A lot of prospecting advice given out to sellers is around building out a strong pipeline to make sure that when a deal fails, regardless of how far through you pipeline it is, there will be others to replace it. I agree multiple high-quality deals in your pipeline can be the answer. However, what I often also see is too many deals in pipelines which are overloaded and risk becoming stale. The common focus on having 3 – 5 times pipeline volume as a metric often drives the wrong activity. (As managers, we need to be careful what we inspect/ expect).

If we compare a reps available prospecting time versus the activity levels required to advance those deals, most sellers in this situation have too many deals in their pipeline versus the amount of time they have to develop those deals. This means that many deals are never developed and become wasted opportunities.

Prospecting versus Nurturing.

If you’re operating at the front of your pipeline and you’re trying to generate interest from prospects? Then we know it’s going to take about 7-10 touches across a specific time frame (say a 60day block). I calculate it takes nearly 6mins per single opportunity per week to prospect across multi-channels. PROSPECTING!

If the prospect (deal) is engaged and it’s a matter of waiting for the prospect’s ‘buying window’ to open. For example, a contract renewal, a new need to develop, the existing supplier needs to stumble, or even the sales process is long and tedious, think enterprise sales. Then we could be said to be in the NURTURING stage, and this takes around 4mins per week, per opportunity. These times exclude attending sales meetings.

If you’re one of the many salespeople who need to manage their time across both creating new business and servicing your existing clients, you need to calculate the time you have available for both prospecting and nurturing. Then take that available time and allocate that time per opportunity. I believe, if you don’t have the time to work a prospect into a lead, you shouldn’t even start. Instead, leave it sitting ‘on the shelf’ until you have the capacity. Leave it for another day.

Consistently good, beats occasionally great, in sales.

Consistency is also important for deal progression. Reaching out once or twice and giving up on a prospect is a sure way to be unsuccessful, regardless of how good your outreach is. (Occasionally great) We now know that we need to map-out a valid multi-touch strategy to get a robust conversation started with our prospects. (Consistently good)

Having 100 leads who are pursued through just two touches is likely to be much less successful than having 25 leads who have a deliberate allocation of 6-8 careful touches. Those 25 leads are more likely to develop into conversations and move through to a conversion than those 100 leads. In this scenario, at the completion of this prospecting block, we will still have 75 lovely leads left to pursue.

As a more in-depth example, if you have 13 prospects at the front of the pipe and 12 further along, this can take around 4hrs and 8mins, per week, to stay on top of. Most Sales Leaders/ Account Managers/ Executives I talk to are surprised that it can take this long to work so few deals. If you were to multiply this by 4 to cater for 100 leads, this means you’d be spending more than 45% of your total work time working these leads (Plus you still have to add in sales meetings).

When we need to measure pipeline volume, I suggest we deliberately allocate sub-sectors inside your pipeline by size. Taking the 25 leads as an example, where appropriate, this pipeline could have five deals with a very large deal size, 5 with a large deal size, 5 with an average deal size, 5 with a lower value and finally 5 with the minimum value. The total of these leads volume hits the 3 – 5 x quota ratio. The exact ratio is dependent on your selling situation, but I think you get the idea.

The other reason smaller deals are essential to include (Small fish are the sweetest fish) is that it helps us to maintain sales momentum and sales practice. We get to stay in ‘practice’ the process of moving sales to completion with deals of all sizes. This way, we are less likely to ‘mess up’ when we get to those more important deals. (Again, being consistently good, rather than occasionally great).

Only managing the volume of a salesperson’s pipeline is not always the best approach. If we have too strong a focus on driving these volume numbers, we risk sellers, either consciously or unconsciously, loading the number of deals to meet those metrics whether they be real deals or not, or whether they have the time to develop those deals or not.

Both scenarios are less than ideal. How does your pipeline stack up?

The post When You Have Too Many Deals In Your Sales Pipeline appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Why is this important to know? 

Suppose you’re posting content or using LinkedIn to help you with any part of your business, such as business development, marketing or personal branding. In that case, a large amount of your strategy is going to be reliant on your potential customers being able to see your activity or your profile easily.

Changes to the LinkedIn algorithm impact how, when and why your content or your profile is displayed to others. 

This is why, if you use LinkedIn regularly, it is in your best interest, to know what to do and, just as importantly, what not to do, to help you reach those eye-balls.

Why now?

With both a new algorithm now released and most of us now having access to the new user interface, this is a perfect opportunity to share some of the fundamental changes. Here are some things you might want to think about when you’re posting or interacting on the platform.

Key Changes. 

1) New Easy Wins

All-Star Profile / SSI Score impacts.

Your LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) is a score of 100 which measures how effective you are with the four pillars: Create a Professional Brand, Find the Right People, Engage with Insights and Build Strong Relationships. The maximum score for each pillar is 25.

HOW DO I FIND MY SSI SCORE? RIGHT HERE. 

LinkedIn awards those who complete their profile to the ‘All-Star’ level by increasing the number of people who will see their content (increased reach). Likewise, the higher your SSI score the higher your reach.

Reach relates to the number of people who will see your initial post, so it is fundamental to your LinkedIn success.

An ‘All-Star’ profile has a reach of X 1.5 above an ‘Intermediate profile’ and ‘the lesser ‘Beginner’ profile suffers a minus reach penalty of X 0.5

An SSI score greater than 60 has a positive effect on your reach; anything below has a negative impact on your reach.

