Unbound Growth Blog

One of the most asked questions I get from salespeople, sales managers, and entrepreneurs is...

How do I know when to close? How do I do it without being sleazy?

Not knowing when to close is like a gardener not knowing when to pick the tomatoes in the garden.

Check out my answer for when to close and what to do when they say no in this video clip.

How do you make prospecting a habit?

How do you make it something that helps avoid the situation where you find yourself at the end of the month, end of the quarter, or end of the first half of the year wondering why your pipeline is so skinny?

You know why it's hard? Because it's hard to form new habits.

How many books have you read? How many podcasts have you listened to, or how many workshops have you done all in the hopes that you'll learn the secret sauce to becoming a top salesperson?

As sales professionals, what does it take to master your craft, and as sales managers and leaders, what do you train and coach your people on so that they can adapt to new systems and processes in this hyper, fast world we live in?

To master your craft, and to develop top performers, we have to constantly be working on the fundamentals. But what are those fundamentals? It's something that the sales community still can't agree on. For how long now has report after report come back to tell us that barely 50% of salespeople are making their quota? Despite the technology and training that we're spending every year, the results still haven't changed.

Getting feedback from your sales manager can be scary. Especially if you struggle with a need for approval from others. But as they say, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions,” and like breakfast, get coaching and feedback everyday to take your sales career to the next level.

The more feedback you can get, and apply, the less of a surprise it will be, the less stressful it will be, and you will have more opportunities to change your behavior.

They say when you are tired of talking about something, that is when people are just starting to get it.

I am officially tired of talking about the importance of personally meaningful goals and how to create them.

But there is still a long way to go. Survey data of nearly half a million potential new sales hires showed only 51% had personally meaningful goals.

Yet, that same data showed that those with personally meaningful goals are 298% more likely to be elite salespeople with 32% more abilities. (Versus those without these types of goals who have 24% LESS abilities.)

Hmmm, I wonder if that has anything to do with the half of salespeople who make quota?

How do you handle referrals?

Because even in today's buyer-has-all-the-control- and information overload age, referrals will still cost you less, will close at a higher value, and will close faster than any other means of generating customers.

Despite this mathematical truth more people are asking, "How do I get more referrals?" than they should. The question that I have is, have you ever thought that maybe the way that you're handling referrals is the reason you're not getting more of them?

This was our topic for a recent #livesaleslab. When I asked participants, "How do you handle referrals?" The answers weren't unsurprisingly a lot about them and their sales process. Hint, it's not about you. 

On a recent #livesaleslab, we talked about two questions. First, why should people buy from you, and second, why should they buy from you now?

These seem like relatively simple questions to answer.

However, most of the time when I'm asking these questions of salespeople, the answers I get are usually somewhere along the lines of, "Well, they should buy from us because we have the best quality product." Or "They should buy from us because we have the number one in customer service." Then of course, there's those that say, "Well, we're the only ones that do this in this particular way." And then of course, there may be those few that still say, "Well, we do have the lowest price."

So, how much does your stuff cost?

When I talk with salespeople about ghosting, when the best time to break up with a prospect is, and how to break up with that prospect, the analogy that's been left with me is dating.

Because throughout the conversation that I was having with salespeople, we were talking about why ghosting bothers us so much. It's the rejection. It's that they didn't reply back to us, or it's the idea that we now actually have to go out and find other people to talk to, which means more rejection.

And so how do we overcome some of these hangups about prospecting? And why is prospecting so important when we're thinking about our pipeline?

Many salespeople I talk with aren't struggling so much with what questions to ask, but rather;

"What is preventing me from asking the questions that I know to ask and should ask, but I'm not asking them when I should?"