The Top 10 Tips To Help Any Sales Rep Close More

I wanted to give my top 10 simple tips to help any sales execs close more deals. What are my top 10 ideas to help any AE, any sales rep on the Zoom, on the phone close more deals? And these tips are on the surface targeted toward AEs, but this will help founders, this will help CEOs think about basic tweaks that will increase close rates, decrease sales cycles and help you close more. Because part of the real magic in SaaS is taking X leads, 10 leads, 20 leads, 50 leads, 100 leads a month, and not just going and getting more leads. And that's important. You need your VP of demand gen, you need your outbound. But in many ways, the real art of sales is closing more from what you have. That's the art. And that's why you, when you bring in a great sales leader, you'll often see sales quickly grow 20, 50, 100%. It's not because they find more leads. It's because they drive up deal sizes, they close faster, they take risk out of deals, and they do that magic and more happens with leads. So what are my top 10 tips for AEs, but really for anyone that'll help you close more? So the number 1 tip for AEs is be strategic when you bring the CEO into deals. And founder CEOs tend to really struggle in many ways with the transition from founder-led sales to VP of sales or just sales team led sales. And the number one mistake founders, CEOs make is they just quit being in sales. They're so relieved to have a sales team. They're like, I want my time back, but it doesn't work that way. As a founder CEO, you never get your time back. If you spent 20 or 30 or 40% of your time in sales before you hired a head of sales, you never get that time back. But what you should get is better use of that time. So your head of sales or your AEs until you have one of your senior sales, They should get quotas. They should get X amount of deals per month where they get to grab the CEO and generally bring her or him into the middle of the deal. The sales leader or rep has to be able to start the deal and they have to be able to add urgency at the end of the deal, which is one of the hardest parts of sales, which is creating urgency when there is none. But bring the CEO into the middle and the CEO should be doing at least 4 to 5 sales calls a week and follow-ups and that alone is hours of his or her time. So Make sure, don't shy away as an AE or sales leader from bringing your CEO into deals, just use her more strategically, use her in the middle, because customers love to talk to the CEO. They love to talk to the CEO of a huge company, but they also love to talk to the CEO of a 5-person, 10-person, 50-person company. Buying a vendor is a big deal to most customers and they love to talk to CEOs, so use her strategically to close a big deal. Tip number 2. Slow it down and hyper-personalize these darn emails and communications. Enough with the endless cadences, enough with the automated sends to 1,000 prospects, they don't work. Well, they work a little bit, okay, and if you have a very inexpensive product, you do need to do lead nurturing, automated lead nurturing, but probably your marketing department should be doing this, not sales. It is, there's nothing wrong with tools like Salesloft and Mixmax and Outreach, they're very powerful, you should all be using a Mixmax or a Salesloft or an Outreach in your sales team, but you should not be misusing it to be lazy. No one wants 78 breakup emails. Slow down, identify your top 10, 20, 40, 50 prospects and research them and write them an email. Hey Linda, here's how I truly can help your company with my product: answer, solve your prospect's solution. You will close far more by hyper-personalizing your email than sending endless spammy outreaches and communications. Number 3, and new AEs and low ACV AEs and transactional AEs get this all wrong, you have to pitch all the stakeholders. The person that inbounds off the website may not be the buyer. They often aren't the buyer, they're often the researcher, they may be too junior. Even if they are sort of the buyer, they often don't control the budget. So your job for any deal of any material size, later it might be $20K, $50K, $100K, $200K, but Newer days it might be 2K or 1K a year, but you have to pitch all the stakeholders. Find out who they are. Don't just do one demo to Elaine who comes in. What about her boss Bob? What about Bob's boss Jane? Ask who else needs to see the product. It's better to do 3 demos or 5 demos or 10 demos than one, even though you seem like you don't have a lot of time, because the more folks you pitch, if you do it right, the higher the odds you close the deal. Do a personalized demo for everyone, and it may take 5 times as many as you thought, but it's worth it, and it will also train you to be a better rep. Point 4, this one always works, start a weekly webinar for all your prospects. As an AE, you can do your own webinar for your own prospects, that's okay, you can invite your 50, 100 folks in your list each month to do a webinar, it's even better if the company sort of does it and maybe they round robin, but what's important is that every week you do this webinar, say every Wednesday at 10 AM, it's always the same time. And why is this powerful? Well, we forget how different people like to buy. Some folks like to do a self-service trial, that's like me, it's probably like you if you're watching this, you love to try products and use premium products, but not everyone likes to do that. Some folks want, on