Users with an SSI score greater than 90 have an X 1.5 increase on their reach.

What should you do?

Ensure your profile is complete to reach that all-star. Manage your LinkedIn activity to make sure your SSI is not negatively impacting your reach.

2) Key Changes for content posting.

DWELL Time 

LinkedIn now awards posts that make people DWELL on their content. Such as multi-page PDFs or other rich media.

This change is an attempt to increase the quality of the posts and move away from those short, text-based click-bait style of posts. You know the ones where you click ‘see more’ only to be seriously let down.

Timings of posts 

The Golden hour is dead! The life of posts in our feeds has been extended and will now show into your connections feed for a longer time than before. (up to 5 days). 

This means we won’t need to post every day or to react immediately to our connections posts or to comments on our posts (Just within the first 24hrs) to increase virality. It also means we can spend more time building quality content (see DWELL time, above).

It also means LinkedIn pods, groups of people organised to interact with each other’s content to boost engagement, are now less effective. 

If you have a piece of content that is gathering good levels of engagement, refrain from posting again until the engagement levels have dropped. Instead, reinvigorate your original post, through comments, to see another +15% engagement on that post.

#Hashtags

Hashtags are considered a bit of a mystery on LinkedIn. We should use hashtags to help others find our content and to ‘file’ our content into the right search buckets for others on LinkedIn whom we are not connected too. 

For best results ONLY use hashtags that have more than 100,000 followers. 

It’s not as straight forward as you might think.

#Sales = 5.85Million followers

#SalesDevelopment = 22k followers

#Prospectiing = 9k followers

To determine the strength of a hashtag simply search the hashtag within LinkedIn’s search window. 

Whilst using a maximum of only 3 hashtags was the advice in 2019 now it seems the sweet spot is 3 – 9 Hashtags in a post, but no more. 

What should you do?

Write content that has more detail and can hold your audiences’ attention. Try writing long-form posts and repurpose them into PDFs or other rich media and post them that way.

Be prepared to leave the post to run for at least 24 – 48hrs. 

Interact with your post using comments, as they are the most effective, with all of those who interact with the post. Do this inside the first 24hrs.

Finally, use a mixture of well followed hashtags, between 3 and 9, that are likely to drag people from outside of your network into the post.

3) Reengaging lost connections.

There is no doubt adding many useless connections has become a daily sport for many on LinkedIn. People connect with us, and we never hear from them again. This means many have a focus on building their network via quantity, rather than building relationships. This is the wrong strategy, IMO.

The chances are, you are already connected to a bunch of people who can help you achieve your goals. You just need to reengage them. Good news.

The algorithm is looking for ways to supply you with content interesting enough to hold you inside the LinkedIn platform. It doesn’t want you to leave and go elsewhere. It’s always looking for clues so it can better understand what it is that you want to see so it can give it to you. 

So, if you would like to see more of someone’s posts or activity, let the algorithm know by being very deliberate in reengaging them. 

Comment on their posts, endorse them for skill, give them kudos, send a message or two. Should you carry out two or three of these activities inside a 7day period, LinkedIn will register that and start to place your content and activity at the top of each other’s feed.

This is gold for managing both new business opportunities and for maintaining strong relationships with your existing clients.

What should you do?

Create a list (use ‘leads’ in SalesNAV if you have it) of people you need to ‘stay in touch with’ and then deliberately create those two or three interactions across that first week. Once they reconnect and your interacting again you can slow the activity down to stay truly ‘connected’.

These 3 hacks will help you pick up the easy wins on LinkedIn as you prepare your social and digital selling strategy for 2021. You’ll be much more effective with just these few tweaks to your playbook.

Other new things you might want to check out.

• Tagging lots of people in your posts will negatively impact your post.
  • Posting links in the first comment is no longer useful (if it ever was).
  • Pressing the SHARE button is not a worthwhile activity. LinkedIn knows it’s a duplicate post and won’t spread it further.
  • LinkedIn live has low levels of engagement.
  • Video should be less than 1min, never more than 3mins long and posted natively.
  • Followers see much less of your content than connections do.

All these findings are either from my own research, observations and the analytics I’ve generated from using tools like shieldapp.ai or from speaking with other LinkedIn experts and trainers either in some of our chat communities or directly in my BOSS podcast.  

However, there is one person who is considered the real ‘source of truth’ for all of these conversations. Richard Van Der Blom’s research is both smart and methodical and the base for many of these suggestions. Richards’ study measured over 4500 posts at 15min intervals to determine what works, what happens and what doesn’t. 

I suggest you access a more in-depth review of all the changes here directly from Richard. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/newsletter-4-linkedin-algorithm-research-2020-you-van-der-blom/

The post LinkedIn Algorithm HACKS appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Every week, a new episode is released as we hear from global sales and social experts who share their very best social strategies and plays. We scour the globe looking for those who do a great job with their social plays and bring them and their ideas directly to you.

In every episode, there is at least one thing you can take immediate action on that will make a difference to your LinkedIn and digital selling approach.

Here are this month’s top selections for you.

3 Rules For Going Viral On LinkedIn.

Daniel Hochuli is LinkedIn’s head of content, APAC and China. He works with LinkedIn’s most strategic clients, big name brands such as IBM, Lamborghini, PwC, Johnson & Johnson, Audi, Philips, Pfizer and many more.

