Convert: Sales

So how does a souped-up engine with high-octane fuel transfer that power to the wheels to create speed?

In most motor vehicles, the powertrain converts power into movement. The more efficient the powertrain, the more torque is being transferred from engine to wheels—and the faster you go. If, on the other hand, your powertrain is failing, then your engine is producing power that’s being wasted—and your vehicle will be sputtering all the way to the shop.

The same holds true in your business. The potential created by an incredible value proposition and flawless marketing can be lost if the sales processes in place aren’t sufficient to capitalize on them.

Converting leads into customers is a hell of a lot easier if you’ve invested resources into the Justify and Attract components of the sales system. But easier isn’t easy.

The actual process of converting leads into customers obviously differs pretty significantly from business to business. Best practices for selling airliners won’t quite match up with those for selling registrations to a webinar. But there are sales and conversion practices that nearly every business should employ as part of a sustainable and scalable growth

strategy.

Process-Driven, Not Results-Driven.

Across the board, a sustainable and scalable growth system requires sales practices that are based on processes, not results.

As someone who proudly wore the “results-driven” badge in my taglines for years, anything other than focusing on results felt unnatural. Converting into a process-person was, well, a process, because focusing on results seemed so logical. After all, with business, it’s easy to look at any change that produces more sales (and effectively grows your business) as being fundamentally a good change.

But that kind of thinking can, in fact, lead to logical fallacies.

If you are looking to make your car faster, you may consider lightening the load and ditching passenger seats and those golf clubs in the back. But you wouldn’t toss the steering wheel, would you? Just because you’re pushing new top speeds doesn’t mean the engine is in great condition, and concluding that it is running well based exclusively on the results you are getting today can actually lead you down the wrong road (assuming you kept the steering wheel and can still navigate).

Across the board, a sustainable and scalable growth system requires sales practices that are based on processes, not results.

Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion and one of the highest female earners in WSP history, explains in her book Thinking in Bets how a results-based thought process creates problems. Drunk drivers that make it home without hurting themselves or others got the results they were looking for, says Duke, but does that make it a good decision or a great process to repeat? As Duke demonstrates, the best poker players are process-driven. The results of a particular hand, or even a particular winning streak, are not as important as the long-term results of their process. And the value professional poker players extract from adhering to a good process, or system, usually comes at the expense of the shortsighted amateurs.

A good process for competitive poker playing is identical to any other good process. It is repeatable, predictable, and in the long run, much more lucrative.

However, having a process is only half of the battle. You have to document it in the same way every vehicle on the planet has a detailed manual associated with it. Processes don’t retain much value and are

virtually impossible to improve in any consistent fashion when they are stored in the mind of one key person.

In the sales world, if your entire team can’t explain in simple terms how to sell your product or service successfully, then you either don’t have a process in place or haven’t effectively documented it.

While documenting processes can be a bit of a headache, I have typically experienced two benefits when I help companies do this.

First, when done correctly, you will almost inevitably find immediate

efficiencies you can implement and realize benefits from. And by correctly I mean objectively. A key component of any process worth its salt is rigorous self-critique. Never be afraid to kill your darlings.

Second, the mere documentation of the process creates value by reducing risk. Freeing a process from being held hostage—even when you are the captor—creates immediate value because it allows the process to continue in the absence of the person with the keys. This may not be great news if the person holding those keys is doing so to preserve their own individual value within the company, but this is about creating a sustainable and scalable growth system, not a make-yourself-unfireable system.

Messaging

Messaging may be the most fundamental factor in determining the effectiveness of sales and conversion processes. No matter what you’re selling, you need to ask the prospect to take action, at the right time, with an impactful message.

Let’s take those considerations in order.

1. You need to ask the prospect to take action. Common sense,

right? It is for those of us who have been in sales our entire career. For many people who haven’t been trained in converting prospects and closing, though, there is trepidation about asking someone to take action and close. Maybe the messaging implies what you want your prospective customer to do or makes the value prop case so strongly you expect them to just be moved to action without directly asking. Usually, that’s not going to happen. An effective sales process requires a clear path and a clear call to action, regardless of whether you have an e-commerce company or a retail store.

