when I when I see it, when I hear it, I know we've got to double click and dive into that because there's something behind it.

:: 01:19:26

Speaker 1

And so what I'm gonna do in this video is highlight what those nine red flags are and more importantly, help you fix them so that you can grow your MRO and scale your business. Plus dive in. Hey what's up? I'm Ray green, founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we have solutions to help companies scale sales. And I'm the founder of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we go in and actually help B2B service businesses scale their business so that they can exit.

:: 01:42:12

Speaker 1

And as I mentioned before, like before I last year alone, I led more than 150 sales trainings with groups of people who are selling IT services. And I've got access to the data, I've got access to the numbers. I know who's performing, who's not, and what they're doing to get those results. Selling it as hard, like I mentioned, you know, it feels commoditized.

:: 02:02:02

Speaker 1

And because of that you actually have to get better. But even though it's hard, I also know this many of you are making it way harder on yourselves and overlooking some low hanging fruit like things that you could incorporate or adopt to help you sell better. And sell more. So today I'm going to share nine very specific red flags that when I see something, when I hear something, I know we can use an improvement there.

:: 02:24:19

Speaker 1

First one is when I hear people say, you know, we've got like an 80, 90% close rate. We just we just need more at bats. We we can close him. If he doesn't get us the deals, we can close them. And in fact, we'll close almost all of them whenever I hear this, I do not hear, oh, my God, like you must be the savant of sales.

:: 02:42:09

Speaker 1

And it's like you must be better than everybody. What I actually hear is behind that, there's one of two things every single time it is, you were either not charging enough for your services. Right? So yeah, you're closing everyone because you're undercutting everyone. And because of that, the profit model that's leading your business is probably screwed, right? So if you scaled whatever that is, if you're not charging enough, it's actually going to get very ugly as you scale up.

:: 03:05:18

Speaker 1

And the solution to that is pretty simple. You've got to charge more. And you may think, oh shit, right. If I start charging more, my close rate is going to go down right. It is as it should, because an 8,090% close rate is not necessarily a good thing. If you're not charging enough money, that means you're selling more services to people at an unprofitable mix, and the more you sell, the worse it's going to get, because the more you sell, the more people you've got to hire to onboard.

:: 03:31:06

Speaker 1

If you're not charging high enough prices, you're not going to have the resources that you need to hire people or hire good people. So the human business is just going to get messy. So in that case, if you're not charging enough money, you don't want to sell more, you don't want to sell more unprofitable stuff. You want to dial up the prices so that you can scale a profitable model in your business.

:: 03:49:02

Speaker 1

And that should lower your closed rate because you don't want to sell to unprofitable people. Second thing that may tell me if it's not a pricing thing is you're not getting enough leads, right? Like I've got a 90% closed rate. I closed one deal a quarter because my cousin refers people over, and everyone they refer is basically pre-sold.

:: 04:08:04

Speaker 1

And I'm going to close all those deals and great referrals are awesome. We love Jimmy's, but you can't sale a business. You can't grow a business aggressively, purely on referrals, especially if those referrals are not done in a systematic, methodical way of you conducting outreach to get those referrals right. So if you're sitting around, you get 4 or 5 leads a year and you basically close all of them because they are hot leads that are referred from people that already know you, that's good.

:: 04:34:14

Speaker 1

Mean you want those deals as long as are profitable, you're charging the right amount of money, but you don't want to rely on that to grow your business. So you've got to start conducting some outreach. You've got to go outbound. You've got to run ads, start making phone calls, start doing some, you know, outreach through email or even direct mail, like whatever that is.

:: 04:52:13

Speaker 1

You need to start conducting that outreach. Now, when you do that, you're going to be going from a warm audience, meaning people who are being referred to you and already coming in halfway sold, or three quarters of the way sold to a cold audience. You're going to be going to people that don't necessarily know who you are, and they've got to go through this process that you put in place that's basically like, hey, are they in my market now?

:: 05:11:29

Speaker 1

Okay, so 100 becomes 70 and then do they even buy IT services. And then like you have these screening mechanisms, but then they've got to go through some process that you have in place to identify the people who are truly qualified to buy your services. And that is not going to be everyone. When you go from a warm audience to a cold audience, you should expect your close rate to decline.