Who doesn’t want their content to go viral?

In this episode, Daniel shares with us the 3 keys to increasing the virility of your content to ensure as many people see your content as possible.

Great insights from someone who helps the best brands get their message out on social.

Sales Leaders why your LinkedIn profile says you’re FAT, DUMB and LAZY. – James Michael.

If you’re a sales leader, business owner or entrepreneur you probably don’t realise how much damage your LinkedIn profile is actually doing to your business.

You might think,

“I’m not using LinkedIn to reach out to start conversations or to support my business growth. Why does it matter”

 James Michael, from Justified Talent, tells us you’re probably driving the best sales recruits away from you and your business and you don’t even know it.

If you intend hiring anyone this year you should check out this podcast so you know what NOT to DO.

How to secure meetings, right now, from the UKs Top 10 SDR – Nia Woodhouse.

Nia is an SDR with coaching platform Refract. Nia spends her days trying to get people to take meetings with her Account Executive team.
 
Nia Woodhouse has just been awarded by Sales Confidence, as one of the TOP 10 SDR’s, in the entire UK.  

In this show, Nia shares her exact outreach strategy, how she uses LinkedIn to open doors to client conversations and a little about her cadence. All the tactics that made her a top 10 performer. 

One of the cool things we learnt is NIA is using voice notes on LinkedIn early in her outreach to create 90% conversation rate. 

If you’re an SDR, a BDM or you just need to find a way to talk to more customers NIA shares what’s working right now. You could do a lot worse than simply follow her lead here.

Automation in sales, at scale with Justin Michael.

Justin is on a mission to help sellers make a bigger commercial impact through the use of automation and technology. 

Justin has worked at a rate of 1000 – 1 doing the work of 1000 sellers in the time and space of one. A Million emails sent, 6years of pipeline built in just 6months. He has worked at Salesforce, LinkedIn and even trained Mike Weinberg’s’ sales development team.  

Who trains one of the world’s best sales trainer’s sales teams’? Justin.

Let that sink in. 

You might not like what he has to say – but you can’t ignore it.
You’re probably going to need to listen to this episode twice.  
Lucky it’s short. 

List of guests

Guests have included many of the tops trainers and specialists you would know as well as some great practitioners sharing what they do and how they do it.

• Jason Bay
• Justin Michael
• Daniel Disney
• Phil Gerbyshank
• Brynne Tilman
• Bill McCormick
• Steven Norman
• Chris Reed
• Jay Jensen
• Cynthia Barnes & more

Subscribe to the pod on your favourite podcasting channel such as Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher or pick up the pod directly at www.markmc.co/boss-podcast

The post The Best of Social Selling – BOSS Podcast Volume 2 (Sponsored) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Why should you listen to the podcast?

There are two ways you can get good at something.

• Work like mad, make mistakes, adjust your approach and then try again. Repeating that process until successful or
• ‘Model the Masters’. , look to those who have gone before you and who have already proven to be successful in those skills.

The BOSS podcast takes this second approach and brings those strategies to you.

Every Monday, a new episode is released as we hear from global sales and social experts who share their very best social strategies and plays. We scour the globe looking for those who do a great job with their social plays and bring them and their ideas directly to you.

In every episode, there is at least one thing you can take immediate action on that will make a difference to your LinkedIn and digital selling approach.

Here are this month’s top selections for you.

EXPOSED: LinkedIn Automation in the Sales Process. What’s working now?

In this episode, we talk to an Australian Account Exec who is currently using LinkedIn-Helper (a LinkedIn automation software tool) to help him find new clients and start conversations while he is doing other tasks.

Because using automation is against the ‘rules’ of LinkedIn, we had to ‘disguise’ our guests’ voice to protect him from having his LinkedIn account banned. In this discussion, he opens up and shares how he uses this automation in the sales process, what other tech tools are in his stack, how they all work together and what results he can achieve from the application of that automation.

A warts-and-all, sneak-peak look, under the bonnet of someone driving great results as a solo contributor in the Australian SaaS market.

Interestingly, there are a couple of astonishing things coming out of this discussion that we were not expecting.

Profile Secrets from Australia’s Leading LinkedIn Profile Specialist – Karen Tisdell.

Time and time again, LinkedIn experts have told us that having a great profile is the key to success on the platform. Having an average or lower profile makes it difficult for people to invite you to connect or to accept your connection request. Yet, with a strong profile, all of that becomes so much easier.

What happens when you get a notification that ‘someone has viewed your profile’ of course you want to go and see who that was and try to figure out what might they want.

That simple, but powerful, first impression drives everything that follows – do they send you a connection request? Do they accept yours? As you can see, a great profile is fundamental to your LinkedIn activity.

Karen Tisdell is Australia’s leading LinkedIn profile writer; as you might imagine, she spends A LOT of time thinking about LinkedIn profiles. Here, Karen shares her very best tips so that you too can have that all-important, great LinkedIn profile. A perfect place to start for newer or intermediate LinkedIn users.

LinkedIn Lurker to Influencer in just 15mins a day with Joe Apfelbaum.

LinkedIn Lurker:

Joe Apfelbaum is a high energy marketer and author. Joe wrote a best-selling book on weight loss called ‘High Energy Secrets’ after he lost 43kilos and transformed his life.

