Earn The Right Newsletter - Issue 3

Want to help your team win more deals? Make it easier for prospects to buy from your company by removing friction from the buying process.

In this newsletter, I'll share an idea for each stage of the funnel. Pick one to test with your team this week.

3 Ideas to Reduce Friction

As Jill Konrath so perfectly captured in her best-selling book SNAP Selling, our buyers are frazzled.

Jill describes a frazzled buyer as someone who is overwhelmed, distracted, and short on time, making it challenging for them to focus on new information or make decisions. Sound familiar?

It's our job to make the prospect or customer's life easier. Keep reading for an idea of how you can do that at each stage of the sales cycle.

ToFu

This is one of my favorite tips of all time. I stole it from the Head of Customer Success at a research company. Her team was responsible for getting clients the information they needed in ways they could quickly understand and digest.

Instead of sending clients a 50-page report or full whitepaper, she taught her team to be prescriptive in sharing insight. The same advice applies to sales communication.

Sellers often aspire to share value, but - in reality - add to our buyer's sense of overwhelm. Audit your rep's emails where they share a resource like a webinar, podcast, case study, etc. Encourage them to pull a 1-2 sentence non-obvious insight from that resource to share.

To help our frazzled buyers get the value we are trying to share, we need to reduce the friction. At the funnel, an easy way to make that a reality is to make it clear why we shared a resource and where they can find the information that is most relevant to them

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MoFu

When I audit sales processes, one of the biggest gaps I seller, even really good ones, make is not empowering their champion.

They've done the hard work of identifying a champion and getting that person to agree to advocate for the purchase. They fail to supply them with the insights and materials that make that job easier on the champion.

A critical way to avoid friction in your sales process and minimize the ask you are making of your champion is to offer to do as much work for them as possible

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BoFu

In Issue 1 we dug into the difference between urgency and sales pressure. If you want to revisit the concept, check out issue 1 HERE.

I'm a realist which means acknowledging that there is a time and a place to use sales pressure. Use it as a last resort, but don't lose a deal because you're too proud to discount if that's the only way to get the deal done.

When your reps have to use sales pressure, I suggest implementing the IF:THEN framework. This means always verifying that the prospect can deliver the results you want, before making the offer. You see this example under the "Old Way" box in the graphic below.

The better outcome is having enough information and understanding the prospect's priorities and timelines to apply urgency.

Urgency can be used to reduce friction by training your team to act as the expert on how to buy your product or service. If they aren't the expert on how to buy from you, who is? Reduce overwhelm for prospects by helping them understand what the final purchasing steps look like and partnering to make their goals a reality

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Call to Action

Choose one of these ideas and implement it with your team today. Learning isn't enough. Mastering the craft of sales takes action.

Earn The Right - The Book

Stay updated on the book launch of #EarnTheRight (ETA December 2024). Your support is important and appreciated: https://share.hsforms.com/1KQAkAHd8QNqMUl6hlONDlAcht9r