The Fastest Path to Optimizing Your Sales Process | Ep 44

Speaker A

00:00:01.040 - 00:17:58.630

This is episode 44, and on it, I go over the fastest path to improving your sales process that generates revenue as fast as possible. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. Hey. Hey. So digging into dialing in your sales team.

I have so many clients that come to me and talk about what does my sales team need to do to be more effective. Generate more leads, handle objections better, all these things.

And the number one place I start is the exact opposite end of the funnel that everybody thinks salespeople need to be working on. Salespeople oftentimes go to training to learn how to get referrals, open doors, handle objections, things of that nature.

And to me, I just come in and say, what is at the closing line that isn't closed? And so let's dive in there and start looking at what's holding it up.

And so the reason that I start here when I come into any client is because there's money sitting right there waiting to come into your company. And. And when we can get those deals over the line, it's instant. Those people have already dug into what you have to offer.

They're already interested, They've reviewed proposals, they've made decisions internally.

And whether they've stalled out, whether they've given you excuses, whether they're not quite certain what they need, there's something that can get them over the line most of the time.

And so when I come in and start spending time on all the deals that haven't converted, we then figure out what's missing that has caused these people to stall out, and now we can start improving the closing process.

And when you start improving the closing process, you may find, oh, we needed to spell out what onboarding looks like, what delivery looks like, what our guarantees are, what our fulfillment model looks like, all those things that provide certainty of what happens after they sign up, after they give you the contract, after they start paying you. And when you can then add those things to future proposals, you'll find your close rate goes up.

Then you move a step further out in the process earlier in the sales cycle, and you say, okay, we're getting people to get quotes, but they're ghosting us. So what do we need to do at that stage? Okay, when we generate a quote, let's find out. What's their budget, what's their timeline?

Why are they doing this now? Who else is involved?

What things are we not gathering at that stage before we generate the quote so that we can serve them best and we can set expectations.

Because if your sales team are just fielding calls and generating quotes and not qualifying anybody, then there's no surprise that they're not getting any responses because they're not developing confidence, they're not transferring certainty to those prospects that you guys are the ones that can deliver the results.

And so as you think of the closing process as the starting point of optimization and then working your way backwards out towards the lead gen process, you'll find all these stages that can be improved and optimized. And as you work your way from the close outward, you'll find that's the maximum way to generate the most amount of money.

Right now a lot of people work on the other end and they say, well, we need more leads. We need to work on a better outbound script. We need to work on a new email automation.

We need to do all of these activities that are completely unproven or used to work and no longer work.

We just need to do more of those things without any perspective of, well, why did they stop working, where did they start breaking and what needs to change?

And so as you think about improving your sales team and improving your sales process, I think asking the question of why isn't this working anymore and what do we need to do to get it to work, and then talking to people that aren't moving forward, asking them why did they go work with some other competitor? Did they do the typical thing and just not move forward?

Did somebody internally kill it because they asked a bunch of questions that nobody could answer and they didn't want to bring your sales rep in because they didn't feel a sales rep could answer them either?

Do you need to provide a technical specialist that can come in and wingman with the salesperson and provide the technical expertise that speaks the geek language of the end user. So those are all things that I think are worth doing. And the hard part is as a business owner, you're like, well, I don't have time to do this.

I don't know where to start. My salespeople just lie to me or they just say everything's fine or the leads are bad or the market's shifted or make up any kind of excuses.

And I think this is the hard part in business ownership, right? Because you've got so many things on your plate. You've got so many things to keep spinning.

And if this isn't your sweet spot of sales management, then it's even harder because you Feel inadequate confronting your team and knowing what questions to ask or what things to try.

And so I think a step by step process of starting at the close, inspecting those deals, figuring out what they need, talking to those leads, digging in, looking at what messages were sent, what information's not given, and really do a forensic analysis and work your way out is the best way to go. Now, obviously, if you can't get to that, reach out to me. This is what I do all day. But I don't want to turn these podcasts into sales pitches.

I just want to open your eyes to the process of how this stuff gets solved over and over and over in the clients I work with.

Because there's so many sales trainers out there that come in and say that they can train your team, do motivational stuff, provide accountability, but if somebody's not looking at what needs to happen to get the deals closed, and then give feedback to marketing or to the management team on what's being offered, then you're just kind of guessing and you're just leaving it up to somebody else to come in and try to motivate your team to do more activity.