It turns out there is a lot in common between weight loss and a LinkedIn social selling strategy.

In this high-energy episode, we hear, what are the three things we need to do, every day, to go from LinkedIn lurker to LinkedIn influencer?

Why you should focus on being seen 1000 times a year by 1000 people instead of being seen just once by 10,000 people?

At one point, Joe even breaks out into a rap about B2B selling. A fun episode with plenty of great takeaways to use.

How to Increase Your Response Rates by 300% with Matt Barnett.

Video messaging has been spoken about a lot recently as a tool that will help you breakthrough with your messages whether that’s using Video via LinkedIn, Email or even Text delivery.

Matt Barnett is the CEO and Papa bear at Bonjoro, a video messaging company. Matt shares with us, what his clients are seeing as far as open rates, response rates and how his clients are currently using video to engage more effectively with both potential clients and their existing clients and how some are getting an increase in response rates of 300%

I use video all through the sales funnel and as a training tool. I think it’s an excellent substitute for face-to-face conversations and a fast way to build some rapport. it’s a great tool to create an easy pattern interrupt

Guests have included many of the tops trainers and specialists you would know as well as some great practitioners sharing what they do and how they do it.

• Jason Bay
• Justin Michael
• Daniel Disney
• Phil Gerbyshank
• Brynne Tilman
• Bill McCormick
• Steven Norman
• Chris Reed
• Jay Jensen
• Cynthia Barnes & more

Subscribe to the pod on your favourite podcasting channel such as Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher or follow the pod on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/best-of-social-selling  

The post Best of Social Selling Wrap up. BOSS Podcast (Sponsored) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Why is this happening?

What’s driving this panic, and what lessons can it teach those of us in sales and marketing?

After all, what supplier wouldn’t like a crazed rush on their products or services now and then? I bet Kleenex et al. are delighted with the current #toiletpapercrisis.

There are two psychological behaviour triggers on display here, creating the current situation.

Social Proof/ Consensus

Scarcity

Social proof, in this instance, is represented as herd behaviour. As people panic buy and stockpile toilet paper, unnecessarily.

Robert Cialdini, the godfather of Influence, says of Social Proof, ‘People will follow the actions of others to determine their own actions’.

It’s a type of conformity. Typically, we think everyone’s doing it, why shouldn’t I. Or, as is playing out in the current #toiletpapercrisis, everyone’s doing it, I had better not miss out.

Which leads us to the second psychological behaviour trigger – Scarcity.

Dr Cialdini says of scarcity, people want more of that which is in short supply or difficult to obtain.

The current situation has people buying lots of toilet rolls. Other people hear about this phenonamum, and think ‘I best have a look for myself’. 

They visit the store and confirm that lots of toilet rolls are indeed being hastily acquired. Their natural behaviour is to comply and buy more than they need, just in case ‘everyone else knows something that I don’t’. They get to the toilet roll aisle, and it’s empty. There is first some disappointment, then quickly concern and lastly panic. 

Then the scarcity behaviour trigger kicks in. 

We might then think ‘they were right to act. There is now no more toilet paper and, supply is genuinely scarce. I best run to the next store to stock up as it’s becoming a VALUABLE resource’.

Boom! A double psychological trigger of both social proof plus scarcity = panic buying.

These behaviours are not new to us; they are hardwired inside us. In these situations, we are operating only on auto-pilot, via our subconscious. These impulses to conform to hoard are challenging to ignore, especially in the face of the current Coronavirus environment. 

The theory above outlines why people are panic buying double-ply in quantities large enough to fill shipping containers. But what are the lessons available for us in sales and marketing?

Scarcity.

Could you create a situation where it is perceived that you have a high level of demand? And that you too, might soon ‘run out’ to manufacture a higher level of buyer interest?

• Can you book meetings with prospects more effectively by suggesting you only have a single 45min window of availability that day?
• Could you remove 60% of the products from your shelves to make it look like a product it was in strong demand?
• Could you limit the number of empty tables in view for restaurant patrons to create a higher level of perceived scarcity?
• Could you have a small number of first release tickets available that they would sell out almost immediately, leaving people to rely on the second release?

Social Proof. 

Could you publicly show how many others have made a successful purchase with you? To not only remove any doubts around their purchase decision, but also, to make it feel socially acceptable to be rushing around to buy your goods.

The media has helped create this panic by showing lots of people queuing and stockpiling toilet paper. It adds authority to the message and makes us think we should be doing the same. It’s a genuinely compelling piece of vision.

• Can you display the number of people who have made a purchase with you before, complete with regular, publicly visible, increases in that number?
• Could you take a picture and display it on social media every time you help a client or onboard a new client?
• Could you create a situation where the item you prefer to sell is presented as the most popular selection? 

As we’ve seen it confirmed again in the current #toiletpapercrisis people, do buy with emotion and try to justify with rationale. 

In a completely ethical way, how could you increase your levels of scarcity or display more substantial social proof, to help you and your business?

The post Toilet Paper Crisis, Coronavirus and Sales Psychology. appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Recently I found that there has been a change in the way many are approaching ‘LinkedIn’.  Have you noticed it? It’s like a disease — mindless, endless connection requests of no value.

