Sales for Startups

SALES FOR
STARTUPS
24 Insights To Help You Design,
Launch and Accelerate
a Sales Program for Your Business

MATT HEINZ

SALES FOR
STARTUPS
24 Insights To Help You Design,
Launch and Accelerate
a Sales Program for Your Business

MATT HEINZ

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WANT MORE SALES AND MARKETING INSIGHTS?
Check out Matt’s blog at:
www.MattonMarketingBlog.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, disseminated or transmitted
in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher and the author.
This includes photocopying, recording or scanning for conversion to electronic format.
Exceptions can be made in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and
certain noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Permission may be obtained by emailing: matt@heinzmarketing.com

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information
in regard to the subject matter covered. Although the author and publisher
have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information
contained in this book, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies,
omissions or other inconsistency herein. Any slight of people, places or organizations
is unintentional. Neither the publisher, nor the author, shall be held liable for any loss
of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to consequential,
incidental, special or other damages. The advice and strategies contained in this book
may not be suitable to some situations.

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All trademarks are the property of their owners.

Copyright © 2011 Heinz Marketing Inc
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-615-36409-4

Art Direction and Design: Ellen Madian

Published by Heinz Marketing Press
8201 164th Ave NE, Suite 200
Redmond, WA 98052

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This book is dedicated to my wife, Beth.

She knows why.

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Table of Contents
The Five Sales Mistakes Most Startups Make .............................................. 1
Five Critical Steps to Building a Sales Team from Scratch ........................... 3
Eight Tips for Hiring Better Sales Reps ...................................................... 5
Improve Sales Forecast Accuracy With These Seven Steps ........................... 7
A Three-Step Process for Effective Sales Territory Planning ........................ 9
How to Teach and Reinforce Consistent Messaging
With Your Sales Team .............................................................................. 11
Nine Proven Alternatives to Cold Calling ................................................. 13
Four Tips for Approaching a Cold Prospect List ....................................... 15
Three Best Practices to Shorten Your Sales Cycle...................................... 17
Four Requirements for Qualifying a Sales Opportunity............................. 19
Three Important Sales Metrics You’re Probably Not Tracking Today........ 21
The Problem With Sales Scripts................................................................ 23
Script the First Few Seconds of Every Sales Call ....................................... 25
Why Your Consultative Sales Approach Isn’t Working .............................. 27
Five Tips for Effective Channel Sales Development .................................. 29
Why Early Adopters Won’t Help You Sell More ....................................... 31
Why Prospects Won’t Return Your Calls................................................... 33
Five Common Mistakes with Sales Collateral (and how to fix them) ......... 35
The Seven Words That Can Transform Your Sales .................................... 37
Is Your Sales and Marketing Customer-Focused?
Two Simple Tests Can Find Out .............................................................. 39
Calculate the Cost of the Problem, Not Just the ROI............................... 41
Managing the Sales Process When the Buyer is in Charge ......................... 43
Template for a Weekly, Metrics-Driven Inside Sales Rep Meeting ............. 47
Isolating and Overcoming Final Sales Objections ..................................... 49

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The Five Sales Mistakes Most Startups Make
To emerge from the early stages of building a new business, start-ups need
to stay focused on two things: building and selling. The first is by far the most
important. You can’t sell what you don’t ship, and if it’s not built specifically
with the customer’s needs in mind, it’ll be next to impossible to sell even with
a great sales system.
But as start-ups begin putting a significant focus on customer growth, I’ve
found that they typically make many of the same mistakes. Especially with B2B
products and services, it’s easy to fall into these traps but equally easy to avoid
them, and scale your sales more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.
Here are the five sales mistakes I find most start-ups make (and how to
avoid or course-correct them in your business).
Mistake #1: Hiring a VP of Sales first. If you’re the founder or CEO of
a start-up, the first head of sales is you. The first salesperson is you. You need to
lead the charge to determine 1.) what the customer is looking for, 2.) what they’re
interested in spending money on, and 3.) what the sales process will look like.
Your next hire should be salespeople who hit the phones and have a quota.
You need people that will sell first. Only then, when you’ve established market
demand and the start of a successful sales process, should you think about hiring
someone to lead. A good VP of Sales will want to build a team. When you’re in
start-up mode, just starting to sell and learn, you’re not quite there yet.
Mistake #2: Spending money on marketing too early. When you
first go to market, you may have educated guesses (based on your customer
insight, smarts or past experience) on what sales and marketing channels will
work to efficiently drive qualified prospects and closed business. But your first
few months will include a lot of learning, a lot of failures and a lot of improve-
ments if you’re carefully executing and measuring everything.
Despite your aggressive early sales goals, don’t throw excessive marketing
dollars against channels that are unproven. Don’t scale spending in any direc-
tion until you have measurable proof that your message, offer, channel and/or
overall approach is working. Instead, test frequently, quickly and then invest in
channels with far greater success rates.
Mistake #3: Building a sales process that doesn’t map to how your
customers want to buy. The sales process you used at your last job is inter-
esting, but may not apply to this market, this product or this customer. You
can’t build an effective sales process in a vacuum.

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Successful sales processes mirror the way your customers want to buy. It
takes into account the stages they go through to develop the need, understand
and prioritize outcomes and then research solutions before a decision is made.
Each customer navigates this process differently.
If you create a sales process that conflicts with that, you’re introducing
friction to the decision-making process that will distract or annoy your pros-
pects, and impact your conversion rates. Even worse, you’ll likely blame results
on the wrong factors and further delay sales process improvement.
Mistake #4: Selling beyond the early adopters. In every market,
there’s a difference between the early adopters and the early majority. They
think different, work different and buy different. Long-term, you have your
eyes past the chasm to the bigger market opportunities. But you won’t get
there until you address the most ready-to-buy prospects.
Your sales process for early adopters may be very different than what it
will look like two years from now, when you’re selling to a more mainstream
audience. The marketing channels and messages you use may be different as
well. But in the early days of selling, stay focused on your most-likely-to-buy
audience. They’re the key to growth.
Mistake #5: Building a large sales team too quickly. This lesson
should be obvious by now, based on the mistakes above. Your forecast spread-
sheet may show that you need ten inside sales reps in three months, but unless
you’re clear on what they’ll be doing, clear on the process they’ll follow,
where they’ll get leads, and what characteristics you need from them to suc-
ceed, you shouldn’t be hiring to scale. Not yet.
You may not even know if they should be an inside sales team, or field/
territory-based. Or maybe it’s best to sell purely via channels. It’s time-con-
suming and expensive to unravel a sales organization you built too quickly
without understanding the proven dynamics of growth in your market.
Inherent in many of these mistakes (or at least in avoiding them) is patience
and discipline. With investors breathing down your neck and a whole blue
ocean in front of you, those attributes are difficult to keep. But trust me,
you’ll save yourself a ton of wasted time and money, and you’ll find yourself
selling and growing faster.

