Valuing your Time | Salesforce

All right, so we're going to start out at this— in that imaginary funnel that should be more of like a finger painting. Let's imagine that we start at the point where a lead is created. So that's the first step in the sales process. What should happen here? What should happen here? What I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through a sample sales process that is actually something I see very consistently across every industry and everything. What the definitions might be of every piece of it will be up to the product, product-market fit, how your customers buy. And so what I'm gonna walk you through is a way to kind of keep track of everything and a way to kind of conceptualize the process. But what you have to think about is it's not a— it's a one-size-fits-all template, but what within that, it basically needs to be tailored to each of your business processes and specifically who your buyer is and how they choose to buy. For someone who does— who someone is buying vacuums, it's very different than someone who's buying Salesforce. So, just take that with a grain of salt as we kind of go through it. So, lead, what happens? A lead comes in, what do you do?

You start interacting with— you start making awareness, use that lead to get— to go to the customer.

What conversation do you have specifically with them?

I think you can start with the question to see if we need you or not.

Like, give me an example.

Let's take an example of Salesforce, for example.

Sure.

Do you have a sales team?

Yes.

What software do you use? What needs do you have?

So you're saying this is a call versus an email versus an automated— This is a call. Does everyone agree it should be a call?

It depends on— It could be.

Could be a call?

Could be an email, could be a face-to-face meeting.

Face-to-face meeting? The initiator is the lead. Okay, so in the sales process, right, the goal is for us to take someone through the buying process. We already know that 59% of it has already happened and we haven't even talked to them. And let's just make it simple, and I on purpose try to create some confusion here because it does matter who you're selling to. To make it a simpler example, we'll just take B2B sales as a specific as we go through this so that we can all kind of orient around that case study. And we'll say that in B2B sales, typically you're not gonna have, you don't have as many products in the market that are like Slack where people are just gonna sign up and buy. The freemium model, some people might sign up, but ultimately speaking, there is gonna be a decision maker that is gonna decide to buy for the company. So, even with Slack, if you think about it, it might get adopted on the freemium side, but for the purchase of it, typically it's still going to be someone who's deciding to spend money. So, lead. So, we decided it could be a call, could be an email. What if I'm— if we're the ones that get the lead, what is our goal in that first conversation?

Interest.

Interest? Get to know the interest? Yeah, so how many— sorry?

Know your customer.

Know your customer, okay, great. So let's dissect this in 2 ways. So one is, what should I know about them already?

What are their preferences? Everything that you get out of previous demographics, that's essentially what you need to know about them.

Yes.

The first thing you need to know is, are they a professional user?

Yeah. Okay, I want to flip it now. You're the customer. What do you want the company to know?

What I usually use, what I generally buy, what I like and what I dislike. What I need.

And how easy it should be for me to accept your product. Yes.

Adapt to it.

Yes.

Usability aspect of it.

Yeah. The— you guys— You hit the nail on the head. So my biggest— as we go through this, we're gonna take the lens of the company because that's what we do. But what I encourage you to do when you think about it as you're starting or you have something going already, challenge yourself and put yourself in the customer's shoes. Create that empathy and think about, if I was them, how would it work? Or even ask someone who is a customer, how did that work for you? Like, and understand where they are and how they think. So the reality is when this comes in, everything that someone does online, the, the to get to a lead. So every webpage they visit, everything they interact with, whatever they click on, however they get to you, you should know so you can create a better conversation. No one wants to have a conversation, like if I go to your pricing page and I come in as a lead because I clicked on something there, you should know that already to be able to have a better first conversation. But go ahead.

Just to add to that, all of that activity It will be possible through the marketing tactics. The various marketing tactics that you use will give you the information that you need to have that conversation. So when you all said, well, I want to learn about sales, it's equally important to know about marketing and the strategy behind marketing to get here.

Yeah. So ultimately speaking, how many of you already started a company or are you thinking about, like, where are you? Yeah, you have. OK. How many people do you have on the team?

7.

7.

4. 6.

3. So we have almost everyone on one hand. My question to you is— no one said this— how valuable is your time? Your time in that company. How much time do you actually have? Very— zero. Here's what I'm saying. The reason I asked you that question is because what everyone thinks about when they think about this lead comes in is they think about the customer, the buying, the interest. Well, also remember you have very limited resources. As a— the beautiful thing about being small is you can move so much faster than any company you're trying to disrupt. The painful thing about being small is you don't have the resources. So you need to be a force multiplier. You need to basically be like a blowfish, act bigger than you are. And the challenge is that what no one thinks about is the value of your time. When you get that lead in, not every lead should get the same amount of time you have. Your time is just as valuable as the customers or potential customers. And one of the things we train our people on is that you— if you were to start at Salesforce in sales, you would go through a boot camp, and in the boot camp you'd go through training where you would learn different techniques to be able to establish whether This is even a priority for them to buy. You could just be wasting— we call them tire kickers. They could waste your time. And how many of you have talked to a potential customer who's just a waste of time?

A lot.

A lot. So the trick with this is what your goal is, is to say, is this worth my time or not? Do I qualify them as actually worthwhile to have a deal cycle with them? And what you should be doing is, yes, I started off with what is this lead, then I moved into here's what the customer thinks about the experience, 'cause that's important, and then it goes into is it worth my time? So when you think about what this looks like, it looks like a set of questions, and you guys all hit the nail on the head, a set of questions that you should be evolving constantly till you can get the right formula to understand. The questions I need to understand to do one, save my time, 2, learn, like, identify opportunities. Optis. And 3, basically product market research. Product market research. Because you'll learn more about, like, what are the people you're looking at. What are your potential competitors, as you mentioned earlier. This is what's critical with the leads. And the thing that's the hardest with them is it's so easy to waste time. Yeah. So I'm just gonna emphasize that. So that's phase 1. What I'm going to do alongside this is one of the things that's impossible for small companies and big companies, basically every company, is forecasting. But it's really important. Because if you understand how the money's gonna come in, you can then make different decisions budgetary, whether to reinvest more in product because a bigger deal's coming in, whether you can invest more in a certain marketing tactic. You can make very different decisions if you understand how things are gonna work. I'll give you an example as simple as someone mentioned face-to-face. If you know— you mentioned face-to-face. If you know you're going to have more sales, you can go more face-to-face because you can use that T&E budget that you might set aside because you know more money's coming in. We know face-to-face typically has higher conversion. There's decisions like that that you can actually start to make when you forecast. What I'm going to do under here is I'm going to just lay out categories of how to think about whether some simple way to simplify this process into forecast categories.

Okay.