:: 05:32:17

Speaker 1

h and you think about closing: 3040

:: 05:55:18

Speaker 1

The second red flag that I see is hearing salespeople talk about objections that they're getting in the sales process that really should have been handled proactively earlier in the sales process. And what I mean is, if I'm hearing from a salesperson, gosh, I keep losing deals because they say the price is too high or I keep losing deals because, they say they need to talk to someone like they're not the decision maker.

:: 06:16:19

Speaker 1

They need to talk to someone. Or they tell me, yeah, I keep hearing feel like there's they're just not ready to move forward. There's just no no need to move forward right now. There's no urgency right now. Those are all things that you should just expect as a salesperson. Right. Objections as part of the game. Right? At the sales.

:: 06:30:18

Speaker 1

Selling really actually starts when an objection happens. Because up to that point, if you just like if you just go through the entire process and you get an easy yes, those are like we love laid outs. Like those are awesome, we should be completely prepared for those objections. In fact, we shouldn't even be handling them at the end of the process.

:: 06:46:03

Speaker 1

We should be handling them at the beginning of the process. Because selling starts when you get an objection. If you go through the entire process, right, you give your presentation answer and they go, yeah, perfect. All right. So against I mean that's great. We love it. We're taking right. Like selling really starts when they go okay, thanks. Let me let me think about this a little bit.

:: 07:05:08

Speaker 1

Because now you've got to start figuring out all right what's the real objection. What's really going on. And there's an art to that. But the thing is a lot of these objections that we're talking about price need to talk to somebody not ready to move forward, whatever it is, contract, whatever. Then you go, hey, those are like the 3 to 5 that we know are going to come up all the time, right?

:: 07:24:17

Speaker 1

Those are just those should just be par for the course. We should know when we get to the end of the process that we should expect that. And because of that, we should work those things into the discovery process. If you get to the end of the sales process and they go, wow, shit, that's the first one I'm hearing about it's price and it's way out of my league.

:: 07:42:26

Speaker 1

You go, how did we not even have a price reference or a price range? They've probably gone through some marketing. They've probably gone through some form of qualification. They've probably gone through some form of discovery. They've probably had some type of assessment. They've had, you know, you're now going through this proposal. At no point in that entire process did you address a range of price like that's there's no reason for that, right.

:: 08:06:07

Speaker 1

Like you can very easily in discovery talk about, well, you know, a lot of companies in your industry or most companies in your industry are investing between X and X and IT services. What are you where are you at today? You know, like you can you can work these things in discovery. I would say all roads lead to discovery.

:: 08:22:08

Speaker 1

If you if you get to the end and they say, okay, great, great. You know what? Let me, let me talk to to somebody else and we'll, you know, we'll we'll get back to you and you go, And that's the first time you're hearing that they have another decision maker. Then how did you miss that?

:: 08:36:26

Speaker 1

And discovery. There's no reason to miss that discovery. You can work that into your discovery process and make sure that these common objections are taken care of. What I would challenge you to do? Go back and get your top five objections. The ones that you hear all the time. Figure out what are the questions that we can ask earlier in our discovery process to help identify that.

:: 08:55:03

Speaker 1

Now, if there's a conflict at the end and they say earlier, nope, I am the I'm the decision maker. I make all these decisions Gothe got it. Now you get to the end and they say, well, I've got to talk to so-and-so. Super easy to say, oh, okay. Well, I was confused because when we talked earlier you had mentioned this, right?

:: 09:13:15

Speaker 1

So you, you were a handling the objection with their own words. Again, no reason to get caught off guard by the 3 or 5 things that you know are going to come up. So go back and him into your discovery. Now, the third red flag for me is when I see a ton of deals that are stalled out, and there's no real objection, right.

:: 09:30:12

Speaker 1

So we've handled the top ones proactively, right. Like we did that in the last flag. But what about the real objections that are beyond that, that these deals, you just get ghosted and you can't necessarily like revive them and get them going. And you don't know what the real objection is. And, you know, it's not one of the top five because you can work those in.