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Five Critical Steps to Building
a Sales Team from Scratch
The opportunity to build a sales team from scratch happens more often
than you might think. Yes, it’s a critical step for any new organization where
sales has never formally existed before. But mature organizations create new
sales teams all the time—to sell new products, to launch into new markets or
industries, to add inside support to an existing field sales team, etc.
Whether you’re truly starting from scratch or creating a new team inside an
existing sales organization, here are five critical steps you should work through
before any outbound activity begins.
Clarity of success metrics. How will the organization overall define
success for this sales team? What do those metrics look like 30 days from now,
three months from now, 6–12 months from now? Make sure you know
explicitly how your leadership team is going to evaluate success. At a more
direct level, know how you’re going to measure success of the sales team itself
as it ramps up. How will you know it’s on a path for success after the first
week? What measures will you use to ensure the right momentum on a daily
and weekly basis with each rep? Define these up front, and let them guide how
you build and execute the rest of your plan.
Customer insight. Successful sales teams don’t develop their best prac-
tices in a bubble. Partner with your marketing team to develop a clear under-
standing of your customer’s needs, pain points and desired outcomes. The
sales process you develop for the new sales team should directly map to the
way your customer wants to buy—including messaging, materials, channels,
offers, etc. The more you understand the customer, their behavior and pur-
chase tendencies, the more likely the sales process will write itself for you.
The right channel(s). What kind of sales team are you hiring, anyway?
Do you need a field team or inside team? Or both? Too often, sales manag-
ers jump into hiring before understanding the right approach. Your customer
insight, as well as observation of how the rest of your industry or market sells,
should give you clues to the right approach as well.
Defined process. Before the first call is made, the first email sent, the first
leads generated, map the entire sales process. Start with how your customer
buys, and map that down to a series of lead development and opportunity
management stages. Know exactly what it means for a prospect to be at each
stage, and define specific roles for both sales and marketing at each stage to
help get the prospect to the next step closer to the closed deal. Then, codify
this process in a way that the entire sales team can easily follow, replicate and
document their progress in your CRM system. I guarantee you’ll make adjust-

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ments to this process as you get rolling, but having it all mapped out up front
will help you not only measure and act on what’s happening in the market-
place, but will also make your sales team far more efficient from the get-go.
Training and onboarding. Don’t skimp on this. It’s tempting to hire
world-class salespeople and let them loose as quickly as possible. But unless
they understand your customer intimately, unless they know exactly how you
want them to sell, unless they know how you will define their success and how
you want them to document their activity, they’ll be spinning their wheels
from day one.
Successful selling requires that you apply a consistent, proven process to a
buyer who wants and needs to be treated as a unique opportunity. The best sales
teams in the world do both, and it starts with the above steps from day one.

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Eight Tips for Hiring Better Sales Reps
by Juli Bacon, President, JB Consulting Systems

In the course of my 19+ years of human resources experience, I have dealt
with many issues due to poor hiring decisions related to sales representatives.
Looking back over the various disciplinary or termination issues, I found that
most employers make common mistakes in hiring, motivating, promoting and
terminating sales reps.
Rather than addressing these mistakes one crisis at a time, I decided it is finally
time to write some of my observations down and spread the word to a larger
audience.

Sales representatives must be motivated.
Each person is different, so you have to figure out what motivates them to
sell for you. For some, the almighty dollar is a significant motivation while the
adrenaline rush of “making the deal” may energize others. Your sales person
might be inspired by hitting a sales number, making a quota or hitting enough
sales to push them to a higher commission level. If your business relies heavily
on making cold calls, a person who sells best through building relationships is
not going to perform well.
Hire only sales reps that are motivated by your commission structure.
If you have a set commission structure and you aren’t going to make changes
to it, then only hire sales reps that are used to selling under that type of struc-
ture. Otherwise you will not get the results you expect.

Sales reps do not have to be experts on your product.
Many companies make the mistake of requiring that a sales person have a
certain amount of experience in their particular industry. This is rarely neces-
sary. A good sales person with a bit of education in your industry will figure
out the key information necessary to sell your product or service. You don’t
want them to be the expert. I think of a good sales rep as someone who can
make you sell the shirt off your back and make you think it’s your idea.

Good sales reps are good listeners.
Prospective customers with the right prompting will tell you what their
“pain” is and the right sales rep will listen for that and sell how your product
or service will help stop the pain.

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Sales reps must be free to sell
and not be bogged down by paperwork.
I have seen many clients require outside sales people to be in the office a
certain amount of time. I have seen clients require their sales staff to process
a lot of paperwork. If they are in the office, they aren’t out selling and if they
are doing paperwork they are not on the phone making sales or out in the field
making sales. If you have more than one or two sales reps, you might consider
hiring a good administrative assistant or sales assistant to process the paperwork.

Great sales reps might make more money than anyone else
in the company, even the owner and that’s OK.
I have heard owners make comments about their sales reps making more
money than them and some have even terminated sales reps because they did
make more money. If they are making a lot of money then your company
should be making more money. I struggle with this issue more than most. At
times, I have seen some instances where the company had a poor commission
structure but other times it seems as if the owner just doesn’t understand that
selling more makes them more money.

Don’t micromanage your sales representatives.
If you have given your sales rep time to learn your product or service,
understand how the sales process works and then sent them on their way, you
need to give them some time to make their sales. Many owners or sales man-
agers schedule way too many meetings with their sales reps to find out how
they are selling, whom they are working on and when the deal will be made.
This not only irritates a good sales rep but also demotivates them and wastes
precious selling time. A weekly sales meeting early in the morning or during
off selling time should be adequate. If it isn’t, something isn’t working right.

There is a big difference between
inside and outside sales representatives.
Sales people who are really good at inside or outside sales can rarely make
the transition from one to the other very well. There are those that do, but
the positions require different skills.
Good inside sales reps do not have to be face to face with the customer to
make sales, and they may not like or do well trying to sell face to face. They
build their “sales persona” on the phone and that persona might not be who
they really are. Moving them to an outside sales position where they have to
interact with people can have a devastating effect on their esteem as well as
their sales. Good outside sales reps rely on watching body language and look-
ing their prospect in the eye. That same person may have difficulty making a
meaningful connection over the phone.
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Improve Sales Forecast Accuracy
With These Seven Steps
A consistent weak point across sales organizations is their sales forecast.
Yes, it’s difficult to predict which sales will close. But your forecast drives
numerous decisions across the organization. And when forecasts are wrong,
the implications go well beyond commission checks.
To improve the quality and accuracy of your sales forecasts, starting imme-
diately, I recommend the following seven steps.

1. Use consistent definitions
If your entire sales team is working from a consistent set of definitions (i.e.
what is a good lead, what is a qualified opportunity, etc.), then it’s easier to
trust the data you have. If you look historically at your conversion rates—over-
all, by industry, by geography, by rep—it’s easier to predict conversion rates
and new sales from a future pipeline of opportunities. The entire sales and
marketing team needs to understand these definitions, and sales management
needs to enforce their usage on a regular basis.

2. Know your sales cycle length
If you get a good lead today, when will it likely close? This week? This
quarter? This year? Many inaccurate sales forecasts get this one piece of data
wrong, meaning your conversion rates are accurate but don’t take place in the
window of time you assumed. You eventually get the revenue, but not at the
time your organization was expecting it. By building a typical (or even conserva-
tive) sales cycle length into your model, you’re making it easier to map expected
sales to the week, month, quarter or year in which they’re likely to land.

3. Read market changes (and their impact on closing behavior)
The model you built last year might not work this year. If market condi-
tions are weak, sales cycle length may have spread out. If budgets are tighter,
an earlier decision maker may need permission from the CFO to take action
now. These changes can wreak havoc on your sales forecast if you don’t antici-
pate, identify and adjust both behavior and expectations as a result.

4. Require a “compelling event” to become an opportunity
It’s the right contact at the right company in an ideal market. They can
surely benefit from your product or service. But do they want it? Is it a prior-
ity? Is there something internally that is driving urgency and prioritization of
what you’re selling? Requiring a defined “compelling event” for new oppor-
tunities may reduce the volume of opportunities created, but it also increases
the likelihood that those deals will close, which in turn makes your forecast far
more accurate.
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5. Conduct regular deal reviews
Sit down with your sales reps and walk through their pipelines. Not just
names and numbers, but context. Ask for the back-story, why they’re quali-
fied, what the compelling event internally is that’s driving action. This isn’t
about not trusting your reps. It’s about establishing a culture of accountability,
learning and collaboration.
Make these deal reviews about helping your reps brainstorm new ways of
accelerating deals, establishing greater urgency with latent opportunities and
creating greater income opportunities for them personally. In the process,
you’ll have a more intimate idea of the quality and accuracy of the pipeline.