2. Ensuring you have a call to action is only part of the battle.

It also needs to be properly timed. You aren’t going to win Le Mans if you floor it throughout the course, and you aren’t going to maximize sales at a retail store by standing out front with a credit card swiper. When you present your call to action (and effectively close) is among the most important parts of the entire sales process.

A great many resources have been written on this, including Mathew Dixon and Brent Adamson’s The Challenger Sale, which is worth a read in full. Challenger model or not, the right time for a call to action is after you have established rapport, understood the prospect’s pain point, provided an alternative to feeling that pain, and presented your alternative as the solution. Then and only then are you closing. This is true of presentations that are three minutes long and pitches that are three hours long.

Like inexperienced drivers who think pedal to the metal is the surefire way to win every race, many inexperienced entrepreneurs and CEOs want to jump straight into the benefits of their products and services when selling. This works about as well as talking only about yourself on a first date.

3. Last, and certainly not least, the message has to be impact

ful. A clear, well-timed ask isn’t very helpful if you use all the wrong words or they’re delivered the wrong way. This means the messaging of your call to action probably requires more thought than “Hey, I have cool stuff. Give me your money.” Here again, there are hundreds of great books out there that can help you get the message on point, and I work with many of my clients on fine-tuning and testing messages tailored specifically for their companies.

One of the books I recommend to people on messaging is The Way of the Wolf, written by Jordan Belfort, who is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. (If a hilarious quaalude scene

immediately comes to mind when I say that, I don’t blame you.) But you’ll have to trust me when I say that The Way of the Wolf is loaded with points on how to create and deliver a badass sales pitch. Regardless of whether you bring someone like me in to help or DIY, there are three very important factors in crafting a clear and impactful message to improve conversion:

More emotion, fewer features. It’s tempting to highlight all the technical characteristics and features of your product or service to win over customers. If you are a technical-minded executive or entrepreneur, you may be especially prone to this. Features are important, particularly for the customer experience when people start using whatever it is they bought. But features don’t contribute to a customer’s decision to buy nearly as much as we think. Diamonds and cars exemplify this point. What is the functional value of a diamond ring or the feature that makes the sale? What are the specific features that lead someone to buy an Infiniti QX80 instead of a Nissan Armada? The sale is less about the specific features of these products and more about the way the purchase or possession of that product or service makes customers feel.

A great example of the difference between features-based selling and emotion-based selling is this old video mocking what the iPod’s packaging would be like if Microsoft had designed it. Apple became one of the most valuable brands in the world while advertising very few features (and some may argue while lagging in features relative to competitors). So why have they been effective? They ignore the features and sell straight to the heart.

Every product or service offers the customer some feeling. Simon Sinek speaks to this concept in his best-selling book, Start With Why. Most companies can tell you what they do, and some can tell you how they do it, but as Sinek says, inspired organizations understand why they do business. This, at its core, is about speaking beyond the features and specs of your product or service and understanding why you are doing what you are doing and why customers will buy it. (You can see Sinek’s five-minute summary video articulating this here.)

But don’t forget about features altogether. Just remember that features are not benefits, and between the two, benefits are more important. You’re better off speaking to the heart than the head.

Understand what is really motivating the customer to buy. The late Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Customers are usually buying a product or service to address a symptom of something else, and Levitt nailed it with his explanation.

Clayton Christensen articulates this concept particularly well in his book Competing Against Luck. In this work, Christensen calls the underlying solution customers are purchasing the “job to be done.” In a nutshell, the theory is that customers are hiring whatever product or service they are buying to complete a job. Understanding that job (even when the customer can’t entirely articulate it) allows you to speak to that job and develop messaging that more effectively converts leads into customers.

Not appreciating this concept can be catastrophic for businesses, particularly those either in start-up phase or developing new

products to grow sales. Investing substantial resources into product development and marketing can still lead to whiffing sales if you don’t understand what customers are hiring you to do. Getting to the core motivations isn’t easy, but the dividends of doing so will pay handsomely down the road.

