Paul M. Caffrey (00:00)
I've done 291 one-on-one sales sessions in the last six months. And here are the three biggest mistakes that I'm seeing sellers make.
If you're like most salespeople that I'm working with, you probably know what to do. You probably know how to do it. And you probably struggle a little bit with habitually doing everything you should all the time.
But then I'm gonna dig into the three mistakes that I see salespeople making that when they correct have a huge impact on their sales results.
My name is Paul Caffrey. I'm a sales keynote speaker and author of The Work Before the Work.
I strongly believe that sales teams don't underperform. I believe they under prepare and I'm on a mission to fix that.
If you think these preparation frameworks could help you or you've got a sales kickoff coming up, go to paulcaffrey.com and shoot me a DM.
I'm on a mission to work with a million salespeople and turn them into prepared sellers.
So let's get into the three big mistakes I'm seeing salespeople make. The first is overlooking a mutual success plan. You might call this a mutual close plan. You might call it a mutual action plan. You might simply just share the steps involved in your sales process when you speak to your prospect.
What you call it doesn't matter, but how you deliver it does.
And mutual success plans, they matter, but not for the reasons that you think. ⁓
With the salespeople I'm working with one-on-one, they're seeing their qualification massively improve. If somebody doesn't have much interest in a mutual success plan, they probably don't have much interest in doing business with you. The second thing that really helps is multi-threading. You are inevitably going to get a few people involved on their side and probably a few people involved on your side. This opens the door to understanding who should be involved and at what stage.
Multi-training absolutely increases your close rate as we've seen by report after report. And the final thing that it helps us with is forecasting. We get very clear timelines around where this project is going to sit or implementation might happen based around what's happening in their business and when is the best time for them to tackle this issue or to solve this problem. And when it's in black and white in front of you.
a lot easier for people to correct the dates versus just give you a vague answer when they might actually proceed.
Now, most salespeople know what a mutual success plan is, how it's being delivered. That is quite interesting. And what I'm seeing top sellers doing at the moment is we are sharing the mutual success plan at the start of discovery. It's got a potential project plan to follow. It's got dates that will be semi-realistic. And of course, the disclaimer is this is what a plan could look like. This is the decision you would look to make at the end of this meeting.
We'll come back to that if it makes sense following on from our conversation today.
This is getting the mutual success plan into the hands of your prospect really towards the very start of the sales process. And now you can see why it's feeding into qualification, multi-threading and driving timelines and forecasting. These are the benefits and advantages that sellers are getting when they go to the effort to prepare this in advance for their discovery calls.
So how do you make this into a habit? Well, you've got to make it really easy for yourself. You've got to have a slide that you can modify or a one page document that you can make quick changes to, which enables you to be able to deliver custom mutual success plans for each of your discovery meetings. people who are taking it a step further are having a shared Excel or a shared Google Sheet, and that has key milestones in it. Who's responsible? When things need to happen.
and is giving edit access to their customers. And what we find is people don't necessarily go too crazy and start putting a huge amount of information into it. But the ones who do log into it, the ones who make the odd tweak here or there are much more likely to proceed.
The second mistake I'm seeing people make is they're not confirming the meeting. Now you might be thinking, yeah, big deal, confirming the meeting. My show rate is pretty high, 90 % of customers show up for my meetings anyway, so I don't need to do this. But there are hidden advantages to confirming your meeting and it comes from how you do it. Between six to 24 hours before you're gonna have the meeting, send the agenda.
You really should have an agenda, I hope you do. And ask this simple question, what would you like to add? This is going to do two things. This is number one, going to again get them to confirm that the meeting is happening, which will increase your show rate. And the second thing it's going to do is if they go to add something to the agenda, it is going to tell you what is top of mind, what is their most focused on. And if it's an early stage call, it might give you an idea of the problem that they have that I think you might be able to solve.
Because let's face it, most of us are selling platforms that can do a lot of different things and how our customers take our product, even if it's a single product delivering one solution, how they might be used and it could be radically different than the problem they're trying to solve can be different from customer to customer. So this gives us an idea of where that conversation can start. If it's later in the sales process, let's say it's a proposal meeting, they may be interested to find out, well, what would legal look like?
What does the master services agreement look like if you haven't addressed that already? And you might realize, okay, well, I better add that to the agenda and make sure that we cover that off.
So how are people doing this? They're at the start and end of the day, they're reviewing their calendar, they're seeing what meetings they have coming up and they're just simply sharing the agenda and asking the question, what would you like to add?
How are they turning it into a habit? Well, they're tacking on five minutes at the start, at the end of the day, and they're just doing this for each of those meetings they have coming up.
Very easy to do and very effective.
third big mistake I'm seeing sellers make at the moment is they're avoiding video prospecting.
We're all stuck for time, but what we are seeing at the moment is AI is making it incredibly difficult to reach someone via their inbox. The connection rates on cold calls is plummeting, even though that is the best way to find out if there is a problem there that you could maybe help somebody solve. And video is still underutilized. At the moment, it's still very difficult for AI to fake video. That's probably gonna change very, very soon, but today you can still tell. And also,
very few sellers are sending video. How I'm seeing the best sellers that I'm working with utilize this is they're either putting aside time once a week, maybe two hours or three hours on a Friday, or they're putting a bit of time aside each day. And they're picking a number of videos to send. So they're connecting to the ideal personas on LinkedIn. are then...
making sure that they're part of the ideal company profile that they sell to. They're looking for triggers and they're not just sending generic video out, they're looking for a trigger which could be relevant to that person and they're sending them a 30 second videos when they're connected with them.
very much along the lines of calling out the trigger. I've noticed that you're hiring people. I've noticed that you've acquired this business. Your website seems a little bit slow and it could be preventing customers from achieving X, Y, Z. Whatever that trigger is that they've seen and then they're going into what that problem could be costing and how it could be solved, maybe providing a little bit of proof within 30 seconds, up to a minute, nothing longer. And this is very like riding a bike.
First few times, it is going to be very uncomfortable. Things are going to go wrong. It's not going to go so well. But over a very short period of time, it becomes something that you get really good at. And then you can just do it and you become so fast at it. Now, why bother with video prospecting? Well, quite simply, because when I'm training people, that is the method which is getting the most results. It's getting the most leads. I'm seeing people get a 40 % response rate by sending out only 16 videos.
And what that turns into is 25 % booking meetings. So they're getting four meetings from 16 video sent. You reach out to 16 clients in any other medium, you are not gonna get a hit rate that high.
So these are three big mistakes I'm seeing people making at the moment when I'm coaching them in sales one-on-one. And as I said, you probably know what to do. You probably know how to do it. You're probably struggling to do it habitually.
That is something I challenge you to change. Can you take one of these and incorporate it into your week and follow it for 90 days? Sounds like an eternity in some respects, but just 90 days. And then let's see, have you got any tangible improvements to show for it? Hope you've enjoyed it and look forward to speaking with you in the next session.
Also, got reminded of something.
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