6. Make updating the forecast fast, easy and mandatory for your reps
Opportunities change after they’ve entered the pipeline. Close dates move
out. Or up. Deals that were on a fast track suddenly slow down, and perhaps
should be moved back to an earlier stage. Most reps don’t want to make these
changes to opportunities in their CRM system, as that may imply weakness in
their own pipelines and selling skills.
Instead, make it easy and mandatory to make these changes in real-time.
Make it clear to the sales organization that these changes will help manage-
ment improve selling conditions, and address real-time changes with the
resources needed to close more business.

7. Reward accuracy and honesty
Very few sales organizations reward pipeline performance and behavior.
They compensate based on closed business, but not based on how close reps
come to their forecasts. Create incentives for your reps to accurately forecast
their expected sales. Foster an environment where honest changes to forecasts,
even if the news isn’t good, is encouraged and rewarded.
Would you really reward a rep for reducing their sales forecast? Absolutely.
Imagine the alternative, that they led you to believe their output would be
much higher when they knew they couldn’t deliver.
What strategies and tactics have you used in your sales organization to
improve accuracy? What can you add to this list?

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A Three-Step Process
for Effective Sales Territory Planning
Great salespeople have a plan. They have a goal (quota and/or commission)
and a specific written plan of how they’re going to get there. Great salespeople
do this on their own, but it’s also a worthwhile exercise to ask your sales team
to go through at the beginning of each selling period (especially if you’re on
quarterly or annual sales cycles).
It’s far better to know, at the beginning of the month, quarter or year, your
individual and overall level of confidence for hitting your number. If there’s a
gap in sales pipeline, or other obstacles in between you and your goal, it’s bet-
ter to know that now vs. the end of the quarter.
Smart salespeople look at this level of territory business planning not as a chore,
but as a roadmap for how to prioritize their time—how and where they should be
committing their own resources most effectively to close more business.
A good sales territory plan should answer three questions:
1. What do I have?
2. What am I going to do?
3. What do I need?
You can do this by breaking down your expected closed business for the
period into three parts:
1. Current pipeline: What current opportunities do I have that are expect-
ed to close by the end of this selling period? Which do I have the most confidence
in? Which might be a stretch but are still qualified and more than likely to close?
2. Leads: What leads am I working with currently are qualified and likely
to become closed opportunities between now and the end of the selling
period? These are more long shots, perhaps, because they’re not as far along.
But you still have an expectation that they will close.
3. Proactive targets: What are the additional accounts within my territory
that I am going to proactively pursue and close by the end of this sales period?
This section may constitute the “gap” between your quota and the combina-
tion of current pipeline and leads you’re already managing, to give you a big
enough pipeline to close and exceed your quota.
As a salesperson, you think first about what you can control. The above
three categories put specific focus on what you have, and what you can still
do. But there still maybe significant roadblocks, obstacles or needs for op-
portunities within any of these three areas to get them closed. This is where a

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good territory plan specifically identifies these needs, at the start of the selling
period, as “asks” for others in your organization—your manager, marketing,
the product team, an executive, etc.
As the salesperson, you are the quarterback of the deal. It’s your job to
leverage whatever resources are available to you within (or even outside) the
organization to help your prospect reach a decision. Your territory plan is a
great place to identify specific needs tied to potential new business, which
gives the context and motivation to others to help.

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How to Teach and Reinforce
Consistent Messaging With Your Sales Team
It’s one thing to get your company’s customer and benefit-centric messag-
ing right in an email, blog post or other marketing campaign. But how do you
take those same messages and successfully get an entire sales team to speak
from the same playbook?
Scripting isn’t the answer (more on that below). You need every sales rep
to understand, believe in and use the messaging that will best resonate with
your customers, generate higher response and move more business forward.
Below are several recommendations for marketing and sales managers to
get every sales professional on your team using the same language.
• Role playing: When you first introduce new messaging, don’t train it by
handing out a bullet list and talking through it. Get your reps comfort-
able with the messaging by acting it out in simulated prospect conversa-
tions. Some organizations go as far as to have a live role-playing “test” for
new reps to make sure they’re comfortable using new messaging. But even
if you don’t go that far, use role-playing to introduce messaging and then
incorporate “refresh” sessions on occasion to keep it fresh and top of mind.
• Don’t overscript it: Good sales reps aren’t going to use a word-for-
word script anyway. It’s OK to give them messaging in a training environ-
ment that is written out—in bullet or paragraph form—but you can’t
expect them to use this verbatim in a sales pitch. It will come across to
the prospect as wooden, contrived and/or inauthentic. Instead, highlight
in your messaging the key words and phrases that are most important,
and use the role-playing to reinforce that these words and phrases are
making their way into conversations.
•Sell it with research and examples: Want your sales team to believe
in the new messages? Prove to them that it’s real and will work with their
prospects by backing it up with research and outside examples. Give them
confidence that these messages will resonate with their prospects and help
them sell more.
• Try a conversation tree approach: When you structure new messag-
ing for presentation to the sales team, consider putting it into a “conver-
sation tree” format. In other words, map out the progression of questions
or back-and-forth you’d expect will happen on the call. This will show
reps not only what messages you want used, but also how to contextually
introduce them into a natural conversation.

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• Keyword reminders at each desk: Even if you use bullet or para-
graph-formatted messaging to educate and train the sales team, don’t
expect this same format will be useful when they’re on a live call and
need a reminder. Instead, give them something they can pin up at their
desk that focuses on the keywords. If trained well, these keywords will
remind them “on the fly” of the broader messages, phrases and themes
they need to use on the phone.
• Monitoring and reinforcement: If you have the ability to do remote
call monitoring, use these sessions to check for correct and consistent us-
age of the new messaging. Afterward, call out those who are using it well
and anonymously cite examples where it may not have been used, with
suggestions for how it could have been incorporated. This will reward
those who are using the new messaging with some peer recognition,
while providing an ongoing training opportunity without calling out
those who may still be struggling.

