Master class: Sales

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This master class on sales is based on notes taken by Dana Hwu, Program Manager, MIT delta v 2020, during a two-part workshop on Sales and Marketing in 2020 by Jose Martins, Business Development Manager, Hubspot for Startups.

Beyond Marketing: Getting started with sales

So you get early traffic, you convert those to leads. You did your best to nurture those leads. What you don’t want to do is to go too fast. You should not convert someone on your website and immediately have someone call them up to sell them something.

You should try to create a relationship before you speak with them from a sales point of view. That relationship is more content, more helpful tools for them to go through and try to solve their problem.

The four stages of the B2B consultative sales process

There are four stages to a B2B consultative sales process:

Identify

A great way is to go to your CRM database and find all those inbound leads, and see which ones you like the most. That’s just one way. There are different ways to finding an identifying who it is you want to talk to.

For more complex B2B industries, you may have target accounts. For instance you may want to talk with the IT director of IBM. So that’s a target account, a named account. But either way you are identifying who you want to connect with.

Connect

After that, you need to connect with them. How do you actually connect with them? How do you create that interaction? Once you create that interaction, that’s when you really start your sales process.

Explore

For most people, the most difficult and important part will be the connection side. Once you have someone open to going deeper into their problems, sharing with you what they’re going through and being open to evaluating a solution or a vendor, you can explorer their problem in depth. That is the consultative part of the sale.

Advise

Once you have a really good understanding of what’s going on with that client, then you move into the advice space. You understand what is going on, and you recommend a path forward. That is the consultative advising on the potential solution to their problem.

That’s the last stage of the sales process. After that is the pricing when we start the negotiation.

Deep dive: Identify and connect

And what we’re going to focus on today is the identify and connect parts of the process. So first is how do you identify you really have to craft your ideal buyer profile.

Now, for most people, this may look almost exactly the same as your buyer persona. But you need to look at it from the lens of sales, because you might see a few differences between the buyer persona from a marketing point of view.

There are three ingredients to developing your ideal buyer profile. The more specific, the better.

Who is the person you want to talk to?
What is it that they want to achieve?
What is getting in the way of achieving those goals? What are the challenges?

Ideally, or hopefully your solution and your product or your service is the solution to those challenges.

A script for the connect call when you do not have an inbound lead

To connect, you want to structure it in this way.

“We help people like you who <have this goal> but are frustrated <because they have this problem> <pause>”

The persona

You need to name the target persona who your prospect falls into up front.

The goal

Succinctly the goal that the target persona has right after that.

What’s getting in the way

Explain the challenges that get in the way of the persona achieving their goal.

Does this happen to you?

Check to see if they have this problem.

Note: There is no need at all at this stage to explain your solution.

This is very effective, because this clearly tells them whether you are relevant for them right now and whether the problem they are trying to solve is something you can help with. If they don’t have a problem or a need for you, you don’t have a need for them. You can then move to the next one.

A script for the connect call with an inbound lead

Now, if you had an inbound lead – someone came to your website and downloaded a piece of content. Say you decide to reach out. How do you reach out to them?

This is another script that you can use to connect with those inbound leads who have downloaded something.

Intro

“Hello <prospect>! <pause> It is XX from Company A. <listen for recognition of your agency>

State your purpose

<Prospect> the reason I’m calling is that I got a note that you downloaded an ebook on <topic> this morning from our website. <pause for recognition> Does that ring a bell? <pause> I was calling to follow up and see how I might be of assistance?

Start a dialog

<They will likely say something like, “I haven’t had a chance to go through it yet…>

Oh, that’s ok <prospect>. If I might ask, what were you looking for help with when you downloaded the ebook?

The first thing is you have to assume that they’re going to tell you they don’t remember downloading it or they haven’t read it. That happens 99.9% of the time. So you can ask at the end: “What were you looking for help when you search for <this resource on this topic>?

You want to end with a question. You want to change the dynamic of the conversation into one where they’re answering questions, and you are understanding the context.

If they say, oh I am just doing research and I got curious about this topic but I have no interest. Then you can move to the next one. But if they are really looking for help, this is where they will tell you. “Well, I have this problem…” And now you can get into asking questions to really understand the problem they’re going through.

Lead generation

Now, now you know what to say, and who you want to talk to. Where do you get these leads? This is the hardest part. Inbound can work, but it can take a few weeks of content to ramp up organically and a lot of money on ads. If you write one blog post every day (that is ideal) – like a diary – that will take a while to generate the amount of leads you need.

You need to establish yourself as an authority and engage on social media. And that doesn’t mean sending a cold email on LinkedIn. That’s not how you interact on social media.

Find the ideal buyer profile, look at someone who looks like that, look at what they comment on – then you comment or repost or reshare or send them a note. “I like the blog post you posted!” and you may start an amicable conversation that might lead into a sales opportunity if it didn’t, it doesn’t matter. You are still engaging with your target market.

If you worked at other companies before, current and past clients are a great way of new leads. And of course you have the power of the network of MIT size and the alumni of MIT.

Connecting with leads

How do you approach the connection conversation? It can be a call, or a meeting in a networking event, or a video conference. How do you approach a first conversation with someone who could be a customer.

Don’t sell in the first conversation!

The first thing is to try to get the weight off your shoulders that you have to sell something. You’re not going to sell anything on that first conversation. So you might as well relax a little, and try not to sell anything in that first conversation, where you want to establish some sort of initial human relationship.

And ideally, in that conversation, you can ask the right questions to understand what your prospect is going through at a high level. How are they managing their company? What sort of problems are they trying to solve? What sort of goals do they want to achieve?