the other end of the spectrum, they want a one-on-one. So there's premium on sort of one side, there's a one-on-one demo. I want to book an hour of my time and I want an AE to show me, show me the app, do that classic demo. Some folks want that, but you know what, A lot of folks want something in the middle. They want to show up to something live, they want to see a demo, they want to ask a few questions, but they don't want to be on the spot. They don't want it to all be about them. They're not even actually sure what the right questions to ask, so they want to join a webinar with 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 other folks so they'll ask the right questions, so they'll hear what, what they ask in the live demo. So every week try to do a webinar that at least involves a 5 or 10-minute demo and a chance for Q&A, and even if only 1 or 2 or 3 prospects come to that webinar each week, it's magic. But the magic only happens if you do it every week like clockwork and email it out so they all know when they're ready they can come, and they'll also know they can bring other folks in their organization. That's magic, because even if Bob sold, he may need to bring Linda and Jane in to see your product, and they may want to jump into a 20-minute webinar, a 20-minute joint demo. So do a weekly webinar, it always works. Point number 5 for AEs, and this is true for CEOs, boy let me tell you too, you've You've got to listen to each other's calls. Get Chorus, get Gong, use other tools, use things built into Salesloft and others, but you've got to listen to your AE's calls in general. And most important, listen to the top closers. We're all distributed today, folks. We can't sit in one room and listen to how those top 2 or 3 reps close in the same room. You've got to listen to their calls, not just the magic of their pitch. You'll often hear less magic in the top closers than you think. It's not their used cars persona, it's the incredible way they handle objections, it's how they solve problems, it's how they listen to the issues the customers have, it's how they package the product up, whatever it is, listen to them. If you listen to the top closers, you will steal at least 2 or 3 tidbits that will make you a better AE, and for the CEO, you've got to listen to the mediocre folks and the poor folks. Why is Bob performing more poorly than Jane? Listen to Bob's calls. I bet you Bob is saying, dumb things, or Bob is saying the wrong things, or even it may be as simple as Bob is not as confident as Jane. But listen to far more calls every week than you have. Everyone should be listening to the top reps' calls. That should almost be a requirement for the top reps that they distribute their top calls. And as a leader, you should be listening to the folks that are struggling. Okay, next point, point 6. This sounds silly, but it's not. Your AEs have to deeply, truly understand the product. They have to know every feature and every use case. What does that mean? It means constant training and strong onboarding. You know what destroys deals? When a prospect comes in, they're excited and the rep doesn't really know the product. Maybe that's okay when you have a mega brand. It's not okay. It ruins that confidence. It ruins the appetite of a prospect to take risk in a vendor. So you've gotta train your sales team every single week, and yet you've gotta listen to the calls and see where they're weak. And even, and this will make you sad, even when they say the wrong things about your product. Mediocre and weak reps will constantly say the wrong thing. They won't say, "I'm not sure, I'll get back to you," because they worry about saying that too many times. They try to be confident and they'll just, they'll say the wrong thing about your product and blow the deal. So everyone, your sales team has to be an expert in the product. They can make mistakes, but think about training them at least once a month ongoing on the product and have extremely strong onboarding for new reps. Don't assume they'll understand the product really at all, even if they understand the homepage and the basic value proposition. Okay, next point for reps: work harder. Okay, what do I mean? What I mean is, if you study the best sales reps, the best AEs, they are ruthlessly efficient with their time and they work very hard. Does that mean they work 100 hours a week? No, sometimes the worst reps work the most, they're struggling, they can't close anything, so they seemingly work all day and night doing— wasting their time, but work ruthlessly hard. You cannot waste any time. The best reps get done more with each hour, and study their efficiency and copy it. Okay, the next point for adding, for increasing sales almost overnight, this one sounds obvious, but it's very counterintuitive to people. You have to treat each prospect like a queen or king, especially the small ones. Look, when the huge deal comes in, when Google or Facebook or whoever, Exxon comes in, they want to buy, of course they're treated— everyone sees that lead come in, they're treated like royalty, they're treated like everything matters, but the rest aren't. The small businesses, the companies you haven't heard of, the third-tier customers, They're treated transactionally and that's backwards folks, it's backwards. Every buyer's time is precious, every purchase of software is risky, even if your product's inexpensive there's risk in deployment, there's risk in data loss, there's risk in business process