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Nine Proven Alternatives to Cold Calling
Cold calling still works, but it’s inherently a difficult way of building your
sales pipeline. Neither side likes cold calling—not the caller or receiver.
Fortunately, even for sales professionals who are responsible for generating
their own leads and prospects, a variety of proven strategies and tactics exist
that can reduce or eliminate your need to pound the phones. Here are a few.
• Referrals from existing customers. Your current customers know far
more prospective customers than you do—they work with them, hang
out with them, spend time in the same social and professional circles.
Your current customers also know better than anyone the real value of
what you do—not just what you sell but also what that enables for them
in their personal and/or professional lives. Make sure you’re tapping into
that relationship, and thanking/rewarding your customers for doing so.
• Check back with past customers. Just because they left doesn’t mean
they won’t come back. Do you have new products or services? Have you
improved significantly since they last bought from you? Just because they
left it doesn’t mean they won’t also refer you to people or businesses they
know who are qualified and interested. Keeping good relationships with
past customers is a significant source of new business for countless smart
companies.
• Watch the social Web for buying signals. You’re one-click away
from knowing which of your prospective customers are complaining about
a relationship they may have with your competitor. You’re a Google
search away from seeing which individuals or organizations are asking
public questions about problems or desired outcomes that your product
or service was created to solve. The better you understand the needs of
your customers and the reasons why prospects come to you to buy in the
first place, the more likely you can search for, identify and take action on
those behaviors and signals when they appear on the social Web.
• Participate in customer communities. You’re a seller, but you’re
also a subject matter expert. Find communities online where your cus-
tomers are congregating and talking amongst themselves and become
a peer. This doesn’t happen overnight, especially as your customers are
likely used to people like you who come in and want to sell. But if you
represent yourself as a source of knowledge and advice, you can win their
trust. And the next time they have a problem or question, they’re more
likely to come back to you first.
• Work with referral partners. Who else does business with your cus-
tomer? How well do they understand what you do and how you could
help that customer in a complimentary way? The better you cultivate
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your partner relationships, the more likely you can convert those rela-
tionships into proactive and reactive prospect introductions.
• Upsell current customers. Don’t just call current customers and start
selling. Check in. See how they’re doing. Ask about their business and
what’s missing. What are their obstacles to reaching even greater success?
You might find they need more of what you have but have been too busy
to reach out (or simply haven’t made the connection that you can help
them more than you already have).
• Hire an appointment setter (but make it good). This one might
not be fair, as it’s really just having someone else do the cold calling for
you. But what if the appointment setter was calling to offer not a prod-
uct pitch but a consultation? Do you have 10–15 minutes worth of best
practices to share with prospects independent of what you’re selling?
Could you use that appointment as a warm introduction to you, your
company and the value you can provide the prospect as a subject matter
expert?
• Answer questions. Find the online communities where customers ask
open questions, and start answering. In B2B, this includes forums like
LinkedIn Answers and Focus.com. Create a paper trail of how well you
understand your client’s problems and how to address them. Plus, the
people asking the questions are more likely to come back to you if they
like your answer and want to hear more.
• Join the comment conversations on targeted blogs. Interact
directly with prospects in an environment where they’re already comfort-
able and sharing back and forth with other prospects. Use a good RSS
Reader to help you quickly identify the blog posts you want to be associ-
ated with.

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Four Tips for Approaching a Cold Prospect List
A good friend recently won a copy of the local Business Journal’s Book of
Lists at a networking event. For the uninitiated, books like this basically rank
the top 25–50 companies in a particular metro market based on industry,
fastest-growing firms, public vs. private, etc. These lists often come with names
and contact information for key executives at these companies as well.
For my friend, this book represents a potentially lucrative list of customers.
But what do you do now? When you are handed, come across, or research and
otherwise acquire a “cold” list of potential customers, how do you engage?
The specific answer to this question will be different for each business, but
here are four considerations that can help you quickly create and start execut-
ing a strategy that works.
Define what success looks like (for you and for them). Of course you
want new business from the list. But what does that look like? What does suc-
cess look like when you’re working with and/or helping these new customers?
Perhaps more importantly, what does success look like for them when and after
working with you? What could you enable for their business? What among
their current needs and objectives are you most likely to address? Understand-
ing these fundamental needs gives you a starting point for creating value from
the first point of contact (vs. looking like just another company trying to sell
something).
What’s in it for them, right now? Answer this question more tactically
now, beyond the broader definition of success for your prospective customers.
Why should they listen to you? What do you have to offer them right now that
can help them? What’s worth 5–10 minutes of their time right now that both
gives you a crack in the door, and delivers immediate value to their job and/
or business? Most businesses, in a first approach with a new prospect, focus on
themselves. They figure it’s more important to introduce who they are and
what they do. And while this is indeed important, it’s how everyone else leads
their first call or pitch. If you want to be different and stand out, know the
prospect well enough to offer them something contextually relevant and valu-
able. They’ll figure out what you do soon enough.
Think long-term. These prospects are cold. They don’t know you yet.
Unless you represent a potential impulse buy, don’t expect miracles and one-
call closes right off the bat. In fact, delivering something of value (instead
of making a sales pitch) as recommended above assumes that you’re in for a
multi-touch relationship-building and sales process. Cold calls rarely convert

15

into immediate sales. Effectively-done cold calls earn you the next call, where
you have the right to go a little deeper, start to talk more about what you do,
and position that as a benefit to the prospect.
Test first. Before you prepare a massive direct mail campaign or give the
entire prospect list to your sales rep, pick a handful of names and make the
call. Test your message and value-added offer. Script the short voicemail and
first few seconds of the live call (if they answer) so you know whether the
research and thoughtfulness you put into the approach and offer are working.
This isn’t going to give you quantitative, definitive results, but should help
you determine if your approach is directionally valuable to both the prospect
as well as your effort to convert a cold prospect list into warm relationships
and, eventually, closed business.

16

Three Best Practices to Shorten Your Sales Cycle
Your prospects will always control how quickly they buy. You cannot
artificially accelerate their path to conversion without creating undue friction
or adding customers who aren’t committed and are more likely to churn at a
high rate.
That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t accelerate the speed at which
your prospects make a decision. You just need to focus on finding better pros-
pects that know what they need and will make faster decisions. Here are three
ways to do that.
Better qualify opportunities up front. Sales pipelines slow down not
just because prospects aren’t ready, but also because the wrong prospects are
being managed to begin with. If your prospect isn’t ready, or isn’t in your
target group, move on. If they’re qualified but not ready to buy, put them on
a nurture campaign and find the prospects that are actively in the market.
Salespeople who want to demonstrate large pipelines to their managers are
notorious for working with prospects that are not qualified, not really interest-
ed and aren’t going to buy. These prospects waste your time, keep you from
spending more time with real opportunities and artificially make your sales
cycle metrics look bad.
Know what a truly qualified opportunity looks like. Create crisp definitions
and enforce consistency across your sales team. Be disciplined about keeping
good but not-ready-to-buy prospects out of the active opportunity pipeline.
Identify pain and create urgency early. Your prospect may have no
idea what you’re selling and no idea why they need it. And if you pitch your
product without context, I don’t blame them.
Before the demo, before the product summary, identify that there’s a clear
and high pain you’re able to address and solve. Your prospect may very well be
able to articulate that pain clearly. They may alternatively have the pain, or be
about to have that pain, and not realize it.
Your job, by asking a set of consultative and diagnostic questions, is to
establish that pain. Establish, enumerate and/or create an urgency to fix a
problem or address a situation that’s a high priority for the prospect. When
you have this urgency established, you have a motivated buyer who 1.) is ready
to hear about the solution, and 2.) is motivated to take action quickly.
Invest in the relationship before they’re active buyers. The vast
majority of your prospective customers aren’t ready to buy. They may eventu-
ally, but not today. They have no place in your current opportunity pipeline,
and they don’t want to hear much from you right now anyway.

17

You want them to know what you do, know that you can provide value far
before active selling begins, then stay in touch and build trust, credibility and
preference until they are finally ready to buy.
Because when they eventually get that far, they won’t be shopping. They
won’t be educating themselves from square one. They won’t need as much
time to build a relationship with you.
If you’ve already done much of that groundwork before the sales cycle begins,
you’re bound to not only increase your conversion rates but do it much, much
faster than before.

