Understanding the Customers

People keep thinking sales is about telling people about your product. It’s actually about understanding what people want and seeing if your service suits their needs. To know what they want, don't ‘show up and throw up’. Try and flip it the other way and let them do most of the talking. From listening to what they say, you'll know exactly how to write a great proposal — and more importantly, a proposal that they actually want. After all, it's your job to listen and digest the information and come up with a strategy to solve their problems. 

Understanding Funnel Metrics

To perfect the sales process, you also need to understand the funnel metrics. A funnel is the step-by-step process all leads go through before they convert and become customers. You need to know how many people to put into the funnel for them to drop down into the pipeline. How many customers do you need to win in order to create value and for what value? How many of them can you convert? (Generally speaking, 50% is a great benchmark). Finally, when the customers are in the pipeline, how do you win them?

In most businesses, the top of the funnel is usually too narrow. You need to tip 100 in and qualify them. These people need to have a problem, the business cases need to make sense, and they have to be able to afford your product or service. If you don’t have enough customers entering the top of funnel, then you can’t qualify them, and you can’t afford to lose them. This makes the sales process small and gives you less revenue. Conversely, if you have a great marketing funnel with a lot of leads, you can cherry-pick them out.

PS: Learn about the B2B myths you need to stop doing. Read all about them here.