A swarm of people, all seemingly trying to RUSH to increase the size of their network trying to reach eye-popping levels. With what appears to be no real regard for quality, reaching out for a mindless connection.

My guess is they might be thinking that having 10,000 connections is essential, or more likely, will make them seem important to others. They might believe that at that level of connections, business will be pouring in through their Inbox. (It won’t) I think they’re gathering connections in the same way my teenage niece has thousands of ‘friends’ on facebook but yet she couldn’t tell you if she was standing next to 20 of them at the bus stop. Friends who are not really friends at all. Connections who are not really connected, or even interested. Think, how much are those connections really worth to you? Zero.

So with all those ‘useless’ connections are you truly ‘well connected’ or are you just overloaded & crowded?

If the quality of your connections is JUNK, what’s the QUALITY of your network? – JUNK. 

Your network is your Net Worth. What’s your NET WORTH?

Rubbish in – Rubbish out.

A FOOL with a TOOL is still a TOOL.

Interesting how I can use an old CRM saying and it seems relevant talking about LinkedIn. (LinkedIn has undoubtedly changed a lot in the last year or two).

Let’s say you do get to 50,000 connections. How would you credibly engage with them all? You can’t. NEWS FLASH. It’s not the shares, likes or views that matter in this game; it’s the quality of the engagement.

Social is social, that means interactions; it’s not a database; it’s not a calling list; it’s not a ‘number’ of connections; it’s not a CRM. If you can’t provide some insights or some value to those who want to connect with you or that they provide to you, then why are you connecting?

Having lots & lots of connections will not automatically make you a LinkedIn superstar. I suggest having the wrong connections will ruin your LinkedIn experience and, at the same time, make it significantly harder for you to use LinkedIn for what it is designed. A networking tool which should be helping you to drive great conversations and then, eventually, opportunities.

Of course, there are exceptions, enter, people like Tony J Hughes. He uses LinkedIn very well to publish. He wants as many people as possible reading his material, which I love BTW, He has a strategy which works for him. But it’s not a strategy which will work for most of you. It will work for 5% of people, maybe. (Have you seen how well he writes)?

I’d suggest, don’t connect with everyone you see and don’t connect with everyone just because they send you a connection request, that isn’t very smart.

Currently, I’m only accepting around 40% of the connection requests I get. The other 60% are simply not a good fit for my network and (here’s the rub) they are much better off without me in their network. I will drive them, their network, and their feed crazy with my sales orientated conversations and posts. (just like this one).

I’ve spent a significant amount of time DELIBERATELY crafting and designing a network which is high value to me, high value to my network as well as my business strategy. So, if you’re not going to add value to the network, to me, or I to you. I’m probably not going to accept.

The average person who needs to use or ‘leverage’ their LinkedIn account to help them to grow their business or perhaps find more business opportunities is misusing the platform if they are connecting without thought and without a clear, defined strategy.

I’ve written about this previously, and I’m sure I’ll need to repeat myself. You need to deliberately design your professional network in the same way as you carefully look for a workplace who has a culture you think will help you to be successful. Your social feed has its own culture.

Why? If you fill your network with ‘randoms’ it will be INCREDIBLY harder to shape your online conversations to be of any benefit to that broader audience. There are plenty of subject matter experts out there, so how can you ‘talk’ (post, share and comment) to a broad audience about everything? You can’t. You might find you’re not getting any traction at all with a broad, large, but weak network. Posting articles, posts, blogs, pictures etc are all designed to drive engagement if you’re connected to 10,000 people, and only 500 people are interested in your business proposition, or what you’re posting about. I’d argue you really only have 500 connections and 9,500 people who’s feed you are destroying with ‘rubbish’ which is not relevant to them. Do you want to be that person who is posting crap which nobody wants to read?

So think about your connection strategy (Do you have one)? And make the necessary changes to make sure your LinkedIn network has the best chance to give you what you need from a true business networking sense.

Failing to do so upfront, will potentially mean trying to ‘undo’ 10,000 poorly crafted connections, that’s not going to happen quickly. You will need to either

A: Abandon the platform altogether,

B: Forget about using LinkedIn as a BDM tool.

C: Delete your account and start again from the beginning.

That’s why I’m selecting ‘IGNORE’ – it’s the polite thing to do.

TO BE CLEAR: – If you’re in IT from Canada, I’m probably not interested – sorry. If you’re in any aspect of sales from within APAC and send me a PERSONALISED connection request, I’ll connect.

A personalised connection request trumps all. Tell me why you’d like to connect, and chance are I will. As will your perfect future customer. You might even start a conversation.

It’s all about the engagement.

The post How To Sell More Without Social Media? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

One thing which has remained and resonated with me over all the many years since my time in the ARMY is the teaching and training style the military used with our recruits and just how successful it was. They were able to take almost anyone from ‘civi-street’ (civilian life) and turn them into an outstanding soldier, all in just 12 weeks, with a wholly repeatable and scalable process.

If I think about what a lot of my current clients are trying to do in the business sphere, it’s precisely the same. Just replace the word soldier with sellers, and it’s the same sort of training problems and situations. Leaders are trying to create great sellers, specific to their situation from their batch of incoming recruits. Yet most businesses are only a fraction as successful as the Army. So, the question begs, what are the secrets that we can take from the military and then replicate in the business sphere?

Let me answer that by using the real-life example of how I and my platoon learnt the obstacle course as recruits in 1987.