Having that high level understanding and developing a good relationship by asking great questions should be enough to get that person interested in talking more with you.

If you stop selling in your connect call, two things are going to happen. First: your prospects are going to be more likely to want to talk with you again. Second: you’re going to be more natural and human, now that you’re not worried about selling. And once you’re not worried about selling, you’re actually listening, you’re actually trying to understand the problem and you’re more likable. And so you’re going to progress more opportunities.

Show an understanding of their problem, not your solution

The most important thing you have to avoid is to try to do a pitch of what you do. They’re not trying to buy anything, they’re trying to see if you’re a person that they can talk further about their problems. So showing an understanding of their problems is going to be way more important than showing an understanding of what the solution is for that to that problem.

If you find yourself talking about what you do and what your company does, that is a sign that you’re not doing the things right. You are not asking enough questions. This is the first stage of an initial relationship. Do they have a problem? Can you help with that problem?

If the answer is yes, that is when you suggest scheduling more time to talk for a longer time. Take half an hour and get a better understanding of what they are going through, and you may be able to help.

Schedule time every day for prospecting

Most startup founders don’t love sales. That is ok – but you have to sell, you have to overcome that fear of sales. You’re going to have to go through that uncomfortable stage of trying to sell to someone, but you’ll be better off by doing it.

The number one thing that will help you do better in sales is put time on your calendar for sales. You’re very busy people. So if you don’t have time on your calendar to prospect and connect with prospects, you’re not going to do it. Put an hour every day on the calendar for prospecting.

Plan to try to connect multiple times

The other thing you need to do is most sales people only attempt connecting with their leads one time. 35% tried to connect with their lead one time. Only 25% try a second time, only slightly over 10% try a third time. So if you’re trying more than three times to connect with someone, you are creating a huge competitive advantage.

If you try two or three times, very, very, very few people will react or respond to that first attempt of connection. You really need to try two or three or four times.

Persistence is key. The ideal cadence is two-day follow up with 6-10 calls or email touches.

Using automation to help manage the sales prospecting sequence

So how can you use technology to help you with this. Look for a CRM system to kind of help you track when you send an email to someone when you call someone, even if they didn’t pick up, you can log that in.

There are tools like templates for an email. You can just have a template email or you can have sequences, where they automatically has the cadence embedded into the average.

The body of the sales prospecting email is that framework I showed you in the beginning with the five steps that I work with: this person who are trying to do this who get frustrated because they have this challenge.

This is hugely more effective than sending one email or making one phone call and it’s more than most 99% of all our sales reps at your competition.

In terms of the prospecting mentality – you should always be helpful. If they want to get help with a problem, and you go in wanting to know if you can help, you will do well.

Do your homework

The next thing is to research the one question that I want to answer when I’m reaching out to a prospect. This is what’s the difference between a cold email and what I call a warm email. I always try to answer “why you, why now”. Why am I reaching out to you? Why am I reaching out to you now? I want to resolve what are signals that you might be going through the problem that I can help with.

So I do my research. And if I find that signal, then I’ll send you an email. If I don’t have a signal, I don’t send you an email.

Tailor your messaging to the role

Lastly, you have to be aware of who you’re speaking to. The way you conduct that conversation is different, depending on the role that you are speaking with. If you are speaking to a CMO about growth, that conversation looks really different to the one we have with a CEO.

If it’s a CEO of a SaaS company, I’m going to talk about turning CAC to LTV. I’m going to talk about profitability. But if I’m talking with the Chief Customer Officer, I’m going to talk about the sales team’s performance and how their experience is integrated end to end. If I’m talking with the CMO then I will talk about marketing performance and lead generation – measuring which channels are more effective from a cost of acquisition standpoint.

If I speak about lead generation with the CEO, I’m going to lose him, or lose her immediately.

Prospecting Checklist

So again,to wrap all these things up, you have to be aware of your messaging, depending on the role you’re reaching out to with your prospecting. so I’ll leave you with a checklist.

Define ideal buyer profile
Define sources of leads
Develop your connect call positioning statement
Establish a prospecting sequence
Block time in your calendar – every single day
Define research and start reaching out.

It is really important block time in your calendar every single day, even if it’s just one hour, instead of one five hour block on Fridays. Having that kind of muscle, the routine of processing every day really sets you apart from from the rest of the competition.

Q&A

Q: Should you try to connect 6, 10, 15 times?

I recommend between 6 and 10. 8 for selling to small businesses and 15 times for selling at the enterprise level.

Q: What is the ideal cadence?

What we’ve learned at HubSpot through a lot of experimentation is the ideal cadence. Is that what we call a two day follow up. I don’t attempt to connect with you every single day. Like, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I also don’t wait a full week as if I was a newsletter.

What I do is I send you an email or a call, sometimes both, on Monday. Two days later, on Wednesday, I do it again. I do another call and maybe a LinkedIn message or maybe an email.

So every two days I attempt to connect with you. I do for about four or five rounds of these in pairs, every day.

If you don’t respond by then, most likely you weren’t going to respond anyway.

Q: What are some other ways to be smart about SEO in addition to having pillar content with links out to interconnected content?

Great question. There are good learning resources on Hubspot Academy that you can look into. The one mistake most startups do is that you focus so much on page SEO doing the right things. Other companies try to ramp up content generation and publish 16 new blog posts per week. These things are important, but it’s not what generates the difference.

The most important thing you can do for your SEO is inbound linking. Smart companies invest most of their time on inbound linking. You are not going to have authority coming in. You need to borrow authority for people who have been doing a little bit longer. So, getting inbound linking is going to be way more effective for your SEO than your own content.