Beware the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is widely understood as a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual unknowingly assumes that other people he or she is speaking with have the background to understand particular terminology or concepts. This happens in all communications, but I notice it in sales messaging again and again.

My advice: make a special effort to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and frame the message as they would hear it, not how you would hear it.

In the book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath present research on this bias quite well with an exercise you can try yourself: tap “Happy Birthday” out on a table to people without telling them what melody you are tapping. The tune will be clear to you, but they’ll have absolutely no idea what song you are tapping out. This exercise highlights the delta between your perspective and the customer’s, and it’s an excellent example of how businesses think they are telling their story well while it falls on deaf ears. You may not be able to unsee, unhear, or unlearn what you already know, but you can audit your activity and messaging to find out if it resonates.

Creating ASales Card Set

You have a process for making sales and you have compelling messaging that seems to resonate with customers. Congrats! But how can you measure how effectively you’re actually selling? No discussion of creating speed or sales through conversion—particularly results that are measurable and process-based—would be complete without exploring reporting and analytics.

For many entrepreneurs and sales managers, sales performance is assessed through intuitive indicators. But relying exclusivelyon intuition lends itself to biases you may not be aware of and, almost by definition, isn’t scalable. That’s why a reporting structure that allows you to objectively and quantitatively assess sales and growth is critical. I call this creating a sales card.

Sales and business reports go by many names, all of which are perfectly fine. It doesn’t matter much what you call them. I refer to such a report as a sales card, drawing on the sports cards I collected as a kid (and still cart around in every family move).

These cards feature a small, limited amount of real estate to use in

summarizing a player’s performance, which means the publishers

have to be selective about the data presented to ensure it has the most impact.

That limited real estate appeals to me. With access to as much data as we have today, and the infinite ways in which it can be stored and presented with spreadsheets, there is a strong bias toward using too many numbers to create reports that should be, by nature, simple. Thinking about reporting as a sports card helps force more selectivity in the K of KPIs (key performance indicators).

The fundamental rules for an effective sales card are as follows:

• Gone in sixty seconds. You should have the data and information you need to monitor the critical components of your sales system quickly and consistently in sixty seconds or less. If more time is required, chances are there’s too much information. To keep this relevant to everyone, you may consider different sales cards for different people rather than continuing to add what everyone wants to see onto a universal sales card.

• Measure productive activity, not activity itself. You may find that you want to jump straight to the common KPIs used by others in your industry. I’ve worked with many businesses that want to measure calls in their outbound phone efforts, meetings in their field sales efforts, or subscribers in their newsletters. While these metrics may be good leading indicators, they also may be misleading or simply vanity stats. I worked with one business to double revenue per sale while cutting the number of calls made by 40%. We focused on the metrics that mattered more than calls, which included presentations and talk time. Take time to

really assess what you are measuring and whether it is the right metric or you. Alfred Armand Montapert may have put it best in The Supreme Philosophy of Man: The Laws of Life when he wrote, “Don’t confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but doesn’t make any progress.”

• It should democratize data, not be a tool for tyrants. A sales card creates data that can help foster accountability. Some people may want to hold this data close to the vest and use it to throw in people’s faces when results are poor. But that means the data is being used in the wrong way and far too late. The key purpose of the sales card is to allow nearly real-time self-correction as people see KPIs lagging. They can’t do that when they don’t have access to it, and they won’t want to do that when the data is only being used against them.

Every report can be different, and reports can be built on a wide range of platforms. I’ve seen some incredible sales cards created using nothing more than Google Sheets that put dense analytic programs to shame (you know who you are, General Patton). What matters more than the platform you are using is its accessibility and the ease with which the information is interpreted. So now you’ve built this fantastic product or service, you’ve managed to get your target audience to your door, they’ve given you money, and you’re tracking it effectively. Woo-hoo! The job is complete!

Just kidding, of course. If you’re planning on creating a lasting business, the job is just getting started. So let’s turn to longevity, keeping customers, and allowing them to help us find more customers.