:: 09:46:18

Speaker 1

How does that happen? Here's how. In the closing process, when you're giving your proposal on, you're actually going to close the deal. Too many salespeople try to avoid objections, right. Because there's a there's a fear of rejection, which is, by the way, completely normal in any industry. Other than sales. So if you don't want rejection, if you're afraid of rejection, choose another career path.

:: 10:05:26

Speaker 1

In this line of work, what you should be doing is hunting for those objections, right? If I'm sitting in front of you and I'm trying to close a deal, the last thing that I want is for us to part ways to leave this meeting and me not know what's going on in your head. So if I get to the end of my proposal first, when I give myself enough time to hear objections and I get to the end of this and I say, excellent, right.

:: 10:28:08

Speaker 1

I wouldn't slam my hand, but I say excellent. Right? Any reason not to move forward today? Right? Or I've got two plans. Which one are you leaning towards? Right, I can I and I go to, I go to close now my job is to find the objection. My job is not just to get in. Yes. Right. Like that's what I'm aiming for.

:: 10:44:21

Speaker 1

But I just assume there's objections on the other side of the table, right? Like, I just assume that they're there. My job is to find them. It's to actively hunt for them. And that's what the best closers do, because they know once you once you leave the room handling those objections, if you don't know what they really are, is virtually impossible.

:: 11:02:05

Speaker 1

And you're leaving that prospect to their own devices to handle their own objection. That's your job. You don't want them to leave with the objection. So you've got to get that out and coach them through that process. Ultimately, your job as a salesperson is to help them make a decision. It may be a yes or maybe a no, but you want decisions.

:: 11:21:01

Speaker 1

You don't want maybes. You don't want to think about it. So you don't want let me get back to you. You want decision. You can't do that if you're hiding from rejection or you're hiding from that challenging confrontation where they've got to tell you they disagree on something, or that they aren't completely aligned with what you're saying, that's your opportunity to coach them, to work with them, to answer the questions and move them to a final decision.

:: 11:40:18

Speaker 1

So don't run away from objections, right? The fourth red flag is when I look at some of these proposal where I look at, you know, what, they're what they're using, whether it's a slide deck or PDF or whatever it is and includes a long list of features and includes, like the list of what's in the tech stack. And it includes like small print.

:: 11:58:23

Speaker 1

Right. Like you've got you got to actually like look at and go, holy crap. Like and in the goal of the person selling at that time is oftentimes they want to show how much stuff they're getting. And look at this whole tech stack and look at all of these services and look at all this cybersecurity and look at all these data backups, and look at all this help desk and look at like and they try to overwhelm them and overload them with the features.

:: 12:20:06

Speaker 1

You don't need to sell everything that's in your plan. Let me ask you this. When is the last time when you bought a car that the thing that sold you was that piece of paper on the window, right? And you took that piece of paper and said, hold on, guys, I'm going to, I'm going to go read this and I'll come back in 20 minutes and I'll let you know if we're gonna move for on $60,000 decision.

:: 12:40:17

Speaker 1

That thing doesn't sell shit like, you know, sit there and, like, look through it. You get in the car, you drive like you're looking for the feeling. You're looking to solve some sort of problem. You're looking for. Think you're looking for something in that car. Maybe it's, you know, gas mileage. Maybe it's, you know, speed. Maybe it's, you know, the brand, maybe it's something.

:: 12:58:01

Speaker 1

But if that car salesperson tries to sell you everything in that car, they're going to miss the mark. And that's the same thing. And IT services your job is not to sell them everything in your plan. Your job is to find out what they really want and then assure them that you can deliver that. Right. Like, what are the problems that they have today?

:: 13:16:08

Speaker 1

Show them how you can solve them. What are the fears that they have? Right? Do they feel like they're vulnerable in your network? Cool. Let's address that piece. But you don't want to overwhelm them with everything in your package. You want to highlight at a high level the things that matter most. And then if you've identified some latent pains, right, like some massive pains that they didn't even know that they had, you might want to address some of those, but you got to be aware of the fact that you have the curse of knowledge, especially if you're a technical person who is selling.