I’m sure you can picture the situation already, barbed wire with soldiers crawling underneath, pushing their weapons through a muddy, wet pit. Unable to stand up because they are squeezed ever-closer to the ground by the tangled barbed wire roof.

There is a reason why they train soldiers to crawl under barbed-wire it’s vital in the scheme of things, and if you’ve not been in the armed forces it may not be immediately apparent, so here’s why it’s so important.

You see in battle, NO ONE gets up and runs across the battlefield as you see in the movies. It’s a sure-fire way to get shot, very quickly. If you get shot, and you’re lucky, you’re dead. If you’re only wounded, then it’s going to take 3 or 4 other soldiers to get you out of the battlefield. This scenario is the best-case for the enemy, 5 soldiers out of the action for the price of 1. Of course, if you’re dead OR wounded, you also can’t help anyone else on the battlefield. In short, YOU CAN NOT DO YOUR JOB. So, in order for you to be able to do your job, the number one thing you need to do first is NOT to GET SHOT. To be clear, as a soldier, your number one priority is not to get shot.

By training us, very early on, to crawl very low under the barbed wire the sergeants are teaching us the #1 critical skill we need to do our job.

How to move around the battlefield and NOT get shot. Because in the battlefield, under fire, you crawl everywhere, quickly. Only then can we do whatever ‘soldier task’ we’ve been trained to do to support the mission, such as blow something up, fire a machine gun of whatever.

This is essential information for soldiers, but the real value for us as sales leaders and sales managers is in the way that they teach their recruits and obtain such a high percentage of good quality soldiers at the end of the process.

Think back to the obstacle course with the barbed wire. On our very first pass under the wire, it’s set quite high, let’s say 800mm for example. It’s dry, no mud, we don’t take our guns or rifles, certainly no backpacks and even though it’s pretty easy, many of us still catch our shirts and mostly our backsides on the wire, ripping both our clothes and our skin.

We get yelled at a lot, mostly things like ‘Hurry up you squeezers. Your Mother’s not here to look after you now. Get a move on McInnes”. Not terribly supportive, this is true, but certainly creating some urgency for us to ‘act now’.

Two days later we do the obstacle course again, only this time we are to be timed, and the wire is a little lower, say 650mm high. And so a routine begins. We do the obstacle course on the way back from rifle practice, on the way to lunch, on the way back from a 20k march or on the way to PT (Physical Training)?. Lots of obstacle course practice. At regular intervals, the wire gets just a little lower, and the level of difficulty gets increasingly higher.

Before you know it, we are doing it, in the mud, in the wet, in the dark, tired, complete with our backpacks, webbing, rifles and even people firing rounds across the top of the wire to simulate battle type noises.

Let’s stop for a second and imagine if, as brand-new recruits, we had been subjected to this level of difficulty on day one? For sure someone would’ve panicked and tried to stand up and ended up caught in the wire (and shot if it was a real battlefield).

What I find interesting is, the military’s training success rate remains the same regardless of whom they are teaching. City kids, country kids, big kids, small kids, smart kids and not so smart kids, all trained in the same way and yet, out pops the same battle-ready soldier, almost every time.

If we think about training in business (or in the military), I know people generally want to be successful, people want to do well. They need the information delivered in a way which will help them make the transition from where they are now, to where they need to be. If we want our sellers to be great, we need to chunk our training down, break the learning strategies around selling into pieces where we get to practice and slowly increase the level of difficulty, incrementally. Making it much easier for people to succeed. Just like my Sargent did on the obstacle course.

We all know of those situations where the first-day seller who starts at a company, they get ‘on-boarded’ which means, here’s the HR manual, there are the fire stairs, here is our 17 principles of leadership perfection and then told to hit the phones, the social, the street, or whatever. Only to fail desperately after 5months and go to another employer. They leave with their self-esteem smashed, and both the employee and employer are the losers. #nowinners

I see it all the time. Sales skill development is not a one-time skill session thing. You can only learn a tiny piece of the puzzle in one given session, regardless of how long it is. Yet time and time again, I’m asked to provide a 4hr or 1-day workshop to help sellers upskill their sales or their social skills. Sure, I can give you an overview in 4hours, I can agitate the need for change, I can even provide some actionable strategies or motivate the team to need more, but transformational change doesn’t happen over lunch. (Unless you’re talking about a stroke or a heart attack, these two afflictions seem to make people instantly change their behaviour. I’d try to avoid these if I was you).

Recently, I ran a session for a small start-up with about 6 execs. The CEO kept questioning the social strategies saying, “yeah, great, but how can I scale that”, “How do I give that to my team in the Philippines to get 10 x activity”. I’m saying hang on a minute. You haven’t even tried these strategies as yet, and you’re already trying to find a shortcut? How can you possibly shortcut something when you don’t know how the process works? This is one of the real challenges in today’s’ B2B sales space, it’s ‘cool’ to be an entrepreneur, the language is all ‘scale up’, ‘10X Activity’, ‘Hussle’.

Here’s the truth

1 – You can’t scale up authenticity if you can’t create it one-on-one in the first place.

2 – Taking time to learn & master a skill will pay you back 10X. That’s the real 10X. When you reach out to 10 prospects and they all reply – that’s 10X. Sending 1000 messages at a measly 3% response rate is still 970 people who think you’re a jerk. Low authernticity is why automation SUCKS for 99% of the B2B sellers out there. #Avoid.

