The Simple 3-Step Sales Formula. EP #332 - Den Lennie

G', day, guys. It's Dan here. Thankfully, Covid has gone and I am back in full health and backfiring on all cylinders today. Today I wanted to talk about sales and sales calls and the important aspect of building rapport early in a conversation and having the alpha position, any sales conversation, so that when someone makes an inquiry, generally speaking, what they're keen to do is get to the price as quickly as possible. And we had a discussion this morning on the Elite call about a process for this. So I'd actually share it with you today and give you that process.

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The biggest obstacle in sales is having a good sales system, a good process that you can lean on that is the same every single time you have a call with a client. Now, there's a couple of different ways to look at this. If you've got someone who's been referred to you, then they are what I call a warm lead. If someone has responded to something they've seen online and reached out to you and booked a call with you through your website, they're kind of warm as well, because they're reaching out.

So what I want to talk about today is how you control that sales conversation from the outset to ensure that you maintain the position of strength and authority during that call. Now, what I will say is sales is both an art and a science, and experience will definitely help. So don't stress too much if it's something that you find really challenging, because we all did to begin with. But the more you use this simple system, the easier you will find the sales process. So let me get straight into it. So the reason that most sales calls go awry is because the client's question that's in their mind, they may or may not be saying to you is, but they're thinking it is, how much is this going to cost me? How much is this video going to cost? What's involved? How much? That's the real question. So if they turn up to the call and kind of ask you straight away, how much is it going to cost for a video? You might say something like, well, look, you know, it's actually very hard for me to just give you a price, but I'm not evading giving you a price. I actually want to give you some Guidelines by the end of this call. But it's gonna take me 15 or 20 minutes to. To kind of re understand more about what you're doing. Do you have that time right now? And if they say yes, you go, cool, let me walk you through a process. If they say no, I just need the price, then what I would say is, well, in order for me to give you a price, I need to have 15 minutes of your time. So if now is not a good time, when could we talk about this in more detail? Because if you don't get some really good time on the phone with someone, you don't actually understand what they need, what they want, what's important to them, and you're just literally shooting into the dark. Now, if they come on the call and say, okay, yeah, I do have some time just now, but I'm just really keen to get a price, a ballpark figure. You can say, totally understand. And then what you do is you do is you reflect back the question and say, I totally understand that you want to get a ballpark figure. This video, I promise you, within the next 15 or 20 minutes, once I understand more about what you're looking to achieve, I'll be able to give you a ballpark figure. Is that cool? So we're always reinforcing that. We're understanding them, we're listening to them, and that we will give them what they came for. At that point, people start to relax a little bit. Now, one analogy which came up on the call today was like, you know, before I can give you a price, it's a bit like walking into a car dealership and saying, hey, I want to buy a car. How much is a car? And of course, you don't know if you want metallic paint, if you want three doors or five doors, whether you want a sports pack, whether you want the bigger engine. So what we've got to do is understand that so you can actually say something like, to a client. So all we want to do is going to understand what you need by asking you some questions.

Similar analogy might be in the emergency room, where they have the triage department, where they bring the patient in and they assess what's required before they prescribe a course of medication or treatment. That's what you're doing as the salesperson in your business. So what I do is I have a list of.

Kind of real themes, I suppose. So I have a client name, and I put the client's name there. And what I do is I type during the call, and I have three Main areas that I want to look at. The first one is the problem. What is the problem they're currently experiencing? Now, the second part of that is, what is the goal? What is, what is the goal for this video project? What are they looking to achieve? And then the third is, what does the future scenario look like? If we can get this achieved to the level at which the client is excited about what, what does that look like now, before we get there, we want to give the client a chance to tell us a bit more about them and we want to try and build some rapport. Now, you can do this in 15 minutes. If it's a triage call. If you've got longer, even better. But the first thing I usually say to a client is, so tell me about you and your role and your business. What is it you do? Who do you do it for? And tell me about your products and services. This will allow them to go through a spiel that they're probably used to going through about them, their business, the product or service. But what happens here is we're letting them tell us everything about what's important to them. They'll probably start talking about, we used to work with other video companies. We've done X and Y before. But what you want to do is just ask some questions around that. So, you know, tell me what you do, what do you sell? How much does that sell for? What are your margins? Like what, what are you, what's important to you when it comes to communicating the message about your product or service?