:: 13:45:22

Speaker 1

You have so much knowledge in your brain that you you actually know what they probably should be thinking about, right? Like you actually know what it's like, gosh, why aren't they worried about this and this and this and this? They're not like at the end of the day, we want what we want. We don't want what we need.

:: 14:02:23

Speaker 1

And so our job in sales is to identify what are those wants. One of the core problems where are the core pains. And then how do I give them the absolute most confidence that I can address those things? The fifth red flag for me is when I listen to calls from one salesperson. I listen to 3 or 4 of them in a row.

:: 14:23:01

Speaker 1

And like the closing call, especially, and it doesn't change, right? Like the the actual proposal and presentation and clothes doesn't change. And here's why. That's a red flag. That means you have wasted your time and their time in the discovery process, right? The purpose of discovery is to identify what they really want. What are their goals? What are their problems?

:: 14:48:03

Speaker 1

What are their pains like, what are the symptoms are experiencing? Why are they talking to you? Why do they need services? Maybe they need compliance. Maybe they need, you know, stronger network. Maybe they've got downtime. Maybe they're afraid of getting hacked. Like your purpose of running discovery and spending all the time asking those questions is to actually understand that.

:: 15:06:10

Speaker 1

Which means when you come with the proposal, your job is to take the wide range of services that you offer. And over the last, last flag that we just talked about, like not give them everything, is to take the wide range of services that you offer and say, all right, which of these are most relevant to what I learned in discovery?

:: 15:23:19

Speaker 1

And then I'm going to frame my proposal based around that. If every time I give you a proposal and every person I give a proposal, it is the same as like 95% the same, then why do the discovery you're wasting time and most importantly, just missing a massive opportunity to frame your proposal in a way that truly resonates with them, which I promise you, is going to maximize your conversion rates and maximize your close rates.

:: 15:49:21

Speaker 1

Because if for them, go back and listen to those proposals, look at the proposal deck or the presentation, and if you can listen to those calls and be like, hey, how much of this is really changing? Based on where I learned discovery, not very much of it is changing. Let's figure out how can we adopt a better strategy to take the time that's being invested and the questions that were being asked and make them work for us to close more deals?

:: 16:12:05

Speaker 1

And that may mean asking better questions and discovery. Right? Like if you're spending discovery, asking questions that really, you know, how many, how many users do you have? And you know, things like, I mean, you could do that on a phone. You know, it's not like a really good discovery question. Like there's so much that you can learn, a good discovery process that will inform the proposal.

:: 16:31:17

Speaker 1

Process, and you're either wasting that time or you're not leveraging the information that you did get. The sixth red flag that I have. And listen, like if you're a vendor selling assessment services or things that you're telling it, companies will help them close more deals. And you're saying, hey, you've just got to run this scan and then present the scanner of all collusion or deals.

:: 16:50:17

Speaker 1

You can tune out of this video because you're going like this. If somebody tells me they're running their assessment and their discovery at the same process, or that the assessment is basically their discovery process, meaning if they go in and they plug something in or get the user to click something and that thing is going to spit out information on their network and their passwords and, you know, dark web scanning, all this other stuff.

:: 17:11:12

Speaker 1

And we expect that assessment to be sufficient to close all of our deals. You're wrong. And assessment does not replace discovery. An assessment can amplify your discovery and assessment can give you incredible information that will help you close more deals. Absolutely. But it does not replace an actual discovery process where you sit down and you ask questions and you get to truly understand what's going on in your prospects mind, what it is that they really want to accomplish.

:: 17:40:22

Speaker 1

What is their buying process, right? Who else is involved in the decision making process? Is there any real urgency? Like these are the things that you need to know. If you want to close a maximum number of deals, and the assessment will help, especially with certain buyers, right. Like certain buyers, that that's the actual problem and that's their concern.

:: 17:59:14

Speaker 1

Like if they told you straight up, hey, you know what my current provider, I'm you know, I'm not really sure like our our networks really unstable. You know, we we don't we don't get any, you know, training on, you know, phishing attacks or how to train the team and, you know, like some of these things. There you go.