3 – Train the way we learn. The 70:20:10 learning principle works for tradespeople with tactical, tactile skills. Sales is the same. After all, typically us sellers are not the smartest people on the planet. #notrocketscience

4 – To create a real change in your selling style or your sales team, you need a sales transformation PROGRAM. Not a once of sales chat, a keynote or a motivational speaker.

5 – You cannot ‘HUSSLE’ poor performance into great results, no matter how hard you try or what time you get up #5amClub.

Figure out what your seller’s core activity is, (the sales equivalent of not getting shot on the battlefield) and get good at it quickly, by simply building a system of regular practice, call it role-play, training, rehearsal, call it whatever you want. #justdoit.

If this training process can successfully get young men (& women) to run headlong into gunfire, across 80meters of no man’s land, then I’m confident it can also teach someone to improve their outreach strategy. Or show them to make 30 calls a day, or build out a social strategy, or handle objections, or whatever, I know this because this is what successful teams do.

Lastly, DISCIPLINE it’s a dirty work in today’s, I want it now, do it later, ‘nimble it’, everyone’s a winner, society, and yet that’s precisely what will make you the star performer. Being contrary, going the extra mile, working late on real stuff, getting in early and doing the numbers and practise, practice, practice. It’s an unpopular piece of advice, I know, but if you want to be productive, successful and fashionable, these are the keys. There are NO shortcuts. #10XSUCKS

The post Lessons From A Front Line Soldier appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Then you know the importance of getting these first meetings off to a good start.

Taking deliberate steps to build rapport has been proven to significantly increase your chances of reaching an agreement.

Whether you’ve finally scored that elusive meeting to meet with the ‘perfect whale’ of a prospect or they fall into the ‘small-is-sweet’ category, it doesn’t really matter. If you have a first meeting booked, you’re going to need to impress, and I think one of the best ways to impress is to differentiate yourself early on. Here are some strategies I can suggest that use a combination of LinkedIn as well as more ‘traditional’ sales skills to set you up for a greater level of first meeting success.

Step 1 – About a week prior to the meeting, view their profile and take notes in preparation, not least because it will send them a notification that ‘you’ve viewed their profile’. This, in turn, will be likely to drive a return visit to your profile, building some nice familiarity prior to your meeting. If your profile is set up correctly they will learn, with only a quick view, where your areas of expertise are and whom you’ve helped previously, as well as, what sort of outcomes they might expect from engaging with you. – A good strategy.

Step 2 – 48-24hrs prior to the meeting, send a connection request. Example. “Hi Gary, We are scheduled to meet the day after tomorrow to talk about widgets, just made sense to reach out for a connection to make it easier for you to leverage some of our previous work or perhaps some common connections and contacts. Hope you agree”

Step 2a – If you were NOT successful in connecting prior to the actual meeting don’t worry. During the meeting, explain that you use LinkedIn as a CRM/ business card-style tool to manage your important contacts and that you would like to connect, would they agree to a connection request? – They will always say ‘Yes’. Politely say, if I haven’t sent you one already I’ll make sure you have one very shortly’.

Step 3 – Rapport building strategies. Building rapport is NOT about deliberately pretending you are something you are not in order to ‘win over the client’ this is misleading and sets the relationship up for a false start. Relationships based on falsehoods are to be avoided. – DO NOT DO THIS. Instead look for genuine areas where you can maximise SAMENESS between you and them and minimise any DIFFERENCEs.

Example 1 – They went to public school, yet you went to private? = Difference. Don’t talk schools. Find something else. However, if you both went to private schools in a similar area you might leverage the possibility that your prospect might know such-and-such from his days at ‘old-boy’ college.

Example 2 – If you’re both from the country now living in the city, (very common), you might ask how long ago or how they became a city person, outlining that you too moved to the city from the country. Each scenario is completely different and using LinkedIn in advance helps provides you with some strategies which are much more likely to increase the levels of sameness and limit the amount of difference, therefore, setting you up for a better start to your first meeting.

Step 4 – Make sure you reach out via AT LEAST one of the following.

• Inmail outlining the common connections, opportunity for them to get a referral, reference of your previous work. (Details on how to do that here). This helps them to build confidence in your ability and provides comfort in their potential decision to chose you as a supplier.
• Provide a case study or ‘TAG’ them in a similar post from a thought leader which talks about a similar topic or strategy that you’re about to meet with them to discuss.

This shows that you’re thinking about the client and their issues and you’re trying to provide some extra ‘insight’ or ‘value’. Makes initial communication easy and we know the more you and your prospect/client get communicating the more information you will be able to glean over time. This will help you provide the absolute best solution for them. This is a good thing.

Step 5 – Optional/ Advanced. Post meeting, provide a genuine LinkedIn recommendation, leverages terrific levels of reciprocity AS LONG AS IT IS GENUINE. Recommendations on LinkedIn are not ‘old-school’ employment style references. (who said they were anyway)? So something simple can work very well. Such as “We met with Gary and his team to discuss their widget requirements. I was very impressed with the depth of knowledge he and the team had around their specific situation and the obviously very high level of research they’d done on potential suppliers, including us. If all my clients did this level of research prior to a meeting, these great conversations would lead to higher quality business outcomes. We really appreciated the levels of preparation they’d done before the meeting. A very professional approach, which is not widely seen” WARNING. Must be genuine to work.

