Scale Your Sales | 4 Proven Strategies To Optimize Your Sales Process [WEBINAR]

Board button. I'll let people as I come in. All right, so you guys saw the title of this webinar. Scale your sales 4 strategies to optimize your sales process. Here I have some slides I'm going to show you guys. It's actually going to be a mix of two of our modules we deliver to our clients.

But here's why I want to talk about this today. Anytime I see a common theme that pops up in my conversations with clients or prospects, I think it's, I always think it's a good idea for a webinar. And I think the reason you decided to attend is you probably know your process could be a little better or fine tuned. And I will tell you when I look at the challenges right now when it comes to sales processes in this industry, number one, too many teams don't have one.

And what happens over time is as producers get hired, everybody has their own way of doing it. And then all of a sudden, before you know it, you've got an agency with six producers and six different sales processes.

Not a good way to scale.

And so that, that's challenge number one. Challenge number two, even if you have a sales process, if I said cool, is it repeatable? Is it on paper? Does everybody in your team know about it? No, it's in my head. That's the other problem. You have a process, it's right here. That's not a process. You gotta have something that's documented, something that's repeatable. And I'm not gonna go over the full scale of a process today. What I am going to share are four things we've done with our process. Four things I did with my process as an advisor that I think help you optimize sales process.

But before I get to those four things, my message early on is simply start with a process.

And I'm going to give you the biggest nugget I might give you right now. Guys, there is no perfect process. Just have a frickin process. People spend way too much time searching and seeking the perfect sales process. You just got to have a process. Let me give you an example. When I was a benefit advisor, my goal was okay, in an ideal situation.

I'm going to have a discovery meeting with a prospect. If that goes well, I'm going to follow up because I'm probably going to have to collect some information.

Then that's step two. Once information is collected, I'm going to analyze said information and I'm going to come back with a proposal based on what information I have so for me the ideal situation was a three step process discovery meeting. Collect info, come back with suggestions based on collected info.

A little note on that that this is not one of the four things. If you are in a position like I was where information collection is a part of the process, it's probably mosty.

You have to make the information process collection process simple.

I know you would love to have as much information as you can but I am here to promise you the more you try to get, the more they're going to go. Too much hard work. Peace out.

Keep it simple. The minimum amount of information you need to come back and make a good suggestion. A good strategy is what you want to strive for.

I've seen too many advisors not lose business or lose opportunities because they're trying to get too much information and then the prospect eventually says no, no, we're too busy, no thanks.

So that's number one. Now if you represent a care industry solution where you have to gather certain information, I get it but I know when I look at the names most of the folks here are probably on the advisor side versus industry solution side. You can go, you can be a little better at what you're trying to get.

Now you'll notice I also shared my ideal strategy that I used to use and it had three steps. Discovery, gather information, come back with suggestions AKA the proposal. If you're going to create a process, my only other piece of advice is do not make it a seven or eight step process.

Again. Prospects going to hear a lot of work. No thanks. Mr. McNeurland, you raised your hand.

Yeah, sorry if I'm jumping the gun. Andy, you had shared with us once, I think it was in a send a few years ago but you had some kind of questionnaire that you were giving your prospects.

Yeah.

Are you going to get to that? Because that was gold.

That's going to be one of the things so. But my point guys is as far as your process is concerned, got to keep it simple. Here's why. If the prospect believes they can go down the process, they will.

And the last thing I'm going to say before I dive into the slides and we get into optimizing your process.

The more you talk about what your process looks like early on, the better it is going to be. So one of the first things I would share in a discovery meeting.

Is this is how our sales process works. You don't have to use the word sales if you don't want. This is how our process works. Make it very clear for them. One of the reasons prospects often get stuck in a pipeline they don't want, they don't know what to do next.

Just be very clear what the process is. They're not stupid. They know you're there to try to win their business. You're not there to just give goodwill and advice out. You want to, you want to earn their business. But share what your process looks like and it's going to be better for you. So now let's dive in. I tend to not waste time here. Just want to get right to the strategy. So let's talk about a couple things you can be doing right now and I will actually put this in presentation mode for you guys.