:: 18:14:00

Speaker 1

Okay. Like, if that is part of the problem that they're trying to solve. Perfect. Like the assessment is going to absolutely help you there. But it's not if that's not necessarily that person's problem, what if response time is their problem? What is what if expertise right. Like hey, my current provider like doesn't know shit about like isn't helping us with the strategy isn't helping us with this.

:: 18:34:17

Speaker 1

There are a lot of reasons people buy it. If you're only using the assessment, you're only appealing to part of your market, and which means it's going to limit your close rate. So leverage the assessment, use it. In fact, I'm a big fan of selling it. You know, on the on the front end and prioritizing that to to qualify people and get them in the door.

:: 18:52:26

Speaker 1

But if you're like even if you're using it as a free assessment in your process, then keep doing that. But don't expect it to fully replace discovery. All right. So red flag is about differentiation. So I'll I'll frame it this way. Pop quiz for you right now. Watch it. Why are you different. Like what is it about your IT services about your company that is truly different?

:: 19:15:09

Speaker 1

How are you unique? Like what? How do I choose between you and somebody else? Like what? What makes you better? Why would I choose you over somebody else? And if you said we answer our phones live, and if you said, we, we have proactive and reactive services like we're, you know, we're proactively managing the network. And if you said, you know, hey, we've got an incredible tech stack, like our tech stack is the best.

:: 19:39:09

Speaker 1

You know, we're using just the best tools. And, you know, we've got this, you know, custom structure with these different vendors. And your tech stack is is by far the best. And we we care about our customers a ton like so we have great customer service. If you're if those are the kind of things that you're coming up with.

:: 19:53:27

Speaker 1

I'm telling you right now, those are the same things everybody else is saying, right? Like, I hear it all the time on calls like, hey, what makes you different? What makes you different, what makes you different? And very rarely does someone have it really thought out to say what differentiates them from somebody else. And if you if you blend in with everyone else, if you can't clearly articulate what makes you different or this is almost worse if you say things make you different and it's the same stuff that other people are saying makes them different, you actually worsen the problem, right?

:: 20:25:28

Speaker 1

Like you actually make it worse because I if I'm shopping with three vendors and two come in and say basically the same thing, right? Like, hey, we're awesome because and they name these 4 or 5 things that everybody says, and one says just one thing that differentiates them, that truly differentiates them, then that's like they are going to be ahead of the pack.

:: 20:44:05

Speaker 1

Okay, so from a strategic standpoint, I really encourage sales teams and business owners to sit down and say, do we have real differentiators here? Do we have true unique selling points that allow my sales person to articulate what makes us different and allows the other person the prospect to say, hey, you know what, they are actually excellent. So, and some examples, like a friend of mine has a company that's now been acquired.

:: 21:12:16

Speaker 1

So she's a she's a partner, I'm $100 million IT company. And the first fund that she founded, she was running iOS. Right. And then she built like core values and use that to attract really great talent. And they had this, this excellent office. And so she knew internally a lot of the operations with her team were different. Like they onboarded employees differently.

:: 21:31:24

Speaker 1

They recruited differently. They manage their their their staff differently with core values. They were running this iOS. And so what she did was changed her sales process to get prospects to come to her office. And then when prospects came in, they were all dialed in, right? Like they had a system all the way from the tech to the receptionist to the salesperson.

:: 21:50:26

Speaker 1

Everyone knew the script, everyone knew the play, and what they were doing was demonstrating how they were different. Right? They won. They went and did something different. And then two, they found a way to showcase that to prospects by altering the process to lean into their unique selling points. Now, that doesn't have to be yours, right? Like this is it's tough.

:: 22:10:17

Speaker 1

Like, I have another piece on here about USPS, but it's tough to say, like this should be your USP because then it's not unique, right? So this takes some some creativity. This takes some strategic thought. But the the power that this has on the sales process is, is massive. If you can't differentiate between you and another company clearly, definitively, then don't expect your prospects to.

:: 22:30:18

Speaker 1

And at that point you are by definition commoditized. Now the red flag is actually similar to the seventh on, you know, in terms of differentiation, but it's specific to pricing. And whenever I talk to salespeople, people and I say, hey, what's the, you know, what's the most common objection you're hearing? And they say it's, it's prices. And I say, okay, cool.