18

Four Requirements for
Qualifying a Sales Opportunity
Your sales pipeline is only as good as it is qualified. If you have deals repre-
sented there that aren’t real, and aren’t moving, then you’re just plain lying.
You’re lying to yourself that those deals will close, you’re lying to your sales
manager that your pipeline is healthy.
At this point in the month and quarter, an accurate assessment of pending
sales is critically important. But unless there’s a common definition for what a
qualified sales opportunity is, this kind of assessment is next to impossible.
So what makes for a qualified sales opportunity? In a B2B setting, I believe
you need at least four things:
1. Engaged decision-maker: This is someone in the organization who
is qualified to make a purchase decision. They may need to get approv-
al from a CFO, or have someone underneath them do an assessment,
but you need the primary decision-maker engaged. Leads can come
in from anywhere in the organization, but if that lead doesn’t have
decision-making power, then your deal isn’t ready to move.
2. Identified budget: If you’re replacing an incumbent product or
service, this is a little easier. But if you’re introducing a new expendi-
ture, you’d better be sure there’s money for it. Ask the hard question
and get explicit confirmation that there are dollars to spend on what
you’re selling.
3. Strong tie to organizational objectives: This is the difference be-
tween “nice to have” and “need to have.” There are many things that
your prospects will think is cool, but that will ultimately be priority #16
(which means they won’t get funded, approved or implemented any-
time soon). But if what you’re offering ties to an existing, published
objective (at least for the department, but ideally for the organization),
then you have a chance. If what you have can help your decision-maker
and organizational target achieve or exceed a publicly stated goal,
you’re far more likely to get attention, get your project at the top of
the list and get more people inside the organization rallying behind the
purchase.
4. Mutually agreed-upon purchase timeline: Many sales professionals
will put an “expected close date” next to prospective sales opportuni-
ties. But that close date is only real if the buyer would give the same
timeline. To make a sales opportunity real, there needs to be a timeline

19

in place. The buyer needs to be working concurrently with you on
the same path. Just because you want a deal to close by the end of the
month, or the end of the quarter, doesn’t mean your buyer has the
same urgency.
Every sales situation is a little different, so your qualified pipeline criteria
may differ. But it’s critically important that you at minimum create common
expectations and definitions across your sales organization, so that the sales
pipeline you’re looking at (good or bad) is accurate.

20

Three Important Sales Metrics
You’re Probably Not Tracking Today
It’s easy to evaluate your sales team based on pipeline size, closed business,
performance against quota. But there are other metrics you probably have
access to already that can help you improve individual and overall sales perfor-
mance. Here are three of my favorites.
First-month customer satisfaction. One month in, most customers
haven’t yet realized the value of the product or service. But they should
already have developed an opinion of how well what they’re now experiencing
matched the expectations set by the sales rep. If your sales team is selling
right—setting the right expectations, selling on outcomes and benefits instead
of features—the customer should know exactly what they’re getting into and
have a solid satisfaction level even in the first couple weeks.
Average selling price vs. team average or expectations. Simply put,
is the average deal size from each rep living up to expectations? Is an individu-
al rep performing better or worse than the team average? This is an important
and often overlooked metric, especially in markets where small deals take just
as much work to close as large deals. Your reps may feel good about clos-
ing the small guys, or feel good about closing the “back up” sale of a smaller
product to a bigger customer, but is that where their (and your) time is best
spent? Make sure your reps are going after big-enough deals.
Current vs. previous territory performance. Sales teams too often
ignore historical performance. They don’t use the precedents set in previous
selling periods or by previous sales teams to predict or expect future perfor-
mance. Let’s say you have an experienced rep working a new territory or
vertical industry. Is their performance dramatically different than what you
saw from that territory previously? There may be good reasons—you may be
saturated, or inventory could be low. But if you’re seeing significantly lower
performance vs. what was previously achieved, it could be a sign that potential
sales are somehow being left on the table.

21

The Problem With Sales Scripts
I’m willing to bet your sales team doesn’t use the sales scripts you gave
them. If you bothered to document the word-for-word transcript of how
you’d like their calls to go, it was a waste of time.
Good salespeople don’t work from scripts, because they know that they
simply don’t work. If you’re reading from a script, you’re not listening. If
you’re using a script, you’re not customizing the pitch to what your prospect
cares about. If you’re using a script all day long, you’ve already made the as-
sumption that every prospect is exactly alike.
Many of your prospects approach their problems in a different way. They
have different perspectives, different needs. All a script does is water that down
for everyone. Worse, it commoditizes what you’re selling (and commoditiza-
tion usually means you’ll end up competing on price).
Scripts work for voicemail messages. They can work for your initial elevator
pitch as well—those first few seconds you use to earn the right to continue the
conversation. But from there, you have to listen. You have to adjust to what
the prospects says, and wants.
This doesn’t mean you go into a sales call unprepared. Have a crisp set of
benefit-oriented key messages, a set of questions you’ll use to discover what’s
really important to your prospect, and a set of desired outcomes for the con-
versation.
Know what you have, why it’s important and valuable, and what you want
from the prospect at the end of the call. Let that outline guide you.
Sales scripts feel safe. They’re coveted by managers who don’t trust (or
don’t train) their salespeople. But just because it feels safe doesn’t mean it’s
going to work.

23

Script the First Few Seconds of Every Sales Call
Good salespeople don’t use scripts. They don’t in part because they know
it’s counter-productive.
Don’t misunderstand me. A successful salesperson still needs to be in con-
trol of the conversation, needs to know what they want to say, and what out-
come they want from the call. But putting a word-for-word script for a back-
and-forth conversation isn’t going to be authentic, isn’t going to address what
the prospect is telling you and isn’t going to help you build rapport, trust and
interest from a smart, qualified buyer.
What IS important, however, is to script the first few seconds of the call.
There’s no reason you can’t have the specific words nailed down for how you
want to begin the call, create immediate interest, and earn the right to continue.
Especially when talking to a new prospect, this set-up is everything. If you
don’t take control right away, the prospect will lead you somewhere else. If
you don’t create immediate interest and value, your chances of engaging the
prospect in a conversation that goes somewhere diminishes greatly.
Here are some specific things to keep in mind:
• Don’t ask how they’re doing. This is a default start to a call for many
(“how’s it going today?”), but can take you in a number of directions
and tangents you don’t want to go. Keep control of that direction.
• Do ask if they have a moment. It’s OK and polite to ask if they have
a moment to speak. You aren’t going to take 30 minutes unless they give
you permission, but you do want to make sure they weren’t interrupted.
• Make a statement about benefits and outcomes. Demonstrate
that you are offering a positive outcome or achievement of a core objec-
tive, not selling a product or solution. If that benefit or outcome meets a
priority of theirs, they may continue to listen.
• Ask if they’re the person responsible for achieving this outcome.
If they are, you know you have a match and can continue. If they aren’t,
you can ask who would be responsible and end the conversation.
All of this can happen in the first 20–30 seconds of the call, and will help
ensure the rest of the call is of value to both of you.

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Why Your Consultative Sales Approach
Isn’t Working
Prospects don’t want to buy your product or service. What they really
want to buy are solutions to their problems. They want to buy a desired out-
come. They want to buy something that takes away pain.
Your product might do that, but your prospect doesn’t know it yet. And
launching directly into feature/benefit statements fails to put what you’re sell-
ing into any relevant context for the buyer.
That’s one reason why the consultative sales approach has worked so well in
recent years. The concept, in general, is to first better understand the circum-
stances, priorities and needs of the prospect before deciding if they’re a candi-
date to buy.
Many sellers who attempt a consultative sales approach still fail. The reasons
why generally come down to three things:
You’re asking questions that require the prospect to educate you
on basic stuff. Many sales professionals begin their consultative sales ap-
proach with basic, fact-finding questions. Tell me about your organization.
What is your role? What are your objectives? These are certainly important
questions to have answers to, but it’s not the prospect’s job to answer them.
Your prospect is busy, doesn’t yet know why you’re calling and what you’re
trying to sell and isn’t interested in taking time to educate you.
Alternatively, if you do your homework and understand answers to some
of these basic questions beforehand, you can begin the conversation by asking
questions the prospect may not have thought about or answered for them-
selves before. And, with that, they’re at least interested and engaged enough
to hear more.
You ask a good first question, then immediately start selling. Sellers
are anxious to start selling. Even with a thought-out consultative approach, it’s
easy to ask the first question and immediately come back with an answer that
includes your sales pitch. Unless your consultative approach truly only pivots
on one question, keep working through the discussion. Probe for more needs,
more context, so that (simultaneously) you have the information you need to
determine if there’s a fit, and the buyer is sufficiently intrigued by the line of
questioning that they naturally want to hear how you think you can solve the
problem.