change. Changing the way you do your business is a big deal, even just changing an email solution, changing an internet provider, even just changing what you use for social media, there's risk, things are already working. So treat each prospect like royalty, and if a deal is too small for certain reps, then segment your reps. Give all the small leads to one rep that has the time to treat them like royalty, because every business owner, their business is important to them. If you can find a way to treat each of them like royalty, I guarantee you, you'll close up to 20-50% more than when you treat these leads just like they're too small, they're not worth your time. It never works. No one wants to be treated that way. You don't want to be treated that way. Make this happen, segment your leads between small, medium, and large, and reps and magic will happen. Okay, next, and boy, the best reps always do this and the mediocre ones don't. You've got to add value in every interaction with a prospect or customer, with every email, call, and Zoom. You have to add value. No random email follow-up. How are you making every interaction count? Watch the best reps at your company or or outside of it. Every time they're moving the ball down the field, how can I help you? What can I demo? Who can I show the product to? How can we get you into production? How can we deploy you? What can I do to help? What are the next steps so that we can get you using our amazing product? Do not, whether it's a call or a Zoom or an email, do not end that communication until you have added more value. Each value moves that ball down the field, and just randomly asking for next steps doesn't get you anywhere. Okay, penultimate bit of advice, be hyper-responsive. Boy, people are getting worse and worse and worse at this. They're all sending endless unstructured cadences, the same emails to everybody. They're getting lazy and they're getting less responsive. Who wants to wait 24 hours when they hit contact me? You know how long you should wait when you hit contact me? A second. Okay, in theory, a second. No one wants to wait for a rep to call them back the next day. If I've gone to the trouble to go to a website, research your product, get interested, and want to talk to somebody, I want to talk to somebody right then and there. Your prospect should be called back within 90 seconds. If that's not possible, okay, but measure it and drive those times way down. You're going to be deeply disappointed in how long it takes some of your reps to get back to prospects. Put an SLA, take leads away from them if they're not called back in 5 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour. Watch magic happens when folks are called back almost instantly, and especially watch when magic happens when the competition doesn't do this. If you do it and they don't, people are going to trust that vendor that is highly responsive. You have two choices when you're a service provider, and we're all service providers at some level. You can be absolutely the best. If you're the best vendor on planet Earth, people will pick you even if you treat them poorly. Like, people will always pick number one even if they're— To some extent the AE is slow, is terrible, is non-responsive, but you either have to be far and away the best or be the most responsive. Service is a feature and you have to start with the sales process to see that sales is as responsive as the rest of the company. So get back to that prospect immediately. Yes, deploy Intercom on your site or Gorgeous or other products, that's great, but the human beings, the sales reps should be, should respond almost instantly. It's magical when they do. Okay, and the last one. This is my bit of advice to sales reps, and for CEOs, you'll figure this out with CS and sales engineers and others, but the most important bit of advice I can give to AEs is help your customers more after the deal closes. So many, 99%, maybe not 99, 90, 95% of AEs, of sales reps disappear when the contract is Adobe-signed or DocuSign'd. Great, hooray, you'll get your commission. But look at all that, watch on SaaS, look at all the net retention of all the cloud companies that have gone IPO, the Datadogs and the Slacks Twilio's. They're all 140% net revenue retention. That means those accounts grow 40% each year. As a sales rep, you want those deals. Those are the— that's the easiest revenue for you to get, and the easiest revenue for the company to get is those upsells. But if you don't maintain a relationship with the customer, it won't happen. And yes, if you reach out to your customer after the deal close, you know what, they might ask you to do some work. They might say the deployment's been rough, or working with 'J' in CS has not been that fun. You might have to do some work if you email them after the deal. You can't email your customer after the deal and they need help and you not give them help. It's fraught with peril, but amazing things happen on getting more seats more quickly, on upsells, on retention, if you help them after the deal closed. Even if there is a CS department, they've taken the time to get to know you as an AE, they've taken the time to trust you. Don't disappear on them and you will close more. All right everybody, good luck out there. Try some of these 10 steps. I guarantee you whatever amount of leads you have today, you're gonna close 10, 20, 40, 50% more without even having to generate one single more lead and one single more prospect.