:: 22:49:03

Speaker 1

And they'll tell me, like the salesperson, you know, hey, I told prospects, you know, we're not the cheapest in town, and you know, this and that. And I go, okay, no, that's fine. So if you're charging the amount that you should be charging and you are priced higher than your competitors, which, by the way, I don't think is a bad thing, as long as you're as long as you're positioned and prepared to to run the process accordingly.

:: 23:07:29

Speaker 1

That's I think that's great. Like you're going to make a lot more money. The problem is if you just take that piece of the advice and you just up your prices, but you're not armed as a salesperson with a clear explanation as to why you cost more, then don't expect anyone other than an idiot to buy from you.

:: 23:24:20

Speaker 1

And I mean, I don't mean to sound rude, but like what I'm saying is if if you say I charge more, but I can't really explain why we charge more, who buys that service, right? Somebody that just doesn't know of competitors or somebody that came through referral, right, and didn't have to go through a qualification process. So you didn't have to compete with other with other providers if you're going to charge more, which I encourage you to do, you want to be armed with the knowledge as to why that is?

:: 23:48:10

Speaker 1

And again, just like before, we're talking about unique selling points. Those are the things that allow you to charge more money, right? But it's not because of your tech stack. Your your prospects don't actually care about the tech stack, to the extent that it gives them confidence that you are going to do the job or you can do the job you said you do, cool.

:: 24:05:12

Speaker 1

But for the most part, that's a prerequisite, right? Like I assume if I'm hiring and it can be that you've got a good tech stack, right, I assume that you're going to answer a phone, right? I can get back to me at some point, like those are those are prerequisites. Don't use those as unique selling points and don't use those as the reason you charge more money or what your premium is.

:: 24:23:04

Speaker 1

This comes back to the unique selling points. And I do have some videos on this channel here. That will will point to that can help you create your unique selling point. Right. And it gives you some background. And, you know, we've got some exercises that you can run through. So it's beyond this video, but this goes back to the same principle.

:: 24:39:29

Speaker 1

If you're going to charge more money, then you just need to be armed and you just need to be positioned and prepared properly to defend that argument and say it confidently. Right. Like be able to say, no, we are we are not the cheapest in town. In fact, I can tell you we're in the one, the top quartile.

:: 24:54:10

Speaker 1

Let me tell you why. And the reason is and if you if you can say that confidently, that what follows that the other person says, okay. And conceptually, if the other person says no, probably not in your market. Right. Because if you're charging premium prices, I imagine you want premium clients. So you don't want the commodity shoppers, you don't want the tire kickers, and you don't want the people that are just trying to get like the cheapest helpdesk thing on the planet for their business.

:: 25:22:24

Speaker 1

Right? So it's it's actually a good qualification process if you do it the right way. And then the ninth flag, which I really should have put first. But I felt like if I lead with this one, we may not have gotten to some of the other ones. So I actually kept this one for last. There is no excuse for you to not have a sales process in your business, but I hear salespeople say, you know, sometimes we do qualification discovery together sometime.

:: 25:47:05

Speaker 1

Well, then actually, sometimes we just do the whole thing together and, and we, we give them the price at the end. But most of the time we kind of do it this way. Most like when I, whenever I start hearing that, I go, there's no process in place. There's no excuse for that with it specifically. And here's why I say that.

:: 26:01:29

Speaker 1

Because sometimes when I see that there's no sales process, it's because the founder or the business doesn't actually understand the importance of process to begin with. Chances are you have the ops side of your business dialed in with some processes, right? Like, I highly doubt that if you're A78 figure IT business, you are out there and you have a one unicorn tech that you allow to handle shit the way that he wants, whenever he wants, however she wants.

:: 26:30:16

Speaker 1

Like it's like, yeah, you know, hey, Billy, I can just go. When people call and just go ahead and hey, not the way that you see fit, right? Like, you know that there's got to be some type of triage process. You know, that there has to be some type of tracking. You know, that there's got to be a consistent way to get results and get things done, because you've got to be able to measure it.