And I think that's probably the biggest thing that so many business owners try to lead by is just do more, make more calls, try this, try this new stuff, throw more mud against the wall and see what sticks. And without a process, without investigating why people aren't moving forward, without figuring out what's missing, you're just guessing.

And I think that's why my bottleneck breakthrough method is just so scientific and so practical about step by step, going through your funnel, from the closing backwards out to the lead generation at each stage. And if you really want to get nerdy, document it, have milestones like I just did for a client.

We changed up their pipeline and their CRM so that it reflected the stages more accurately and didn't just have a whole pile of people backlogging in one area. So the other thing that I think so many people lose sight of is how is the market shifting? What are competitors coming out with?

What is the market concerned about or being intrigued by that you're not adapting to?

And so about 2023, after late fall 2022, and the market just started freezing in big corporates, I told everybody in 2023 that was in professional services or in agency work, you've got to change your offer. You can no longer offer only the Rolls Royce package. You need to offer a better best option.

So a better option is a foot in the do project, something easy Something that causes you to not make as much money, but proves that you can deliver and build some confidence. Because the market started becoming skittish and it hasn't changed. It's still very, very skittish here in end of Q1, 2025.

And so I told everybody I knew in 2023, start making foot in the door offers something that is a piece of your Rolls Royce package, something that lands you the client, and then you can expand from there.

And so if you're not investigating why deals aren't closing and you're not talking to leads and prospects to find out why they're not moving forward, and you're not finding out what else is in the marketplace that people are buying. And I'm not just saying do a Google search and guess and hypothesize as to why you're not getting the business.

I mean, really do research, talk to people, find out what else are they doing, what did they want, what were they hoping to get? Then you'll be able to see, oh, the market is shifting. Oh, we need to lighten our offer, lighten our requests, lighten the first stage.

Maybe there's a lot of fear that AI is going to provide some magical solution, that if the client that you're dealing with doesn't find an AI solution now, that they're going to get passed over by their own client.

If you're in a B2B environment, if it's in the home services space and people are at the end of their credit card limits and their budgets are stretched, instead of the monthly solution, maybe you offer a quarterly solution, maybe you offer a quick cleanup and then check back in with them.

And I know those aren't ideal for your subscription businesses, your monthly maintenance businesses, but maybe that's what's needed to get them to move forward and just get started.

Maybe you just do a cleanup one time and then they see how well that went, and then you say, look, we can save you a lot of money and a lot of headache if we do this quarterly or bimonthly or monthly. But here are some options for you. We want to meet you where you're at.

And I know that that's not ideal for economies of scale and for streamlining things, but this is the kind of feedback my clients get when we meet with their prospects and we figure out, okay, do we need to move up market?

Are we no longer able to serve this, let's call it, lower end, less affordable end of the market, or is this our bread and butter and we need to Adapt and be a little gracious and earn some goodwill. That buys us more market share once the market turns around. So those are the things that I look at when I get into optimize the sales team.

And I'll leave you with this.

I think the biggest reason most prospects don't move forward on proposals that are a no brainer, should work, work, should be a fit, is because the salespeople are golden retrievers. I talk about this in my book in the sales section.

I don't remember what chapter it is, but I talk about the difference between the typical salesperson today, which I call a golden retriever, and the top salespeople, which I say sell like a surgeon. And golden retrievers are super friendly and they are very easy to get along with. They're not intimidating and people feel comfortable around them.

That's why they're the number one dog in America. But in a sales environment, they don't transfer confidence. And so they chase whatever ball the prospect throws.

And that prospect will ask a lot of questions because the golden retriever salesperson says, well, do you have any other questions I can answer? Does your team have any questions? Is there anything I can change in the proposal for you?

And they go back and forth in being so friendly and service focused, but they don't transfer confidence. They don't tell the prospect, hey, I know you're worried about xyz. We've dealt with that a thousand times.

And here are some three clients that are case studies that we've done so you can see like we know exactly what you're dealing with.

And like a surgeon, when I worked with surgeons, when I was planning on being an orthopedic surgeon in a prior life, they knew exactly what was going to happen in that surgery because they'd done it so many times. And so they tell the prospect or the patient, hey, you know what? This torn acl, it's not going to get better. It's really bad.

And if you don't deal with this, you're just going to have a very loose knee for the rest of your life and you're going to develop arthritis early and you may not have a lot of pain and you can wear a brace and you can get by if you're a little active, but you're going to develop arthritis really early, like in your 50s, and you need to get this ACL repaired and it's going to suck. It's going to be a year recovery, but it'll make your knee stronger and it'll keep you from developing Arthritis early in that knee.