27

In other words, be patient. Follow the process. A qualified prospect, with
the right set of consultative questions, will stay engaged because you’re asking
smart questions, relevant to their focus, and they already want to learn more.
Your questions don’t make the prospect think or learn something
new. Many buyers fail to buy because a need hasn’t been established. They
may have a problem but they can’t see it. They can’t envision how that prob-
lem will manifest itself in the future. Your consultative sales approach needs to
be built to help the prospect discover answers to these questions. It doesn’t
have to immediately answer the question, but should at least get the prospect
thinking that they do, in fact, have a potential problem they need to explore
further.
The fact that you’re asking questions, relevant questions, they don’t have
the answer to is in itself valuable to the prospect. They’ll wonder what other
questions you have they should have answers to, and they’ll also immediately
start believing that 1.) you probably know what you’re talking about, and 2.)
you might have some of the answers or solutions they all of the sudden need.
At its core, consultative selling is about asking questions first. But the right
questions and the right sequencing is key.

28

Five Tips for Effective Channel Sales Development
I see a lot of companies managing their channel partners in a less structured
way compared to their direct sales teams. But in most cases, your expectation
from the channel is the same as your expectation from inside and field sales.
You expect closed business and new customers.
Below are five fundamental suggestions for establishing and managing a
channel-based sales program.
1. You need an overall and by-channel sales goal. You need to
establish a sales and pipeline growth discipline with each individual part-
ner. It would be great if the partner was aligned with this and also had a
sales goal in mind (to drive referral fees back to them as revenue), but at
minimum you need to have an internal expectation of sales and revenue
yield by channel.
This seems fundamental, but I’ve seen many channel “objectives” talk
about partnerships, customer alignment and awareness. Maybe, but
those are means to an end. Be explicit about expected sales & revenue
yield from these channel relationships.
2. To get to this, you need an accurate sizing of the channel—how
many prospective customers are involved, how big those customers are,
and what revenue potential is inherent in each. Do the napkin math
on what kind of sales and revenue would result in getting 5 percent of
channel participants to sign up, ten percent, etc.
3. You won’t necessarily be driving sales from new partners in month one,
but you should have a clear, month-to-month expectation for
lead activity, sales and revenue growth. Also, what are the lead-
ing-indicator metrics via which you can judge early success in the first
couple months? Things like message/offer penetration and impressions
in their communication channels, number of inbound leads tracked to
that partner, etc. You need a very clear, quantifiable way of measuring
progress.
4. Create a common sales toolkit for partners so you’re doing every-
thing possible to enable them to communicate your value proposition
and accelerate sales growth. This should include sales collateral, mes-
saging platforms, samples of emails and other ad copy, access to your
webinars and white papers, case studies, etc.

29

5. In addition to having a clear compensation model for the referring
channels, consider “juicing” compensated activity in the early
days of the partnership to help develop the habit of driving aware-
ness, leads and business your way. For example, you could pay them for
inbound leads in the first month. Eventually, you’d only want to pay
points on closed deals, but you could essentially let them earn more
early by delivering leads, then they’d get paid for that with a higher
percentage on the first couple deals (so you don’t have to pay for any-
thing until you start actually closing channel-generated business).

30

Why Early Adopters Won’t Help You Sell More
In every new market—with new products in new categories that solve
a new or previously unsolved problem—there’s a group of early adopters.
These are the customers that already get it, that are predisposed to try some-
thing new, and are the quickest to buy.
The early adopters are passionate about what you’re doing, they give you
a lot of feedback, and they’re vocal about what they want to see you do next
with the product.
Problem is, early adopters don’t necessarily reflect the rest of the market.
They might make up the bulk of your earliest customers, but it’s dangerous to
build your long-term product strategy, marketing plan and messaging frame-
work based on their direct feedback.
The next group of customers—the post-early adopters, those that won’t
dive in right away but will slowly warm to what you’re selling as the market
matures, as they see others using it and as their understanding of the prod-
uct and solution evolves—are going to think about you in a different way.
They’re going to think about the problem in a different way and think about
the outcome they’re seeking in a different way.
The product you’re selling may or may not need to evolve significantly to
reach this new and much larger audience. But the way you approach them,
the way you resonate with their current situation and describe a positive future
that your solution can bridge to, that needs to be different.
Many companies build their product strategy and marketing plans based on
feedback from their early adopters. They take feedback and priorities from that
early audience as indicators of what the broader market thinks. That’s danger-
ous thinking. Unless you understand both the early adopters and the broader
market—and especially understand how they act, think and buy differently—
tapping into that broader sales and growth opportunity will be far harder than
it needs to be.

31

Why Prospects Won’t Return Your Calls
If you’re in sales, you’re intimately familiar with leaving voicemails. If
you’re like most salespeople, you leave a ton of voicemails every week and get
few responses.
But take a moment to think about the message you’re leaving.
• Is it really compelling?
• Does it create urgency?
• Is it about the customer (not about you)?
• Does it identify and/or offer to solve a problem the customer currently has?
• Is it short, less than 20–25 seconds long?
• Does it offer something of real value to the customer just for responding?
• Is your message any different from what your competitors are leaving as well?
Prospects aren’t going to care about you, let alone return your calls, unless
you give them a reason to.

33

Five Common Mistakes with Sales Collateral
(and how to fix them)
We’ve all seen awful sales collateral. We could go on and on about why it’s
bad, why it doesn’t work and what it should look like and do instead to drive
customer interest and action.
But here are five things most bad sales collateral has in common. Don’t let
it happen to you.
Too much copy: Whatever you wrote for a first draft, you could probably
cut the word count in half. Say the same thing with far fewer words. Let the
words on the page breath with more white space around it. Let the shorter
copy put greater emphasis on the points you want to really sink in, that you
want the prospect to remember.
No customer testimonials or results: Unless this is your company
or product’s first rodeo, you’ve got successful customers behind you. Why
not feature them? Demonstrate that others have made the leap to use your
product or service, and succeeded. Don’t just use the typical “I’m so happy”
quote, but back it up with real data. How have those customers quantified
the ROI? How has their business changed, how have their results improved,
because you are in their lives?
No compelling visuals: If you surround copy with clipart, that’s not
good visuals. If you use pictures of your building... you get the point. What
visuals will reinforce the points you’re making? What visuals could—alone—
communicate what you’re about and what you can enable for your customers?
It might be a chart; it might be physical examples of your work. But think
carefully about what you’re showing, and what it’s communicating.
Features before benefits: It’s bad enough when collateral focuses on
features without explaining what they do. But even if you’re including both
features and benefits, too often marketers put them in the wrong order. List
the benefit first, then follow with the feature that enables that benefit or
outcome. Prospects want the benefits; they want the outcomes your product
or service represents. Start with what they want to hear, then (if you must),
explain how you do it.
No call to action: Your sales collateral is not meant to be a direct-response
piece. But if you do everything else right and the prospect wants to learn
more, what do you want them to do? Plenty of collateral lists the company’s

35

main line. Do you want motivated prospects to call the receptionist? Or could
you promote a dedicated line to a sales consultant? Better yet, what about
including a value-added offer so that both ready-to-buy and not-quite-ready-
to-buy prospects are equally compelled to respond, engage and keep walking
the path with you towards a sale?

