This is the follow-up online session with Silver Rooger, who was unfortunately ill during the live event and kindly promised to do his presentation online via Zoom. Below the video, you can also find a short summary.
Silver runs Dominate Sales, a company that coaches others on how to increase sales and grow significantly.
Silver has experience in taking clients' business to foreign markets, designing a growth strategy, training teams, as well as building and implementing background systems necessary for sales, such as CRMs, payroll systems, etc.
Tell them that you are trustworthy
One of my biggest sales lessons occurred when I was just 16. At the time, I had been working as a part time chef in a restaurant, assistant chef, helping the main stars perform and do their thing. But the salary was quite low and I walked.
I started walking around in my hometown, jumped into different restaurants and asked whether they have any vacant spots. The third spot that I jumped into was this half bar half restaurant and the owner of the restaurant happened to be at work. I sold my self quite arrogantly and she ended up hiring me as their new head chef. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw one 39 year old woman and one 47 year old woman - both have been working there for years. How could it be that those two women, good chefs, definitely better chefs than me, with more experience, didn't get the job? Because they didn't apply.
So the first true lesson, especially in B2B sales? Tell them that you are trustworthy. And over these eight years as a business and sales consultant attending my client's sales or CEO meetings, it's aggravatingly painful to see how little this common sense strategy is being used.
The rule of two
When I was in an NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) training, they taught us the rule of two. After that little tenure as a head chef, I ended up in B2B sales and the job was described as a business consultant, but in reality it was cold calling to get the CEOs to meet you and sell your SaaS solution to them.
By that time, I had been selling different stuff at events or face-to-face. I was really good at it. But when I started doing these calls to the CEOs, it was a horrifying experience for me. I was shaken.
What was behind that fear? It is either fear of the unknown or a traumatic past experience or limiting beliefs. The first thing that you have to solve is the unknown the part. The easiest way to start doing that is writing it down and predicting what happens next. Before a meeting, I try to write down or at least visualise in my head the potential scenarios of how this meeting could roll out. What are all the potential objections that the client might have? How would I react? What would be going on inside my head?
So rule of two: everything you do in life, you do it two times. First, do it in your head, then in real life.
When in doubt, make the bloody call
As a consultant, I see two typical scenarios. One of the scenarios is that people spend way too much time on prospecting, but prospecting in a way that they are trying to talk themselves out of doing the action entirely. This really limits productivity.
As soon as you have the first doubt whether this is a prospect, instead of trying to figure it out in your head, just call! In substantial amount of cases you will discover that actually they are a prospect.
And the second part here is that people have this stupid quirk where after a meeting they discover that some critical question wasn't discussed and later, when they start working on the proposal, they predict the answer or just make a very general proposal. The same principle applies here, just call! I have never had a situation where this has backfired.
Persistence is the name of the game
When I started my business to business sales career in this credit software company doing cold calls and meeting with CEOs, I hunted one client for three years. At some point, the other side has this subconscious obligation or the the need to reward this action. When I started my own consulting company that client was the first who bought from me.
You need to have a system. Always have the next steps ready when you're making calls. Lead the way: you are the orchestrator, you are the limo driver taking the client to the desired destination. And the key ingredient here is a good CRM.
You are here, where do you want to go?
So when you are persistent, will it mean that you will always score? You definitely need to have other tools as well.
One of the biggest game changers for me was implementing a module. Basically, it's a questioning model to help your potential client solve a challenge or get from point A to point B. You are here, where do you want to go? What's your desired situation where you want to be with your business? What are the reasons why you haven't already gotten with your own resources from point A to point B?
The three founding blocks of sales
Another one, a really huge one for me was the three founding blocks of sales. The client needs to have some kind of a need, they need to have trust and you need to minimise their limiting beliefs or fear. If you don't remove those fears that the client has, you may not get the deal.
Am I even in the finals?
One of the huge problems is clients stalling the business. Especially if you're not selling something where there is always a huge demand, then the clients or the potential buyers have the tendency to start stalling deals. When in doubt, make the call!
Never hesitate to attack the problem when you feel that this is a BS argument or it's an objection or a smoke screen or not a real argument. And especially if the client is on an autopilot, where they just postpone decision-making. The strategy there is to just get a meeting or a lunch to make a restart. If you don't do the restart, then it's just a waste of time for everybody.
They say they know, no they don't
And the final thing that I wanted to focus on is this: they say they know, no they don't. May be in some cases true that the customer knows and you should have to address it but you should always analyse.
Client: I know this, I have heard this from somewhere.
You: Okay, but are you using it? Like really using it?
When I was at the beginning of my career, one of the client groups that we tried to attack with our credit software were banks. We met with them, we showed this amazing product and they said, oh yeah, it's an amazing product, but if you could get more detailed financial data, it would be even better. We bought that data and put it into the system. Went back to the banks, they now asked for owner networks. We bought the data and put it into the system. When they started coming up with a new excuse we really went into hard sell mode and showed them that our product is already sufficient. So we changed the paradigm and changed the mindset
that didn't let us believe that everything the customer says is true.