The Rookie Mistake You're Probably Making On Sales Calls

Okay. I have never considered myself to be good at sales. I, you know, kind of always saw these, like, objection handling videos on, like, Instagram or on YouTube, and my only reaction was always, that could never be me. But I have always been lucky. I'm pretty good at marketing. And so leads come in fairly warm. A lot of times they follow me on social media or they're on my email list for a while, and so they've kind of seen my stuff, they know what I'm about. And so, like, by the time they make it to the sales call, they're pretty warm. Now, fairly recently, we made some big changes in our marketing. We flipped our messaging upside down on its head. Completely new marketing. And we actually changed our product quite a bit, too. Massive upgrades for both. But what we forgot was to make sure that sales was in alignment with our marketing and product changes. Now, as my own chief everything officer, I still take all my own sales calls. And I remember the first couple of calls I took after making these massive changes in the company. They were just awful. Like, some of the worst sales calls I've ever had in my entire career. And I literally remember sitting there after one of these calls, borderline, just, like, head in my hands, like, wondering what I had done to become so awful at sales. And this was kind of a turning point because I decided at that moment to never let this happen again. I will never let anything get in the way of my own ability to sell for my own company. Product shift, marketing change, a bad day, none of that is gonna get in the way of my ability to sell. And after I made this sales shift, my first few sales calls went amazing. Same lead quality, same marketing funnel. They were coming through. But everything I was hearing on the calls was, this is exactly the problem we've been having. This is exactly what we're looking for. This is exactly what we need. So cue eye of the tiger training montage. Here's exactly what I did to fix my sales problem so quickly. Okay, so the real issue creating this slump was that my sales, marketing, and product were not aligned. So marketing is on this end, product's on this end. And in my opinion, sales is right in the middle. Right? Because marketing brings people to sales. Sales brings people to the product. And my marketing was great, on point, Messaging is great. Everything. My product is on point. Great client results are through the roof. Everything's going perfectly. But the bridge between those two sales was not good. We made some large changes in our marketing messaging, which was a huge upgrade and was attracting way better prospects. But Sales lagged behind, and sales wasn't on the same page here. We made some changes in our product as well, which was way better operationally. It was way better for our client results, our existing clients who got this upgrade to doing so much better now. But sales lag behind. So sales was on the same old messaging, marketing was on this new messaging. And the offer we're selling also has some pretty large changes. And so there's a fundamental misalignment with what the prospect experiences before, during, and after the call. This just created a ton of confusion for the prospects and a ton of frustration on my end because they weren't picking up what I was putting down. I had kind of an informal script that I was using, just kind of developed, you know, the. The set of questions I like to ask that I've kind of figured out over the course of taking a hundred or two hundred sales calls, but really nothing with any intention behind it. I just kind of developed this over time over taking a lot of calls. And ultimately I found I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by trying to use this old, like, informal script that I just kind of have in my head. Like I couldn't train a salesperson on it. And I was trying to use that and fit this into the new marketing and the new offer. So my main actionable advice for this video is around the questions you ask. And part of this section here is going to seem very, very basic. But I promise I'm going to get into super T because I'm not a sales guru. I'm not the guy who should be teaching the theory behind it. I just want to show you the specific steps I took because I'm really happy with how it's going. But the questions you ask are how you make a lot of objections really easy to overcome in the end. Because, for example, if they admit to you that their business is in really bad shape early in the call, and if things don't change soon, they don't know what's going to happen. And then you get to the end of the call and they try to hit you with an I need to think about it objection. Well, it's really easy to just point them back to what they themselves said in response to your question about how business was doing. So if there's objections at end of the call that you know you're going to need to overcome, there's certain statements you can get the prospect to admit that would immediately overcome that objection, then it's just a matter of finding the Questions that are going to get them to admit they need the thing and they can't wait to get it. So I have a one pager I use for all our sales calls. We do these over zoom. It's just like a formatted Google Doc and it's basically a one pager on our offer. And so it's just line by line. Here's all the things you're going to be getting. And what I was doing previously was I'd ask some questions kind of sort of generally aimed at like, do they need help with marketing? And as soon as I uncover just enough to say they need help with marketing, not that they need our solution, but just they need help with marketing broadly, then I would go, yeah, you know, I think we can help you. And if it sounds good to you, I can go ahead and kind of walk you through how our service works. And this was not working at all. So I'd get to the pitch, I'd start walking them through our offer. And I realize, man, I'm like speaking to a brick wall here because I haven't explained to them why they need half of this stuff. And so now it's just a matter of me trying to, like, convince them they need this rather than having already asked them questions that would lead them to believing they need it and coming to that belief on their own without me having to tell them completely. Rookie mistake. But it's also kind of cool because I've sold like $70,000 months before without ever having figured this stuff out. And so now I'm kind of like, man, like, what could I do now that I figured this out? So what I did is I took this one pager that we used to show what our service entails, and I made another one pager with a list of questions. And so what I did is I took each element of our service over here and I just asked myself, for each element, what do I need the prospect to believe in order for them to realize that this element of our service is crucial for their success? And so then I just came up with three to four questions for each of these that would lead the prospect to believe that. So, for example, the very foundation of our service is a brand messaging blueprint where we go in, we research the client's ideal customer, we go through a bunch of their past sales calls with these customers, we go through their current clients and their success stories and, you know, figure out why did their clients actually choose them over somebody else. And we put this all into one cohesive brand story that we can use in their marketing. And so if I need somebody to believe that this is a crucial component of our service in order for them to actually have success, then I might ask questions like, who is your ideal client? What matters most to them? What type of language do you use with these people that tends to really resonate or like create a massive unlock for them? What can you say that makes them go, how is this guy reading my mind right now? And let me tell you, never come across a prospect who can answer all those questions fully. They maybe have some idea and if you're watching this, you probably have a general idea. But the problem is, as the CEO and as the founder of a company, you get so caught up in the day to day so easily that it makes it really hard sometimes to get in the head of your ideal customer and speak their language. Now, once you uncover them with an issue they're facing, it's really, really important that you label them with this problem. This is something that's not generally seen as okay in real life where you label people with the things they are or the things they do or the problems they have. But in a sales conversation where the ultimate goal is to get them onto a service that's going to help them overcome this problem, you have to label them with the problem. You have to get them to admit to having the problem. It sounds like we got a couple of things cooking that we can work on. It sounds like lead quality is kind of an issue. Sounds like messaging is a bit of an issue. I mean we tried a course, we've tried it online, this, we've tried a webinar and it just like getting blank. So yeah, you hit the nail on the head with that one. And once they admit it, you can bring that back up in the pitch. If you ask the right questions and you label them with the right problems, then it makes it really easy to overcome any objections that they come up with at the end of the call. It makes your service seem perfectly aligned with the problems they have and the solutions that they need. And so if you just systematically work down the line on each element of your offer, asking the questions that lead them to the belief that shows they need your service, you're essentially priming them to say yes at the end of the call when you ask for the sale. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you take action on one thing today, go through this exercise, go through your sales script. If you don't have one, create a sales script and build it based off of your offer and what you need to get them to believe. Because this has been so incredibly helpful for my company, for my sales process, and I think it could be really great for yours, too. See you. Next one.