How to Prep for Your Agency Sales Calls

Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of Inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by the Agency Sales System, the online course designed specifically to teach you how to build a rock solid agency sales system inside your HubSpot CRM. Learn more at dotinbound.com salescourse now here are your hosts, Ryan and Gray.

Welcome back to Inbound Sales Journey. This week Ryan and I are going to be diving into what it looks like to get prepped for your sales call with a prospect. So Ryan, this is, we're going to be talking about crunch time and your crunch time ritual. What do you do in those 10 minutes before you jump on that first call with a prospect? So let's go ahead and dive right in. I'm going to kick it over to you here what you do and then I'll take over from there.

So I'm not the most detail oriented.

Person understatement of the day.

And I'm not always the most prepared person. So I'm not saying that this is definitely right for everyone. However, it seems to work pretty well for me. So a lot of people will spend a lot of time doing research before the call just to get themselves prepared. I find that I really only need 10 or 15 minutes unless I'm, you know, special situations, but typically 10 or 15 minutes. And typically what I'll do is probably what most people would start with, which is company research. So obviously going to their website, you know, for us we do a lot of marketing but also website redesign or development calls. So depending on if I know going into it what type of call it's going to be, I'll focus more on their website or check out, you know, typical, I'll check out their blog and things like that and kind of see what they're doing. Now what I always have found helpful for sales calls and the reasons that I start there and their company site is I always like to just have just a couple of like quick, you know, what seems to be obvious to us and people who are in this space, just pointers and things that they could improve right away. Just in my back pocket that I can just share with people, just show a little bit of like added value right away on the call. I don't always, it's not always like I give this like consultation and this is what you need to change and stuff but just some helpful things. It's good to know some areas that you can point out where they need help. And it also kind of gives you an idea of like where they're starting from. After you get on these calls and do this over and over again, you start to kind of realize and pick it up a little bit faster. And then what I always do is I figure out who I'm talking to. Usually you're going to have that information available and what I'll do is some research just on them. So just googling their name. LinkedIn's obviously a good place to go, but what you're really trying to pull out there is just anything that would create a common bond between you. So whether they live where you like to vacation or. I mean, it could be a variety of different things, but just some, like, easy rapport builders is good to know. And like, I don't make it a big deal or like, make it weird, but if I see something on LinkedIn, like, it's not weird just to say like, hey, like, like I saw your LinkedIn and that you're located here. Like my wife and I like to go on vacation there. And like, you know, it's just, I don't think it's like strange to do that. And it's been really helpful for me in a lot of ways. So just looking for any sort of common connections and things like that. So usually for me it's research the company, get a sense of where they're at, focus a little more on their website. If it's a website redesign project, definitely check out their blog and things like that, if it's marketing, and then go for the individual person, LinkedIn, those types of things to help me build a little rapport, give me some sort of edge.

Nice. I largely do a lot of the same things, kind of start with. A lot of times I'll actually start with the person and I will. The first thing I'm going to do is go look at their contact record. And basically I'm looking at two different things. One is where did the call originate from? Was that a referral that got set up with us? Was that an inbound lead that came through the funnel? Did they fill out a contact form or contact us about a specific service? And I try and have some idea, if possible, what they're looking for ahead of time. So I want to review what they said to us or have given us? And then the other thing I want to look at on their contact record, aside from the answers that they've given to different form fields and stuff of that nature, is I want to see what pages on the website have they viewed or what have they consumed so far, what videos have they watched? So have an idea what their level of understanding about what we do specifically is going into it. Now, obviously on the larger scale of things, there's no great way to know how familiar are you with inbound or how familiar are you with what you actually need here. But figure that out. Then I'll go, like Ryan said, check out LinkedIn or find where they are online and just get a quick sense of what there is. LinkedIn will show you what connections you have shared between them, in most cases between you and that person. So that's kind of place number one to start is who do we know in common? And that sometimes will give you a tip as to how they may have found out about you or just here's, you know, they're connected to somebody at another client. Especially the farther that you get into working in verticals, that'll happen more and more frequently. So you can hit on that there. So that's kind of place number one. And then jumping right to, you know, if they're telling you that they're looking for a website redesign, you're obviously going to look and be interested in seeing what their current site is and get a feel for the site architecture and stuff like that. But that's, that's really all that I do. I really don't. I rarely spend probably more than 10 minutes. Even though I used to spend a lot of time prepping for these calls, now I really don't. I spend just a quick amount of time to cover those basics, get prepped for the call and then jump on. The other thing that I'll typically do if we are having a call and you know, a lot of times you send somebody your link and they'll schedule it for four or five days later. I'll try and make sure that if I don't have an automated reminder going out that I shoot them a reminder and either schedule it for like an hour ahead of time or shoot it out half hour, 15 minutes, something to make sure that they know when and where we're meeting. So that's the one other piece that goes into my pre call ritual. And then right before I jump on I'll pull up, obviously have their website up, turn on do not Disturb on my computer, trying to reduce notifications and close down unnecessary apps in case we're going to be screen sharing, which in a lot of cases we are. And then from that I'll also make sure I have their Contact record pulled up. And if I'm using two separate screens, I'll have that on a separate screen than the one I normally share on. So just the normal things that you go through before a conference call to make sure you're ready to rock and roll. So that's what I have. Ryan, is there anything weird that you do? Like some people talk about the power pose where you're supermanning for two minutes ahead of time. Anything you do to get yourself psyched up for calls or is it kind of. I'm kind of to the point. I never really have gotten into that. I don't know how popular that is for. For meetings, but. But I know some people do that.

