Creating the Perfect Sales Process, sales training with Ryan Dohrn

Live from the BrainSwell Media Studios, this is the Ryan Dohrn Business Show. Hey friends, on this show we're gonna talk about the acronym DRIVE, D-R-I-V-E. What are you gonna do to differentiate yourself, be relevant, invest in yourself, self-value, and know what your endgame is? That's coming up next along with listener questions from Carrie in Wisconsin and Mike in Ontario. They've got questions about emails going to spam as well as They're having some great meetings, but they're not closing deals. All that and more coming up on this episode. Hey, friends and fans, so glad you've joined us here on this episode. We're going to dig in on your listener questions as well as that acronym I promised called DRIVE. And really, where does that come from? Well, I've been selling for over 30 years. I've got clients that have sold over $1 billion. We know how to do this, friends, but one of the things a lot of us need to redo is we need to refocus and we need to strategize around what is our sales plan for the year. And that's where the acronym DRIVE comes from. So the D in DRIVE is all about differentiating yourself, not only from the competition, but from all the other salespeople out there that are selling as well. So let's just say that you're like me and you sell advertising and marketing solutions, and you've got 10 competitors in a market. That means you have to differentiate yourself not only from your competitors, but also from others in other product areas that might be being sold. So let's just say in a given week your client gets 10 phone calls from people selling advertising solutions. Well, they're probably getting phone calls from other companies selling other types of solutions, for example, software or printing services or whatever the circumstance is. So when you think about differentiating yourself, it's really not just about differentiating yourself from your competition, it's about differentiating yourself from all the other salespeople that might be reaching out as well. One of those things you're going to do to differentiate yourself is the R in DRIVE, which is all about being relevant. But before I get to the relevancy piece, let's talk about other things that you can do to differentiate yourself. One of the biggest things that I do and my clients do— don't forget, friends, I sell every day just like all of you— one of the things that they like to do is use my rule of 3 and 3. It is a differentiating factor, and that is 3 words in the subject line 3 sentences max in every email. One of the other things that I do to differentiate myself from all salespeople is when I leave a voicemail, I don't ask somebody to call me back because they're probably not going to call me back. So unless they know me well or it's my mom or something like that, even sometimes she doesn't call me back. No, I'm just kidding. When you think about the call patterns that you use, your voicemails— I use the voicemail to encourage an email reply. I don't ask someone to call me back. As a matter of fact, I say you don't need to call me back. But if you could reply to the email I sent, I would greatly appreciate it. All right, time of day that you send can be a differentiating factor. I like 11 and 4 because most people don't book meetings at 11. They don't want to interrupt lunch. Most people don't book meetings at 4. They don't want to interrupt going home. Makes sense? So that's my diff— some of my differentiating factors. Okay, drive. That's the D, differentiate. The R is all about relevancy. And that is a differentiating factor. Keep in mind, in most sales scenarios, you want to have a nice, thoughtful 45 to 60 minute meeting with most prospects. It gives you time to ask questions. They can ask questions. Hopefully you'll have a little kumbaya kind of moment at the end of the conversation and they'll buy from you. Unfortunately, 60 minutes is a really big ask. That's a long request for time. So one of the things that I like to do in being highly relevant is really being spot on with what I'm talking about. Most people don't have time for a 60-minute meeting. So relevancy is about me being respectful for somebody's time, asking for say 15 or 20 minutes. The other point of being relevant is being researched, and that is spending time. And that leads us to the I of invest in DRI. Invest. The relevancy, a lot of it is your investment in your time. in knowing who you're calling on, why you're calling on them, assuming what some of their pain points are, and those types of things. Mentioning things they're doing now, try to sell them marketing solutions for what they're doing right now, and that leads into a bigger conversation. See, a lot of us, what we do is we want to have big conversations. I get it, so do I. But typically, smaller conversations that are highly relevant, that are in drive, Typically, you're gonna book more meetings that way. You're gonna have shorter meetings. People are gonna pay more attention because you're highly relevant to them. All right, D, differentiate. R, relevancy. I is invest. Investing time in you yourself for personal growth. You know what that means. And the other piece is investing time in your sales process. That means getting on LinkedIn, doing the research you should be doing, getting into Winmo or Seamless.ai or Perplexity.ai. Perplexity.ai, getting in and digging in on the research that you need to prove to your customers that you've invested in yourself and in them in being prepared for that meeting. So differentiate is D. R is relevancy. I is invest. V is value. Those that are successful in sales always have a plan around value. Price is what somebody pays. Value is what they get. Now, most salespeople are great at selling features, but they're not so great at selling the value benefit from the feature. Never forget, every time you mention a feature, you also then need to bridge and say what this feature means to your business is, and then you give them the value benefit. Sales reps that are great at selling value are also really great at closing deals as well. So the V in DRIVE is understand your 3 main points of value, get great at selling value. Then the E in DRIVE is all about the end game. What is the end game? What's the end game of you watching these videos? You're going to do something with it. What's the end game of the sales call? Is it to get an order, ask for the order, set the follow-up plan? What's the end game? But then also recognize for some of you, the endgame is a big sales goal number. Break that, friends, into bite-sized chunks. The endgame is always something to consider because if you're running a race and you don't know where the finish line is, it is a very tough race to win. DRIVE, D-R-I-V-E. Write that acronym down, friends. Make it a part of your sales process. And I think you're going to be a raging sales success. Never forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. We're not crazy, friends. It's a great career. It'll feed your family for a lifetime. All right, your listener questions coming up next. Stick around, stay close. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends and fans. Ryan Dohrn here. We're answering your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Love to get your questions, so keep them coming. Hey, if you don't get a reply back from us via email or text message, or I record you a little video, we did not receive your question. I answer all the questions come in. It's something I just really like to do. So, all right, first question here comes from Carrie in Wisconsin. Hey, Carrie, you got some family and friends up in Wisconsin. All right, so Carrie's question is, Ryan, I'm having good meetings with customers. Unfortunately, these meetings are not turning into closed business. What should I do? Any advice is appreciated. So Carrie, I am kind of speaking, um, from a point of distance, meaning that I'm not on the meetings, I haven't seen your meetings, so I don't know what meeting format that you're following. But something you said in your email Does alert me though and set off a little red flag. So you know, before I say this, you know that I am here to help you, Carrie, and everybody else. All right, if you're hosting meetings and the meetings aren't closing, you can't say you're having good meetings, the meetings just aren't closing. Does that make sense? So a lot of times what you've got to do is you've got to think back to what was said at the meeting, what was done at the meeting, what was the format of the meeting. See, a lot of meetings are designed to close with the creation of a proposal, meaning you might feel like you had a great meeting, and at the end, your goal then is to leave to create a proposal. Well, that's great, so to speak, but the problem is if you don't get significant enough buy-in at that meeting to warrant a proposal, you're probably creating a lot of proposals that maybe don't even need to be created. So here's 3 or 4 things, Carrie, that you might consider. One is you do need a sales call roadmap. You need something you can replicate. So for example, mine has basically kind of 10 steps in it. I'm not gonna go through all 10 today, but it kind of goes like this. I always validate time first. Hey Carrie, thanks for the 20 minutes. You still have 20 minutes. The second step is I always have a 3-point agenda. Sharing success stories, asking questions. Is it a yes? Is it a no? Is it a maybe? So I always try to set that agenda up front. And then the third main thing that I do is I come prepared to get buy-in. So I come with pricing ready to go. I have to come with ideas ready to go. In the end, I might still need to create a proposal, no problem, but I do need to get significant buy-in before the proposal is created. And that's where the soft close comes into play. Now, some of you have heard me talk about my favorite soft close, and I call it the 1 to 10 close. So here's how it goes. I would say something like this: Carrie, with all that being said, having a great meeting, on a scale of 1 to 10, where are you at? Meaning 1, you're sort of like, yeah, you know, it's okay, and 10, you're like ready to sign me a check today. Where are you at? And you're looking for them to give you a number. If they say 5, You know that you're kind of on the fence at a, yeah, you know, it's okay. It's not a no, it's not a yes. That's not a good situation to be in. So then you would use that number 5. Great. That tells me you're kind of on the fence, Carrie. Where could I— what could I share with you? What could I do for you? What could I provide you that might get you to be more like a 6 or a 7? Now, they might say, hmm, I don't know, when you ask them on a scale of 1 to 10. Then you explain to them what the different numbers mean. So I would say if Carrie said, hmm, I don't know, I'd say, well, a 5 would mean you're kind of 50/50. You're kind of on the fence. You don't know if it's a yes or it's a no. You're kind of in between. A 6, a 7, and 8 would mean you're interested. You just have a few more questions, need to get some approvals and things like that. So kind of where are you at? 5, 6, 7? Now, I definitely don't say, are you a 3? I don't want to lead them down that path. But if they're not a 5, 6, or a 7, and they're not an 8 or a 9 or a 10, that means they're a 4, 3, 2, or 1. And that's something we need to know. Because a lot of times, if we don't know where they're at on a scale of 1 to 10, We're creating proposals for people that don't necessarily need proposals. Does that make sense? I don't want to lose any business, but that soft close is very important. Last thing for you, Carrie, it might be a follow-up plan situation. What you might need to do is be a lot more clear on what your follow-up process looks like, meaning you're going to think about this, Mr. or Mrs. Client, you're going to think about this So tell me what that means. Is that a week-long thought process? Is it 72 hours? Should I follow up with a smoke signal, carrier pigeon, phone call, email, text, cookies? You know, be funny if you're funny, be funny. And it's those types of things. What does that follow-up plan look like? Remember, never end a phone call or never end a meeting without a next step in place. It is so very, very important. So, Carrie, I am kind of shooting from 1,000 feet away because I don't know your exact situation, but let me do this for you, Carrie. If you'd be so bold and record your next sales call on Zoom or whatever, send me a