36

The Seven Words That Can Transform Your Sales
You can get lost in the never-ending stream of suggestions, advice and best
practices to improve your sales and marketing performance. And although
much of it is great, we still need to boil things down to simpler direction that
can be quickly and easily folded into the work we do on a daily basis to close
new business.
Here, then, are seven words to live by. Seven words that individually repre-
sent important concepts in accelerating sales and marketing performance, but
together encapsulate a strong strategy and roadmap for improving results.
Give: Give freely, early and often. Give away ideas, training, best practices
and insights that can make your customers more successful. Publish articles
featuring your “secret sauce,” prospects will run back for more. Give free
samples of your product or service, free access to your smartest people. Deliver
value early and without pretense. It’s a quick way to develop trust, rapport and
credibility with your new customers and prospects.
Benefits: Don’t talk about features. Don’t talk about solutions. Talk about
benefits, results and outcomes. What you sell is a means to an end. Focus on
the end. Your customers don’t want to buy solutions; they want to buy what
happens after putting the solution in place. Talk about those benefits, those
outcomes at the beginning, middle and end of your sales process. Constantly
remind your prospects that you represent more than just a purchase, you rep-
resent the achievement of something bigger that will improve their business
and/or their lives.
Partner: You’re not in this alone, and you’re not the only company ad-
dressing the needs of your target customer. No matter how important you
are to your customers, you’re merely a part of the puzzle they need to piece
together to achieve their ultimate end-goal. Find the other puzzle pieces in
the market, and work closely with them to deliver a bigger, more valuable out-
come to your customers and prospects. Pool resources, campaigns, marketing
budgets and more to collectively and individually capture even greater market
share than you could on your own.
Listen: Don’t talk so much. Ask questions. Understand your customer—
their needs, their pain, their dreams, their objectives. Listen to them before
they’re ready to buy, before they even know a solution to their problem exists.
Use social media and listening tools to keep watch for signs of the pain, signs
of trouble, signs that your prospective customers have a problem and are seek-
ing a better path to the outcome they desire. Spend more time listening than
talking, and your prospects will tell you exactly what they want, and exactly
how to help them to buy (from you).

37

Stories: The best salespeople don’t pitch. They don’t present. They tell
stories. Stories of success, stories of redemption, stories of pain and problems
that are converted to results and achievement. Your customers would prefer
to listen to stories, especially stories that resonate with their situation, featur-
ing companies or individuals they want to emulate. They want to hear stories of
what their future can and should look like. Pitches and presentations are often
dull. Stories bring ideas and outcomes to life. They inspire and drive action.
Appreciate: Never take your customers or prospects for granted. Look
for ways to remind them, every day, how important they are to you. Do big
things and little things to make them feel special. Your competitors don’t do
this. Fill the void, and create remarkability and loyalty with little more than a
few well-placed words, a few more thank-you’s and a few simple gestures that
cost little but deliver reams of value back to you.
Experiences: Do they remember you? Did you give them a reason
to? Were you remarkable enough to create word-of-mouth to their friends,
colleagues and peers? Were you memorable enough to get them coming back
for more? This isn’t just for customers. If you’re delivering value in the sales
process, you’re creating differentiation and value vs. your competitors. Com-
moditization goes out the window, and you win.

38

Is Your Sales and Marketing Customer-Focused?
Two Simple Tests Can Find Out
Think your sales process and marketing strategy is focused on the custom-
er? Here are two quick and simple ways to find out:
Marketing materials: Take your most prominent collateral, email tem-
plates, advertisements, etc. Get a red pen and a blue pen. With the red pen,
circle any word that’s focused on you and/or your company (we, I, us, com-
pany name, product name, etc.). With a blue pen, circle any word that’s focused
on the customer (you, your, customer name, customer goals/outcomes, etc.).
Do you have more red than blue?
Sales process: Look at the name of the stages in your sales process. Are
they customer-centric words like discovery, diagnosis, consensus, delivery, etc.?
Or are they company and sales team-centric words like approach, presenta-
tion, negotiation, close? Now check out your primary sales presentation. How
many slides up front focus on describing your company? What percentage of
slides focus on the company and your solutions vs. your customers’ situation,
problems, objectives and expected outcomes?
This may not be exhaustive or conclusive, but it may be an indicator that
there’s room to improve how well you’re creating credibility, trust and con-
nectivity with prospective customers.

39

Calculate the Cost of the Problem, Not Just the ROI
Return on investment is a great tool to use in the sales process. It demon-
strates clearly that a company can make more (or save more) by using your
product or service.
The major problem with ROI on its own, however, is that it doesn’t neces-
sarily create urgency. There’s a positive return on the investment, fine, but I
could do that for dozens, even hundreds of things. How do I determine if the
work and cost up front is still worth my time? How do I, the buyer, prioritize
this? How do you, the seller, create urgency with your prospects to want, to
need, that ROI?
The answer often can be found in calculating the cost of the problem.
Understanding there is a problem is just the first step. If you can quantify the
problem, then calculate the cost of the problem over a period of time; you
may just create urgency to change now. The risk of staying the same needs to
outweigh the risk and time/cost of making a change. That comes from under-
standing the true cost of the current problem.
You also need to make sure you’re speaking to someone who understands
and directly feels the pain and cost of the current problem. Let’s say you’re
working with a company and want to help them reduce the margin of error on
a current process. You make a case that by eliminating 50 percent of the cur-
rent errors; you can save the company significant money.
But if you’re speaking to someone who has already built a profitable model
with the margin of error baked in, and who is motivated to spend as little extra
budget as possible this fiscal year, good luck getting the deal done.
But take that same business case and cost of problem calculation to the
sales department (who may have more inventory to sell if you fix the mar-
gin of error) or perhaps the CFO (who would enjoy the sales lift while also
understanding that the cost of fixing the problem would be a fraction of the
incremental sales, therefore also improving margins), now you’re getting
somewhere.
Calculate the cost of the problem to drive urgency. Ensure you’re selling to
someone whose direct objectives and desired outcomes are impacted by that
problem. Then deliver the ROI on solving the problem. It’ll be difficult for
prospects to argue with that.

41

Managing the Sales Process
When the Buyer is in Charge
With so much information widely available to your buyers, managing them
through the sales process has gotten more difficult than ever. But smart sellers
leave the buyer in charge and STILL fill their pipeline with closed business
month after month.
Here are several tips for building and managing a buyer-centric sales process.
The buying cycle is always longer than the selling cycle. Every sale,
since the dawn of time, began long before the salesperson was involved. Long
before the cold call, long before the lead was generated, long before the first
presentation. Buyers start by recognizing or establishing a need, typically
based on a gap or pain or obstacle in getting what they ultimately want. Then
they consider what they think they want, do some research, and eventually
reach out to (or accept calls from) prospective providers.
As a seller, your visibility to pre-sales buying stages used to be non-existent.
But now, thanks to the social web, you have greater access and visibility to the
buyer’s early consideration stages than ever before. They’re asking colleagues
and peers about it on forums, pontificating about it on Facebook and Twitter.
And smart sellers get to know their buyers so well that they begin addressing
the source of the gap/pain/obstacle before it becomes acute for the buyer.
Smart sellers are working themselves upstream with buyers, creating trust and
credibility before their products or services are needed.
Most leads aren’t ready to buy, and you can’t force them to go
faster. According to research from MarketingSherpa, only 10–15 percent of
sales leads are qualified and ready to buy. That means the majority of prospects
you meet, though the right company or individual, aren’t going to do busi-
ness with you right now.
Know this going in and you can model your activity and output according-
ly, without creating outlandish expectations about what’s possible. But more
importantly, respect the buyer’s timeline, give them the space they need, and
build a long-term sales development pipeline for yourself by nurturing those
leads actively and regularly. Stay with them, with value-added content, as long as
you need to. Yes, you can drive some urgency to make a decision faster. But in
many cases, you simply cannot (and attempts to do so are counter-productive).