:: 26:46:22

Speaker 1

You've got to be able to deliver a service that has some complexity in a consistent way. So you understand process and you understand the importance of process and having some structure in place. It's the exact same thing on the revenue side of the house, right? It's not just important on ops, it's just as important on the revenue side of the house.

:: 27:06:10

Speaker 1

You can't get consistent results, you can't get significant improvement, and you can't really troubleshoot what's going on. If you don't have some processes and some systems in place. If you are finding yourself like, you know, sometimes we're mixing, you know, qualifying and discovery and sometimes we just do like the whole thing in one calls and you and you just in some you say sometimes a lot, then that's the flag to say.

:: 27:30:17

Speaker 1

We've got to take the time to start building out the sales process and building out the sales process that side of that house is very much what I imagine is what you went through on the OP side of the house. It's not a one time event, right? It's going to require some work. You're going to start at a high level and you're going to move through, I liken it to like, you know, one of the Russian dolls, right.

:: 27:50:16

Speaker 1

Like where you take it like at a, at a high level and then it gets, you know, more granular, more detail as you get going. And so that's what I encourage people to do. Like if you're watching this video at the end of it, like go take 15 minutes and go, go get a whiteboard or a piece of paper and say, let me just map out one of the core steps.

:: 28:06:26

Speaker 1

I want our customers to go through our prospects to go through to buy something. Right. Like, I want them to book a call, all right. I want them to do a ten minute qualifying call. I want them to do a 45 minute, 60 minute discovery. I want to do a network assessment that I want to do the proposal process.

:: 28:21:29

Speaker 1

Okay, cool. Let's try. That's the top of the Russian doll. Now, once you get that in place and once you define that, then go back and say, okay, what's the objective at each one of these steps? Okay. And book a call. What's the what's the objective at qualifying call. What's the objective. And I go pro tem. Most of the time the objective is to sell the next thing.

:: 28:41:20

Speaker 1

Right. So at the end of the qualifying call you're screening people out and you're getting closing that deal. A sale and a qualifying call is getting them to discovery. Getting a qualified person to discovery right now, loss would be losing a qualified person to a discovery. And at discovery, your goal is to get them to the next stage, in the next stage.

:: 28:57:27

Speaker 1

So you write out what the objective is. Then you go back and look at each stage and just do like the one on one process, right? So book a call. Let me just map this out on a process doc real quick okay. They're going to go to a booking page. They're going to go to they're going to book that call.

:: 29:13:10

Speaker 1

They're going to go to a thank you page. Right. And then they're going to get some confirmation emails. Okay. Cool. Like that's the playbook qualifying call. All right. Objective is identify anyone who's not a good fit, kick them out and take people who are a good fit and move them to discovery. All right. So what are the questions that I'm going to ask in in the qualifying call.

:: 29:30:06

Speaker 1

Right and right. Like a little you know one on one playbook you can get AI to help you do a lot of the stuff too. And so you start like you start at the top and you just move and get more granular as you go, and it will eventually end up like you have it. On the upside. And I've talked to a lot of you that say, you know what, I just got done systematizing this whole side of stuff, this whole side of things.

:: 29:50:05

Speaker 1

And now I'm ready to start systematizing that. And that's and that's fine. But you know, that it wasn't like a sit down, let's do one meeting or one, you know, a one day, you know, session and expect it all to be fixed. It will take a little bit of time, but there's just no excuse to not having a sales process dialed in.

:: 30:07:07

Speaker 1

And I say that with love, because I know for a fact that you know the importance and the value of having good processes, because I see it then in your businesses. So there you have it. Those are nine flags that I see from having run, you know, more than 150 trainings and coaching, with, with salespeople. If you want more free sales tips, feel free to join my newsletter.

:: 30:28:10

Speaker 1

Every, every week I send out some more sales stuff. The link is below in the description, and if you want access to, some more resources, I've got like the the objection handling playbook, I've got, you know, some templates for goal setting and, you know, a bunch more. It's actually it's the mSRP sales tool box, down below there's you can opt in for that.

:: 30:47:05

Speaker 1

That's free as well. And of course, feel free to subscribe to the channel if you want some more stuff here. Thanks for watching. Adios.