And anybody who's had arthritis early knows that your mobility goes way down, the pain goes way up, and then you just have to get a knee replacement sooner.

So get the knee, the ACL dealt with now while you're young, while you can recover, because recovery takes twice as long in every decade that you take to do it or whatever it is. And they transfer that confidence, and they say, I know what I'm doing. I know this is what you need, and you need to move forward.

And that's what the best salespeople do. They know they can speak to the worries and the concerns already going on in the prospect's mind.

And so whatever you need to do to develop that confidence and that certainty in your salespeople, that's the training that I think needs to spend more time on, is knowing your product cold, knowing the prospect's needs, knowing how the solution matches the needs and the goals of the prospect's organization helps them become a superstar, helps them develop their own career, whatever it is. That's what the top salespeople focus on, and that's how you get more deals closed.

So in closing, I think focusing on why aren't deals getting closed and not just listening to your sales reps, go inspect them, go talk to the prospects, go follow up with them. I mean, you're the owner. You carry a big stick. If your salesperson's got this whale of a deal, they cannot get across the line.

Just jump in, call the prospect, say, hey, Steve, this is Joe over at Acme. I know Bill's been working with you on this, but I'm really excited to help you guys. I don't know if you know, but I own the company.

I'd really love to help you make this deal happen. What can we do to get this across the line and what's holding things up?

And I guarantee you have that conversation with a prospect that's been stalled out, and that deal is going to get good feedback if not closed because of your energy. Now you may say, well, this isn't sustainable. I can't be involved in every deal. And this is only time.

The only time you get into this is when things aren't working smoothly, when the team's not closing effectively, when you're not getting revenue where you want, you have to roll back up your sleeves and get this done. Or you hire somebody like me to come in and do it. That's the only option.

Nobody on your team is going to solve this, because if they would have, they would have done it by now already. So you have to add the energy, you have to add the expertise, add the horsepower to jump in, roll up your sleeves, and get the deals done.

And there's a lot of business owners I know right now who've taken their eye off the ball, who aren't managing their sales team well, who've brought in a weak sales manager, and they're paying the price and they're going backwards, and they're not paying attention to the market. They're not paying attention to what needs to be adjusted, and they're just putting pressure on everybody. And that's not a recipe for success.

That's not true leadership. True leadership is figuring out what needs to happen. I think Jeff Bezos is a great example.

He was early on this is great example on Lex Friedman's podcast with Jeff Bezos last year. Early on, Amazon really wanted customer support time to be under 30 seconds, waiting on phone calls.

And Jeff was in a board meeting or executive meeting with the team, and he said, hey, we're getting complaints. And they were looking at the KPIs. They said, look, our average hold time is 23 seconds. And he said, I know, but something's wrong.

And so he just turned on the conference room telephone, dialed customer support, and let it ring, and then wait on hold while they were talking about it. And sure enough, they ended up being on hold about 10 minutes. And he says, I'm not mad at you guys. There's just something broken in the reporting.

And so we need to figure out why the reporting's broken, and then we need to figure out why the hold times are so long. And that was it. And that's what a great owner does.

And I do really think that that interview with Jeff Bezos is one of the best entrepreneurial interviews I've ever heard. And I never really followed Bezos before that, but I was really impressed.

And I'm a huge fan of his management and leadership style based on what he discussed. And there's another book called Working Backwards by Bez, Bill and Colin. I can't remember their last names, but they were Amazon executives.

I've met them recently and talked to them, and their book goes through that management process really well and the detail they have to go through for projects and for postmortems after projects and new initiatives fail. It was so detailed that Jeff forced them to go through. And I think that's the piece missing in small business. And this is the difference.

This is why big business has the scorecard of billions of dollars of revenue, is they make sure that things are working.

Now, obviously there's big businesses where there's a lot of waste and a lot of inefficiency, but for the most part, somebody's inspecting and somebody's fixing things, and that's what needs to happen in your sales team, in your organization, if deals aren't getting closed right now. So I hope this is super valuable. Let me know what questions you have. Fire an email to podcastottleneckbreakthrough.com I'll reply.

Looking forward to any feedback you have on this and hope your sales team continues to grow and improve. Take care. This podcast theme music is an excerpt from triptych of snippets by Septah Helix. It's used under Creative Commons.