Step 2 of a sales process focuses on guiding prospects through change. Since 99% of people resist it, reps should talk only 30% of the time, ask ten critical questions, and use visual one-sheets showing success stories and financial benefits. Record everything in your CRM for the proposal stage.
All right, let's move on to step number 2. Now remember, step number 1 was all about identifying gaining access, about identifying your access issues. Step number 2 is all about decisions and change. Now remember, the reason this is important is because you are asking a potential customer of yours to make a change from something or from nothing rather to something, which would be you, or going from one piece of software to another. So you're competing against your competitor And asking someone to move over to your product. Remember something, it's so important that you remember that out of 100 Americans surveyed, 99 said they hate change. Now, you might be a person that loves change. I actually like change, okay? But you may be a person that doesn't. If you are, you're in the majority of people, okay? So because people hate change, what are we going to do as a sales rep to make that change as easy as possible? Well, the first thing is we need to stop talking all the time. See, one of the things that happens all of the time in IT sales, in sales in general, is that salespeople talk way too much. Way too much. Great sales reps talk approximately 30% of the time. You're asking all kinds of critical questions. I've got what I refer to as my 10 critical questions. What are your 10 critical questions? What are they? Do you have them written down? Well, what I like to do is I really want to have some really good one-sheets that have a ton of visuals on them. The reason that I want to have a ton of visuals is because I really want to be able to explain to people, my new customers, is that when we're asking them to make a change, that I can show them how others just like them have had success by using our product or service. And the fastest way for me to do that is with visual one-sheets. Guys, don't forget, Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, said this: over 80% of what you take into your brain comes in visually, yet most of us do nothing but talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And that's why even though demos are great, demos of your product are great, I like to have PDF one-sheets so when I'm on the phone with somebody, I can send them through visuals and really show them what it is that I'm talking about. Guys, remember something, you want to focus in on success stories. If you want to make change easier for somebody, changing to your product, making an upgrade, you've got to show success stories, you've got to show what happened positively When other people made change. Now, it's so important that you focus in on it because overall, we just don't actually understand the psyche of the human being. If we know that people absolutely hate change, then we really shouldn't be surprised, and we should always be— that they say no to us or they don't move forward. And so, we should always be looking for the path of least resistance. In everything that we do. So, when you're actually explaining your product or service to somebody, what is it that you're doing to make the point from point A to point B as easy as possible? You have to ask yourself that question. What does this mean to them? How is my software, my product, my service going to benefit them financially? Really, you know, you want to ask yourself, really, what's in it for them? Really, what is a new client worth to them? What does it mean to them financially? Do you have success stories to share? See, guys, you're asking them to make a change, but yet very often, we're not doing anything to make that change or make that decision really, really easy. In the end, it really needs to be exceedingly clear to them, exceedingly clear, a perfectly, perfect, perfect path. What is it that our product is going to do to make their life better? What's it going to do to benefit them financially? And one of the only ways you can find that out is when you ask a ton of really, really good quality questions. Then you want to make note of those answers in your CRM tool. Okay, now let's move on to step number 3, and that is what are you doing when you're presenting proposals? Let's move over to that video right now.
