Howdy, salesperson (or founder, or president, or chief potato officer or whatever: you’re a salesperson, and there’s a clear picture of what salesperson success looks like). This is where I’m supposed to tell you rapport, creating urgency, overcoming objections, hardcore closing, follow up and so on are the key sales tactics to winning more orders. You may be shocked to discover that I am not. You can get that kids’ stuff somewhere else.
What we’re going to talk about here at SalesTactics.org are concepts beyond the norm. I’m not interested in regurgitating the same boiled-over techniques everyone else has been talking about. They’ve covered those for the past 20 years, and how much better are they doing? I want to give you something new and different when it comes to overcoming the business growth problem and driving conversion success. Are you open to that?
1/ The Critical Importance of Money Tolerance In Qualifying Your Buyer
2/ Why You Need To Understand Your Customers’ Pain Points
3/ Why Price Point Is So Valuable As a Filtering Factor, And Why You’re Afraid to Raise Prices
4/ Your Outreach Sucks, and What You Can Do About It
5/ The Danger of the Two Sales, and How You’re Running Afoul of This Danger
6/ Why Demos Fail to Sell⏤Nobody Cares About Your Bells and Whistles
7/ How Much Time You Should Really Be Spending Prospecting
8/ Why “Buyers Are Liars” and How You Can Use Their Lies to Sell
9/ The Reasons CRM Selection, Setup and Use Often Goes Badly
10/ The Four Systems Every Salesperson Needs, and Typically Can’t Explain.
Let’s take a closer look:
Money Tolerance is THE limiting belief that impacts whether a sale will be made or not. Even more important than the customer admitting they have the problem your solution fixes, Money Tolerance (MT) rules the reality they exist in and the decisions they make.
Like a thermometer reading of “How much is ‘a lot of money’ for you,” you can quickly tell whether your prospects’ MT matches the offer’s price level⏤or not. How well does the prospective customer’s MT line up with the offer’s price? If it’s “too much” because buyer and seller money tolerance don’t match, you’ll always struggle to make that sale.
Even if you discover the prospect’s MT is out of alignment with the offer, at least you know what you’re up against and can work on it. But if you don’t discover this, you’re beaten in making the sale before you start.
A buyer is a buyer, and there are many people out there who will never buy your offer. You need to understand this. I have watched many marketers year after year who believe if they can just keep hammering away at their marketplace with their offer’s features and benefits, eventually they’ll turn that obstinate lead into a buyer. No. Some people will never buy.
But there is a way to rapidly filter IN those leads who already believe things that are in alignment with your offer. Things, for example, like understanding the problems or symptoms of problems that your solution makes go away. These are best expressed in the words of your customers, and are called Pain Points.
You may have heard of “dog whistle copy”. This is an example of pain point language: it is crystal clear, to the point, and speaks directly to the person who could most use the solution you provide. But nobody is going to walk up unsolicited and give you this language. You have to go out and earn it. You need to interact with your target market to hear these words and phrases.
They will tell you these pain points for free. However, you have to be talking to your ideal customers to hear these words. I recommend you be brave and do information interviews to get them. Hardly anyone does these. They’re too scared. You will gain a tremendous sales advantage if you bother to uncover these terms and use them.
Information interviews are the fastest and easiest way to learn your market’s pain points, so you can start incorporating these into your marketing material, prospecting calls, and advertising.
Learn how to find Pain Points, and use these up front in your conversations with prospects. This is the quickest and easiest way to filter for qualified buyers. They must be in the language your buyers used, however: do not try and ‘flower them up’ by being a copywriter. Use them as they were given to you to make your life as a salesperson much easier.
We spoke about Money Tolerance above, in respect to your customer. Find out about head trash and why it is so important. Know now that you also have this same limiting belief operating in you. How good a match is your MT with the offer you’re trying to sell? If your personal MT is lower than your offer, you’ll always find ways to screw up the sale.
On the other side of the scale, we have the importance of the low Money Tolerance limit. This is the point at which and below an offer is priced too low to be worth it for you.
But most salespeople struggle with this lack of fit of their personal MT Upper Limit and the price of their offer: its price is too high for them, and they believe no one is able to afford it. I caution you that Money Tolerance is an entirely personal piece of head trash, that you can change it, and that other people are walking around with a completely different number of how much is “a lot of money” in their heads than the one you value so highly.
Straighting this necessary alignment out of the price of the offer you’re selling and your own Money Tolerance will do more for you than any sales technique. Why? Because it attacks the problem at the conceptual level rather than the behavioral. So learn right now Why You’re Afraid to Raise Prices.
Talk to the wrong people and you’ll bounce right off. This leads to salespeople spamming everyone in sight when they try to act as marketers. But if you want to be effective, you need to be a sniper and understand the value of good prospecting rather than a shotgunner.
There’s a course at the end of this article in which I describe how your LinkedIn outreach is terrible. It’s not my course. That’s how good it is: I want to give it to you, just like the course creator did, rather than make money on it. Don’t be like nine out of ten people who visit that post, who do nothing and don’t even go visit the course page.
“Conversations with qualified prospects lead to sales”. That’s a maxim of mine, and what you need to do is create the most opportunities to have those conversations with those people. How much time should you spend prospecting? Leave it to chance and you’ll be far less effective. You came here to learn sales tactics, didn’t you?