43

Add value, and give it away for free. Teach your prospects. Give them
something unexpected. Help them do their jobs, or lead their lives, easier, bet-
ter, faster. Become a trusted source of information not about what you’re sell-
ing, but the outcome it enables and represents. Become a go-to and referable
resource of information that addresses the core needs, objectives and situations
your customers and prospective customers live in on a regular basis.
Creating that value does take time and resources. It’s an investment on
your part. And you should not only do it, but give it away for free. This strategy
accelerates the impact of your content, exponentially increases the size of the
very top of your prospect engagement pipeline, and ensures that the volume of
“natural” inbound leads will not only increase over time, but remain a sustain-
able resource for months to come.
Enable buyers vs. managing sales. The right buyers want what you’re
selling. They want to remain in control. They will make decisions based on
their own criteria, not yours. Honor these boundaries, and build your own
sales process based on the way your buyer buys (not based on the way you
want to sell, or are used to selling), and you’re far more likely to gain the
buyer’s respect and business.
And you can’t just do this once. The way buyers will buy is guaranteed
to evolve. The steps they take, the tools they use, the influences that affect
their direction and decisions. In a B2B sale, even the roles of buyers and buyer
influencers within an organization can change dramatically, and quickly. Know
your customer, your buyer and their processes well enough and you can set and
modify your sales strategy accordingly to create frictionless selling environments.
Join the buyer community. Sales yesterday meant sponsoring or adver-
tising in places where your buyers congregate. Today, to build credibility, you
need to participate. You need to become an active part of the community in
which your buyers exist, and you need to do it by participating as a peer, not
as a seller.
This doesn’t mean impersonating a buyer, but does mean sharing,
exchanging and seeking information to make the buyers smarter. Not smarter
in purchase decisions, but smarter in doing their jobs in general. Those you
directly engage will benefit from and appreciate your perspective. And others in
the community will also see and respect what you’re doing, and will be more
inclined to engage or work with you in the future.

44

Turn buyers into sellers. If you make the sale, provide a product or
service worth talking about, enable your customers to become sellers on your
behalf. Actively collect and share their success stories in a variety of formats
and mediums (written, video, audio, online, etc.). Give your customers incen-
tives and tools to share your content with others.
This doesn’t just mean referral offers and tell-a-friend incentives. It also
means giving them a steady feed of the same content you may have used to
engage them in the first place, and encouraging them to directly share and
distribute that content to their own peers and networks. This ensures your
message gets in front of exponentially more prospective buyers.

45

Template for a Weekly, Metrics-Driven
Inside Sales Rep Meeting
If you manage inside salespeople, you likely talk to them multiple times
a week if not daily. But a weekly 1:1 meeting is still an important means of
ensuring focus, productivity and results from every rep. Done right, it can also
save you a lot of time through the week by consolidating a lot of information
into one dedicated, managed period of time.
Below is a 30-minute sales meeting template you can use or modify for your
organization. The key here is to make it as metrics-driven and objective as pos-
sible, with a focus on identifying and resolving obstacles to greater success.
Opportunity Pipeline Review (10 minutes)
• Closed-Won vs. Quota, quarter-to-date
(or month, or whatever your selling period is)
• Pipeline volume with current-quarter close-date
(should ideally be at least 3X quota)
• Discuss roadblocks and challenges
(where are some deals stuck? how could the pipeline be bigger?
Are there any future quarter deals that can be pulled into the
current quarter?)
Lead Review (10 minutes)
• Current lead volume and follow-up
(are there any untouched leads? Are there any that are active
but haven’t been contacted in a long while?)
• Which current leads are close to becoming opportunities?
• Discuss overall lead disposition and follow-up
(why are some leads not moving forward? What are the primary
lead-to-opportunity objections and roadblocks you are encountering?)
Activity Review (5 minutes)
• Metrics review
(dials, talk time, demos—last week goal vs. actual)
• Discuss roadblocks and challenges
(what specifically is keeping you from hitting activity goals?
What tools, resources, etc. would make these goals easier to achieve?)

47

Additional Challenges and Roadblocks (5 minutes)
• What specifically is keeping you from selling more?
• What specific, additional support do you need to find and
close more business?
• What additional support can the business provide to make you
more successful?

48

Isolating and Overcoming Final Sales Objections
The deals you’re likely going to close before the end of the month (or any
selling cycle) are already leaning your way. If they’re going to close this late
in the game (let’s say there’s just a couple days left in the month or quarter),
they’ve pretty much already made up their mind... except for that one last
objection or two.
Do you know what those objections are? Do you know specifically what’s
keeping them from making a positive step forward?
Is it lack of clarity on the value and ROI of the purchase? If so, have you
left the issue of value translation in the prospect’s hands, or have you proac-
tively addressed, defined and calculated the positive future of going with your
product or service?
Is it getting that last decision-maker on board? If so, how well do you
already know that decision-maker, what he/she cares about, and how best to
either translate value for them, or isolate and address their specific objections
(which may be different from that of your direct buyer)?
Is it a budget issue? If so, without making a concession on price, how do
you make it easier for them to buy now? Can you get creative with your own
finance team to improve the terms of the deal without making it cheaper? Can
you define a specific ROI for whoever holds the purse strings to make it a win
for their objectives as well?
If the opportunities in your sales pipeline with a month-end or quarter-end
close haven’t yet decided if they need what you’re selling, closing them in the
next couple days (especially for a complex or considered sale/purchase) might
not be realistic. But if you know they already want it, that they already need it
and see the value to their business, it’s your job to create and execute a specific
objection-handling effort that strategically and specifically eliminates the last
barrier to success, for both you and your customer.

49

Credits and Copyrights
This book is copyrighted. You do, however, have permission to post this,
email this, print this and pass it along for free to anyone you like, as long as
you make no changes and attribute its content back to the author.
You do not have permission to turn this book into a play, a musical or a
television mini-series. The author reserves those rights, just in case.
You can find more information on much of the contents of this book, as well
as additional information and insights, at www.mattonmarketingblog.com.
We hope this book inspires you to keep thinking, innovating, and inspiring
those around you. The author was particularly inspired by Bill Lawler,
Don Gregory, Robert Pease, Craig Rosenberg, Anthony Iannarino, Jill Konrath,
Tom Searcy, Claude Hopkins, Jeff Thull, Verne Harnish and many many others.
Special thanks to Ellen Madian of Madian Design for her fantastic cover work
and layout, and to Emily Harris-Deutch for her editing and proofreading.

51

About the Author
Matt Heinz brings more than 12 years of marketing,
business development and sales experience from a variety
of organizations, vertical industries and company sizes. His
career has focused on delivering measurable results for his
employers and clients in the way of greater sales, revenue
growth, product success and customer loyalty.
Matt has held various positions at companies such as
Microsoft, Weber Shandwick, Boeing, The Seattle Mari-
ners, Market Leader and Verdiem.
In 2007, Matt began Heinz Marketing to help clients focus their business on
market and customer opportunities, then execute a plan to scale revenue and
customer growth. He launched Heinz Marketing formally in late 2008.
Matt lives in Kirkland, Washington with his wife, Beth, two children and a
menagerie of animals (a dog, a cat, a fish and seven chickens).

53

Matt’s Blog
www.mattonmarketingblog.com

Monthly Sales and Marketing Newsletter
www.heinzmarketinginsights.com

LinkedIn Profile
www.linkedin.com/in/mattheinz

Matt’s Business
www.heinzmarketing.com

Matt on Twitter
www.twitter.com/heinzmarketing

Brainstorm with Matt!
www.10minutebrainstorm.com

55

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