Whilst it’s important to build rapport, don’t go too overboard. One of my favourite sayings from Dean Mannix is “EXPERTS always get paid more than friends”. Don’t fall into the ‘friend zone’.

P.S. Trust is the combination of rapport and credibility. Deliberately building credibility is an important part of first meetings. More on that in another blog post.

The post First Meeting Strategies To Make A Better First Impression appeared first on Head Of Sales.

We surveyed 1700 sales managers and salespeople from both Australia and New Zealand on their sales meetings. It’s not pretty.

58% of all sellers we surveyed said they were LESS motivated AFTER their sales meeting than they were before the meeting. What could be causing this level of motivation drop-off? 

Your terrible meeting. So stop it!

Running sales meetings is a core activity of every sales manager. Yet, based on these results, I say the vast majority of sales managers should immediately stop running them. Not only are they not adding value to their team, but they are also actively DEMOTIVATING them.

The teams’ productivity levels and morale will IMPROVE by merely not having a meeting. Running a bad meeting is much worse than running no meeting at all. 

Stopping running sales meetings might be the most effortless lift in morale and productivity you can implement. Nothing for you to do and the entire sales team get their hour back. Win-win.

Our first-hand research of those 1700 sellers found that.

• 58% of sellers are LESS motivated AFTER their sales meeting than they were before.
• Yet 69% of sales managers say they run great meetings.
• 57% of salespeople see sales meetings in a negative light.
• 49% of Salespeople say meetings have ZERO impact on their sales activity.
• 63% of Salespeople say their meetings have ZERO effect on their sales skills.

IF YOU WANT ACCESS TO THE RESEARCH – SEND ME A MESSAGE.

What should you do?

If your sales meeting is currently an activity readout, such as listing whom you visited last week, your wins, your losses and what you hope to achieve this coming week – it’s simply not worth having. Stick all this detail in your CRM and review it from there.

Are you running through admin, marketing, the latest promotional campaign or product updates? Then it’s not a sales meeting; it’s an admin meeting.

Typically, sales meetings are high-jacked by the high performers in the team leaving those who need the most help feeling isolated and most certainly not looking forward to their turn to contribute, most likely they are attempting to hide. You probably think you’re making people accountable in these meetings. Accountability is better managed through an individual coaching session rather than in front of the entire team. You’re only demotivating your team.

So ask yourself, are you actively increasing your team’s sales skills in your sales meeting? Are you sellers leaving your meetings with something new to do that is relevant to their current selling priorities. If so, well done. If not, why not?

I ran terrible sales meetings for 15 years. I now know better. Helping your team to grow their skill base and overcome their current selling challenges is real sales leadership. Yes, these types of Sales Meetings are harder to run and require preparation and planning. It’s also where SalesITV excels. If you’d like to run a Sales Meeting that drives better sales results, please let me know.

The post Why You Should Stop Running Sales Meetings appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Do you know why they make recruits in the ARMY crawl under barbed wire on obstacle courses?

I was in the ARMY, and I loved it, tank driver & assault trooper (M113), it was enormous fun. The reason they do the barbed wire trick is, so you learn to stay low when moving around the battlefield. BECAUSE if you stay low, you’re much less likely to get shot. The number one thing a soldier needs to do is …. stay alive….. if you get shot, you can’t do much else. Therefore, a critical skill you need to master is moving around the battlefield without being killed. – Make sense? Stay low and go, go, go.

The way they trained us in this skill has some merit in today’s business world. The ARMY leaders (SGTs, CPLs) made us do this repeatedly and slowly increased the level of difficulty of the skill.

And as a result, we got better and better at this critical skill.

My point is. If you need to be good at something, to do your job well, practise it.

Objections are a pretty good example of where this works well.

Objection training (Basic drill).

Step 1 – Figure out what the top 4 objections are you, and the rest of the team are getting every week.

Step 2 – Find who, in your team, is doing the best job right now at handling these objections and get them to tell everyone else what they are saying or doing to get past these objections.

Step 3 – Practise it, then increase the difficulty to secure the learning.

If your objection response strategy is sound and you’ve practised it. Then you and your team should be able to handle ‘standard’ objections with ease in your everyday selling situations whenever they come up.

Most sellers say they’re handling objections correctly, but I’d argue they’re not really. My observations indicate most are easily ‘baulked’ by the very simplest of objections. No time, No need, No budget, We use someone else. Stammer, stammer, stutter, pause… crickets. Ask a team member today what their objection strategy is for “we’ve already got one”?

Does this all sound too hard? Well, chances are you’ve already done it.

Remember the McDonalds, 2 All Beef patties competition from the late ’80s? – I do. They said if you could say the entire ingredients of a Big Mac in 4 seconds or less, you ‘won’ a free coke. This was an example of marketing genius. To this very day, I can easily rattle off the recipe for a Big Mac in well under the 4secs. Just as most of us could back then.’

I’d argue if you can force yourself to remember, practise and regurgitate a burger recipe for the equivalent reward of about .90cents of Coke. Do you think you should practise your objection response strategies so you can sell more, make more commission and have a better week/ day/ life? So why haven’t you?

I don’t know why you haven’t either, but you really should.

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