copy of that and I'd be happy to give you some feedback as well. Never forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. I used to say we're crazy. We're not crazy. Well, I mean, we're sort of crazy, but this is a great career, friends. It will feed your family for life. For a lifetime. All right, keep your questions coming, ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, moving on to our next listener question sent in from Mike in Ontario, Canada. And a big shout out to all my friends and my clients up there in Canada. All right, Mike's question. Hey Ryan, I send out a lot of emails. I should probably pick up the phone more. Yes, Mike, you probably should. A lot of times what's being reported to me is that my emails are dropping into my clients' and prospects' spam folders. I don't feel like I'm doing anything differently than I did last year. What is going on? Any help is appreciated. All right, Mike, email, a vital part of our sales lives, right? So why all of a sudden are things different? Well, every year, every month, every week, every second, Barracuda and the Google filters, etc. They're all making updates and they're making changes. So there's several things that could be in play that are causing you to potentially get blacklisted or dropped into somebody's spam folder through a filter. Okay, so the first is your company itself might have been blacklisted by the company that you're sending emails to. So the way that you find that is you go and look up your company's domain name Whether you're using SpamCop or something like that, go and look that up. Usually that is not the case, but it can, it can happen. The next thing you might consider is what is it that you are sending. So there's a lot of triggers for email filters. Now, in a subject line, excessive capitalization, excessively long subject lines, excessive punctuation— not punctuation, excessive punctuation— and then of course any of those trigger words. Deal, special, last-minute chance, those type of phrasing and words. And obviously anything that's adult-oriented in a subject line or an email is obviously going to more than likely get picked up. Now it may or may not be the subject line, although spam filters tend to put quite a bit of weight on the subject line. I would say what I observe to be the most common reason that I get dumped into somebody's spam folder is too many links in an email And too many attachments or attachments in general. So let's talk about the links, Mike, and everybody. Here's what I've observed. I have no stats or evidence to back this up. It's just what I have observed. I've observed anytime I put more than 4 or 5 links, including my signature, in an email, I notice that I tend to get dropped into people's spam folders a little bit more often. So what I try to do is keep no more than— try to put no more than 2 links in any email that I send. Now, some of you, your signatures have a link to LinkedIn, a link to your Google profile, a link to your Facebook profile. I mean, so just watch out for that. So if you've got emails with lots of links, links in your signature and attachments, the chances of you getting picked up in a spam filter are actually pretty high. So keep the links to a minimum. Try to keep the length of the email short as well. So if you follow my rule of 3 and 3— 3 words in the subject line, 3 sentences max— get rid of a lot of the links, stop doing a lot of attachments, more than likely you will get through. Now keep in mind, once you've emailed somebody and they've replied back, that's a trigger for the email filter that you've already bounced back and forth once. You haven't bounced, but you know what I mean. You've gotten to them, then you've gotten back from them. Usually you're free and clear to kind of do what you want back and forth, but not always. One of the biggest problems I find though is attachments, specifically PDF attachments. We all know that all the hackers out there have figured out how to put viruses in PDFs, so PDFs get picked up a lot, especially if the PDF itself has a bunch of links in it and those links are to all kinds of external things. So if you are going to send a PDF, make sure it's a graphical PDF without a bunch of links in it because the link total is just going to be too high. But for me, when I'm prospecting folks, very few links, no attachments, keep it really simple. If you're emailing a customer of yours and things aren't getting through, ask them to make sure their IT department whitelists you or somehow do that yourself But then also do a couple of tests. See, I'm so worried about PDF attachments that if I sent you as a client a PDF attachment, I would then immediately send you another email with no attachments and no links saying, I just sent you an email with a PDF, just double-checking that it reached you. And that's also a little bit of a sales tip and sales strategy in and of itself. So, Mike, you know, I'm looking at this from an outsider's perspective. I don't know exactly what you're saying you're doing. But do a little math there. Look into what you're sending. Look into your links, your attachments, your subject lines. And this goes down to the saying that I always use. You hear me say it all the time, Mike, and everybody. If sales was easy, this was an easy job, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. It is a great job. It's gonna feed your family for a lifetime. Sometimes though, friends, we just have to adjust our game depending upon filters and changes with the internet and all those different kind of stuff. So keep watching the show, listening to the podcast, et cetera. And we'll be sure to keep you updated on all of that. All right, friends, keep your listener questions coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, that's the show for this month, the episode for this month. We sure appreciate you listening and watching. If you're on YouTube, be sure to subscribe and like down below. And we'd sure love to come into your office or to your conference, and I'd love to speak to your teams and get them all pumped up for sales success. You can always reach out to me over at ryan@ryandohrn.com. Hey, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. I sure appreciate it, and we'll see you on the next show.