Yeah, I don't do anything like that.

Just grab another Cheeto, right? Just kidding.

No, I mean, for me, honestly, the. The less like pressure or like thought like that that I put into it in the beginning, I feel like the smoother it always goes.

Let's hope just kind.

Yeah, just kind of roll into it like your next thing. But I think that, you know, it is important, like some people don't do any prep and stuff for calls. I would just. If you're not doing any prep for the calls or on the opposite hand, if you're doing like a ton of prep for the calls just for us, like, you know, both of us have found we're pretty different people and sell differently. But like 10 minutes is really all you need and I think that's a good. Just have a little crunch time before do your research. I mean, it really can be the difference between losing and winning a sale. Like if you get an advantage of that really helps you with rapport in the beginning and you start and have an awesome beginning to that call, odds are it's going to go well later. So I think definitely have some sort of crunch time beforehand. So hopefully it was helpful to hear what, what we do.

But the. I'm going to make just a couple other notes and we'll wrap up here. Ryan, if you are jumping on a call and you're bringing somebody else into that call to help you out, you know, you're talking about website redesign and you're bringing on somebody from the technical team to help you out. You want to make sure that you spend a little bit of time with them so they understand the context ahead of time. Make sure they've read through any notes from the last meeting and that you've given them a quick debrief on what to expect, what the situation is so that you guys are on the Same page, jumping into it. And then the other thing is if you're jumping into a second call or a third call, you've got a call from prior times you want to review, make sure you took care of all your homework, that they took care of their homework especially. We've talked about assignment selling before. Typically in our sales process there is homework definitely on the client side and sometimes on our side, depending on what the situation is. So make sure that you review that and that's kind of fresh in your mind as you're ready to jump in. And I will say most of the time with the first call, I won't have a slide deck for it. I don't really like slide decks in general, but in a lot of cases I will use a slide deck on a second or third call just to walk people through the process that we're going to go through. So I won't be sharing my screen and using that the whole time. So for the most part that's standardized. But there are times where there are pieces like a web design process overview. I'll pick a different process depending on what the website is. So if we're walking through and here's how, and it's pretty high level, it's not a super detailed process. But if the client has all the design pieces, I'm not going to walk through and show them step by step what we do during the design process if we're just building the development and helping with the strategy on the front end and the implementation. So you might have a little bit of personalization but making sure that you're ready to go with that stuff as well. And I think that's mostly self explanatory but wanted to hit on that because that is part of the pre call ritual as well.

All right, land playing there. Next week we are going to be talking about selling with metaphors. This is something gray that we came up with on our own as a topic. It wasn't user submitted, but something I'm really excited to chat about because metaphors, whether it's been when I was selling houses or transitioning into selling inbound or even software, has been really, really helpful in communicating different ideas and new concepts to people. So we're going to chat about how we do that and maybe give you some ideas as to how you can use metaphors during the sales process to really help convey some serious value to people and help with that. So that will be next time. Until then, have a great week and keep on selling.

Thank you for listening to Inbound sales journey. You can find the show's notes for today's episode@doinbound.com salesjourney that's doinbound all one word.com salesjourney today's show is sponsored by do inbound, the world's first project and process management platform built specifically for inbound marketing agencies. Learn more@doinbound.com if you enjoyed this episode, why don't you head over to itunes and subscribe button? Make sure you leave us a review of the show until next time. Remember, life is a journey. Keep moving forward.