What kind of stuff have you done before? How was successful? Is that, what other marketing, excuse me, tools do you use? Do you run ads? Excuse me, how. How do you get people to see and experience your product or service?

Then what we do is we, excuse me, excuse me saying I've got rid of COVID So tell me about the specific problem you're looking to solve here. What is the problem that you're looking to solve in your business that you think video might be a good solution for? And you know, why? Why do you think that? And what's got you to here? And what reference points are you pointing to? And why do you think this is a good solution? What have you done to battle test this? So you're asking them to really tell you more about their goal, sort of the problem that they're experiencing, and then they'll probably start telling you about their goals in between that. But what you can do is say, so what is it specifically that you want this video to do? What is the One thing this video has to do and who does it need to talk to? And you know, do you have a script already or do you want to help with scripting? You, you know, do you want to really gauge, you know, what level of experience do they have with video, what kind of help they're looking for? If they've done it before, did they have a good experience, they have a bad experience.

And then we go into the future scenario which is, you know, really, you know, if we, if we could be a good fit here and we can actually make this video work really well for you, what is it specifically that you are looking for?

Now? Within that, there are some subtexts that you're really looking to tick off. And these are their motivation. How motivated are they to fix this problem? Are they just in the early stages of discovery or are they going through a process of trying to establish a supplier so they know exactly what they're doing, the urgency, how quickly do they want to do this? Really important, because that will often determine someone's needs and motivation to, to put pen to paper and sign on the line. And we're also looking for price objections. When we ask questions like, you know, tell me about your product or service, how much sell for, what kind of profit margins are you running? You know, what is, what does a sale mean? You're getting a sense of where they're at. If they're selling a product for, you know, $100 and they sell 10 of them a week, they're probably not able to afford to do a video with you. But if they're a million dollar product and there's a 30% margin, they might be making 300,000 per system, who knows? So you're getting a better idea of the price and price objection. The other thing you're doing is you want to build trust. Building trust throughout the sales process is really important. You want them to trust you and you want to know you can trust them. And then finally, we're looking for a commitment. We're looking for a sense of how, how serious are they about moving forward this project? And the commitment part, you can say during the future scenario phase is, well, look, it sounds like we can help. Would you like me to share a little bit more about how I think that might look? And then you're always asking permission to move to the next stage of the process. And so with that in mind, what we're doing is moving people through that process. So the process is.

Problem. So we're establishing a rapport and then understanding what the Problem is then moving to the goal. And then from the goal we're moving to the future scenario. And at the future scenario, that's when we can bring it back to. Well, look, I think we can help you. Let me. Would you be okay if I shared some ideas on how to do this? Now you can either give a ballpark figure here, which is also.

An opportunity to gauge price. Objection. You can say, well, in the past we've done projects similar to this, anywhere between, you know, 15 and 30,000. How does that land with you in terms of the budget you had allocated this. And they might be like, yeah, that sounds reasonable. Or they might be like, oh my God, that's a lot of money. Or no, that seems fine. At which point you can say, well, if you get a positive response, what I would be saying is, well, look, I think we've got enough information now. What I'd like to do is go away and give you a couple of options as a starting point and then we'll come back and have another meeting and discuss how they might look. And I just want to emphasize at this stage we're really just still in a discovery phase together where I want to give you some ballparks. And then once we start working on those ballparks, we can start to really knuckle down on the specifics that are important to you and then we can whittle that down and put together a final quotation for you. So that, that's the sales process. It's quite a simple process, as are most things in business, quite simple. It doesn't mean it's easy or straightforward. And you know, when you're dealing with high pressure situations like sales, when someone's just like, at you to get a price, it takes a bit of skill and, you know, experience to, to negotiate and bring the call back to your, you know, your, your focus. But what you'll certainly get with this, this process in this framework is the.

Power of being able to just look at your page and bring it back to problem go future scenario. So guys, I hope you found that helpful. If you'd like to learn more about sales and more about this, feel free to join our free group skill your video business. The links will be below or over at my website, videobusinessaccelerator.com you click on the button there and join the free group. I'm going to be starting to do some regular support calls to help you get to grips with some of this stuff and grew your business here into 2024 and get some support.

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