Does Your Sales Process Lack Urgency? Are You Losing Prospects Just Before They Make It Across the Finish Line?
If your sales process is perfect and you are converting all the clients you need: Pat yourself on the back and stop reading.
If, on the other hand, you aren’t quite getting the results you want, or you want to learn how you might improve: I have something you need to learn about.
Imagine closing new clients within one week of meeting them. I know what you are thinking: “Bruce, you are crazy. That just isn’t possible.”
Whether you are a business owner, a technical guru, or a non-technical sales person that has just started in this market, this process will work for you.
I call it the one-week sales process. Why? It takes just a week from first contact to close. This is a snippet from an email one of our clients sent to me a couple days ago:
“I love using the presentation format you taught us. And I’ve been pretty successful with it. The assessment turned a prospect we’d been trying to get for a long time. We did a full-blown assessment last year and still couldn’t get them to buy. I got them to run Galactic Scan and they signed up on our biggest package with a three-year term!! This process made the difference.”
–Keith V
Sales Engineer, The Computer Warriors
Are you getting results like this selling your cyber stack or managed services offerings right now? If not, read on.
Before he revolutionized his sales process, Keith was confronted with the same issues you are facing now. The big roadblock: getting administrative access to the network to perform a network analysis. Objection after objection over cost. Deals dragging out for months and years that never seem to close.
Just like you, he was having to chase down decision makers with constant follow up. He had to stomach meetings that were canceled last minute or rescheduled. And he had the never ceasing problem of getting decisionmakers to listen who would rather be at the dentist getting their teeth pulled out than participating in an hour-long assessment of their network infrastructure. Sound familiar?
How does this new method work?
You start by getting the prospect on the phone. That should be easy. They are usually calling you because they have a problem, or they are responding to your marketing campaign. Either way, you have to get them on the phone.
While you have them on the phone you ask them a couple questions to learn about them and their business. This is a critical step to help build trust. You confirm they are the decisionmaker. If they are not the right person, simply tell them that the first step of your process is to have a quick 10-minute call with the person running the show.
I’ve found being up front about it and asking for the call with the right person out of the gate to be incredibly effective. By the way, if the decision maker doesn’t want to talk to you, you won’t win the deal anyway. Move on with your life. Next!
Once you have the decision maker on the phone you basically start over, ask a couple questions about their business, and get to know them. Then suggest a network assessment. Explain that it will be simple. You don’t need any administrative credentials. You won’t even need to come out to their office. All they have to do is have three to five people in their office click a link.
Once they agree to this step, and while you have them on the phone, you schedule your readout meeting in one week. THIS IS CRITICAL. ONE WEEK.
They click the links, you get the reports, and then you sit down with the prospect and readout the results. During the readout, I’ve seen people screw this up all the time, here is the secret sauce. You will have three critical steps in your meeting process to close the deal:
- Check in – Spend 10 minutes finding out how they are doing. Are they having any new computer issues? Your goal is to have them remind you why you are there. This puts them back in the mood to buy and helps them relive some of the pain they are experiencing with their current computer support solution.
- Report review – Spend 20 minutes reviewing the results. Do not go through the technical details of the report. Simply show them the pages and share stories about events and breaches you’ve dealt with in the past. Relate those stories back to your findings.
- Agreement approval – Ask them if they would like to address the issues you identified. If they are interested (I haven’t heard of a single business that hasn’t been interested!) Spend 15 minutes going over how your service will work, explain your agreement and your guarantee. Focus on how you will make their current problems (revealed in the check in phase) and the issues you identified with the analysis go away.
Now, take out your pen and wait. If they sign on the spot you get a gold star and the first prize medal. If they don’t sign on the spot, schedule your next meeting before you leave.
For more details check out: www.galacticscan.com/audit
Using this new method, folks are getting results like this:
Bruce,
Just wanted to share with you we landed a very high-profile non-profit client (our niche market) with ~140 users. We performed a paid IT assessment with the penetration test and presented a detailed report with very little effort. BUT with BIG results. This puts on track for 3m in total revenue by mid-2021, the deal brought us $13.2k monthly MRR and $100k in project work starting mid-May. The penetration test methodology is a game changer for me. It’s helping our team become more comfortable discussing and selling cybersecurity.
Many thanks – Dan Hernandez
There is nothing unique about Dan’s situation. He is like many of you—working to grow his business and trying to overcome all those big hurdles to earn the business sweetheart clients like this.
I am convinced that anybody working inside of your MSP will be able to implement the one-week sales process and immediately start closing more business.
I have complete confidence in your ability to transform your sales cycle into a well-oiled week-long process that results in more high-quality deals for two fundamental reasons.
Why? First, you will position yourself as an expert who addresses MORE of the hot button issues prospects are actually thinking about. Gaining expert status is normally the hardest part in sales, but using our assessment process completely changes the playing field. You will expose information—personal and meaningful—that you are missing in your current process.
You won’t only catch their attention with data that is important to them and their team, you will be able to connect the dots to WHY that information is so vulnerable (something I was never able to do with the old network assessment process). This is a tremendous advantage, and you, my friend, will have it.
Second, my experience with hundreds of MSPs, large and small, teaching this new analysis tells me that just about anybody can learn to do this. That’s right, closing new business is a learned behavior.
How can you start revolutionizing your sales into the 1-week cycle?
To help get you primed to this new methodology of selling managed services and cybersecurity, here are 5 questions to evaluate whether your audits are working:
- Are you telling stories that easily help a decision maker understand why the problem you’re pointing out is important?
- Are your network issues clearly linking back to information they see as important?
- Is your report focused on your decision makers?
- Do you have clear next steps from your report?
- Are you giving them too much information that they don’t really care about and diluting your message?
(Again, for a more detailed list and step-by-step guide to improving your sales process at www.galacticscan.com/audit).
When I was running my MSP, I was constantly trying to figure out the secret sauce to getting faster sales. Until I stumbled on this process, I was like many of you. Leads would never ‘decide’ on signing up. Decisionmakers were always too busy for a meeting. My process wasn’t convincing them they needed to buy right now. There was just no urgency.
The New Analysis Super-Charged My Sales Process
When I developed this methodology, I knew I was on to something. Working in hospitals, I had started to get IT Directors and hospital management to buy into our cyber stack. This new assessment started to turn heads and change minds (something the old network assessments just didn’t do), creating realizations at prospect sites to actually do something about their cybersecurity through education.
MSPs are the key to protecting our local economies. We need to do a better job at showing our business communities that they are vulnerable, rather than just telling them. Until you’re able to really show your prospects, associates and colleagues that you’re an important part of keeping their businesses up and running, your sales process is not working the way it should.
Don’t be intimidated by the idea of a one-week sales process. There’s no magic in this new way of selling, and no Harvard degree required. It will take some work, dedication, and ambition. But what successful sales endeavor wouldn’t?
If you are ready to learn more and build that sales engine you’ve always wanted, you will want this free report outlining the steps we’ve found to create success: www.galacticscan.com/audit
Don’t feel like reading about it? Check out this session I did on revolutionizing your sales process back at the January Producers Club meeting: https://youtu.be/-w7r7ZZW_Q4