This secret problem kills sales, especially for newbies and for people trying to bring a new product or offer to the marketplace. Are you asking, “What product should I make“? If your audience requires education to understand the need for your offer, listen up.
Salespeople rush to the finish line in the sales conversation. They bleat about the many features and benefits of their solution without understanding the implicit connection between features and price. But did they take the time to uncover whether this prospect has the problem their magic bullet solves?!
Often, no. Too often.
Discover here a full explanation of The Danger of the Two Sales, and how to innoculate yourself and your sales process from this terrible deal killer.
Look at the statistics of reasons from 2007 how SaaS vendors get it wrong and why people don’t buy SaaS apps. You’ll find out that these same reasons continue to apply today!
The truth is that you must get at the underlying reasons people will buy, and why demos fail to sell. This ability to uncover the truth is your most powerful sales tactic. And those reasons almost assuredly have nothing to do with features! They are almost always emotionally-based. Only gearheads buy because of features…and they, too, have emotions. Emotions driving decision making like wanting to be associated with the cool kids, so they buy from you with your cool company and cool product, so they can tell their friends. Hear about an example in this podcast episode about SaaS sales problems and the Battle of Dorking.
While your boss, who probably knows a lot about software but nothing about selling, will chant, “Book demos, book demos, book demos,” this is hardly an effective way to overcome SaaS sales problems. You can do better.
Your or your company’s reputation is NOT enough to rely upon for you to make the money you want every month. Your employer, if you have one, cannot be relied upon to have a marketing department that delivers you enough qualified leads every month to support you in hitting your target.
You have to take these matters into your own hands. But now you’re probably asking, “How do I build a list?”
Marketing is frequently out of alignment with Sales. That’s just an observable fact. The leads they think are great which they’re providing to you often simply don’t turn out to be a good fit. So you must understand the value of good prospecting and make up the difference on your own. And if you’re a solopreneur or commission-based salesperson, you must bring in your own leads.
Not putting in enough time doing prospecting activity is the death signal of businesses and sales careers. We’ve already noted that if you don’t have enough conversations with qualified prospects, you won’t hit your money target.
What I have seen is that salespeople need to spend consistent time prospecting, and a lot more than they believe. (“How much time should you spend prospecting?”) I know closers don’t like to prospect. Well, then, outsource it as you can pay for it…but you have to do it. And nobody will prequalify a lead better than you, the salesperson.
A prospective customer gets excited as you start the conversation with them. But then nothing happens (leaving you asking, “Why didn’t they buy? We had such a great conversation”). Or, a prospect doesn’t show much emotion at all, even mild disinterest, at the beginning of your discussion. So what? Do your emotions go up (“I got a live one here!”) or down (“This person’s never gonna buy”) at this point?
As an effective sales tactic, I warn you that allowing your emotional state to get bumped around like a plane experiencing in-flight turbulence is a bad idea. “Buyers Are Liars” for a reason…and how they begin the conversation is often a total smokescreen.
Let me be crystal clear: Don’t get sucked into the emotional response your mind wants to put you into as you hear the first reponses of your prospect in sales conversations. This is how buyer preferences kill sales. They’re probably lying to you.
CRM selection, setup, and use often goes poorly. Why are CRM setups a problem? Salespeople resist using new software⏤I have seen good leads forgotten on Post-It notes stuck under keyboards! “When should I fill out the CRM info?” Now! And fast-talking salespeople often get business owners or department managers to overbuy, paying lots of money out every month for CRM features no one will use.
Be deliberate with your CRM selection. I’ve been around a long time and used everything from ACT! to custom database programs for multinationals…and the most common CRM I reach for is a Google Sheet with conditional formatting.
The way you use technology in a modern sales process is critical. Documentation is important! If it’s not written down for other people to see, it didn’t happen. The right CRM is a sales tactic that will make you faster, better, and richer.
Lack of clarity is the fastest way to lose energy and stop taking action in your business (and if you’re a salesperson, you’re running a mini business-within-a-business, and don’t you forget it: check out this article for How To get out of negative mindset). Every business, EVERY BUSINESS despite their claims that “my business is different“, needs these four systems described as advice for a new agency founder. They apply to every business.
As your foundational sales tactic, implement and ruthlessly improve these four systems. Every business needs them, whether they’re a dog groomer or a bank. Understand this, internalize it. Use these four systems to drive your results. Wondering “how do I get more clients“? This is how.
Everybody wants a fast magic bullet to get to where they want to go. But those don’t exist. The power of using business fundamentals repeated over and over again are what get you to success, and these four systems are absolutely fundamentals every salesperson needs. The goal? You should be able to write in plain English (or your first language), in a couple of sentences, what you are doing for each system. Apply, measure, improve. Always keep improving.
We’ve looked at 10 out-of-the-norm sales tactics that others won’t be talking about. These sales tactics will, when applied, consistently place you in high value situations where you can be incredibly effective in solving big problems for your customers, closing sales, and driving revenue.
For more sales tactics that aren’t rehashed and are proven from activity in the real world, get the Sales On Fire program. If you’re dead serious about becoming an amazing salesperson and know you must learn how to sell, or are staying up late at night wondering how you can get your sales team to peak performance levels (this is why reinforcement is necessary for sales success), get Sales On Fire today.