So what we're going to start with, number one, the first way to ought to optimize your sales strategy, your sales process is automate it as much as you can. In fact, I'm going to go out of this because I'm going to skip around a little bit to make it helpful for you. One of the biggest problems we have in the industry right now is too many people are recreating the wheel with every new opportunity. I don't know if anybody on this call feels that way right now. Like you feel like every new prospect that comes to the door, I'm doing something different with. That's a problem. That means you don't have a process.

You should be able to operate the same process with every prospect no matter what their problem is, no matter what their goal is.

Now here are some truths about processes. Without clarity, your prospect will not know what to do next. You must retain control throughout the process.

And you have to remember you are interviewing your prospects as much as they're interviewing you. There is not a person on this webinar right now that likes RFPs. And there's a reason the odds of winning an RFP are very small. I think the number I heard is over 70% of the time a company does an RFP, they stay with the same advisors.

But the bigger reason that's so hard to win the business is whose process is that? It's the prospects, not yours. You're. You're in somebody else's process.

You want to retain control. So the first way to optimize. Here's strategy number one. Develop and build a proactive sales process. What does that mean? Here we go. I am going to share with you. I think the best way to teach is not how to. I don't want to tell you what to do. I'm just going to show you what we do because we Think it's successful and it's what I did when I was advising.

What does a proactive sales process look like? Well, number one, you gotta automate it as much as you can. So here's what our process looks like. Step one, we use a calendar link to book all calls. If you want to optimize your sales process, start using a calendar link to book calls.

Why is that important? Because.

I don't know about you, but without a calendar link, here's what my life used to look like. I get a prospect who's interested, I'm excited. And then now for the next three days, we are in an email snowball fight to figure out a freaking time. And they got three decision makers. So now we gotta wrangle the monkeys together to get everybody. It's like herding cats, right? Why don't you just give them a calendar link and then they get to pick the time.

Now here's why that's so beneficial. You get to control when they book, so you get to control your calendar and they pick the time, which makes their life easier. So the first thing we do from a standpoint of optimizing our sales process, use a calendar link. We automate that.

Here's why we use a calendar link, though. This is where the automation comes in, folks.

This is how we keep our sales process proactive. The second you book a call with us.

You get a welcome email.

So to just open up the kimono, we have the paid version of calendly, which lets us build workflows. And we have it set up that the second you book an appointment through our link, you get an email that goes out.

And it welcomes you.

Now, we use an assessment as part of that. You don't have to, but what I do want to share with you is when you get that email from me, from us, there's two things that happen that I think are very vital in a process.

One, you get a video for me. There's actually a video in the email. It says, hey, great meeting you. Looking forward to, you know, looking forward to meeting with you soon. And then I go through via video, I go through everything we're going to cover in that meeting.

That's proactive.

For too many agencies right now between the moment the appointment is booked and the moment that call the meeting happens. Most agencies aren't doing anything.

Worse yet, we might be sitting there going, I hope they show up.

We have got to retain control of the process between the booked and the call booked in the meeting. Best way to do that is send them an email if you have a video in it of you. Even better, it does not have to be personalized. Says, hey Andy Deary, looking forward to meeting you. When we get together, here's what we're going to be covering. Here's the agenda. I wanted to make sure you are prepared for the call. You know what that does for you folks that builds credibility, especially if you're trying to go after the C suite. You tell them what you're going to cover because you're trying to respect their time. They will love you.

So the two things we accomplish is the video so they can see me if they haven't met me before and I let them know exactly what we're going to cover.

Now the third step here between booked and meeting is we send out a reminder email.

Again, it's automated because we use calendly workflows do it 24 hours in advance. You get an email and it just says, hey, looking forward to our meeting tomorrow at 10am.

Just a reminder about what we're going to be covering. Now when I was an advisor, I would actually attend.