Winning at Selling: The 3 Best Sales Strategies

If you want to consistently win at sales then you need to be strategic in your approach. It’s not good enough to randomly be connecting with prospects and hoping that they will buy from you. You need to implement step-by-step systems that allow you to find and close business like clockwork. And that’s where the three sales strategies that I’m going to cover in this post come in. Right Message, Person, Timing The first sales strategy is designed to rapidly improve your prospecting. It’s deadly simple. For every prospecting activity you do, ask yourself if you’re sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time. If not, then don’t send it. This simple framework forces spammy sellers to stop spamming and it encourages sellers to share too much information to pull back. When I’m coaching the students in my Salesman.com Academy program I find that most prospecting issues come down to the fact that the individual isn’t: Sending a message that is going to leave the prospect in a position where they are excited to book a call. Connecting with the real decision maker that can move a deal forward. Communicating at a point in the buyer’s journey where the prospect has enough urgency to get a deal done. Critique every single step of your sales prospecting cadence against the criteria of; right message, right person, right time and your meeting booking conversion rate will sky rocket. Which leads me to the next sales strategy of understanding “buying temperature”. Buying Temperature Understanding the required buying temperature for your prospects to commit to getting started is integral to sales success. Think of your sales process as needing a certain level of temperature put into the system before it hits an “activation energy” where the deal happens naturally. Your goal as a seller is to increase this buying temperature with every single interaction you have with the prospect. Every time you send a crappy email like, “Hey, not heard from you, just checking in?” The buying temperature decreases. Alternatively, every time you share an insight, build trust or create curiosity in the fact that your product is likely to help the prospect solve a painful problem, you increase the buying temperature. As the temperature in the system increases you go from the prospect thinking “I don’t care”, to “OK, I’m interested”, to “Let’s do this!” It’s only at the point that the prospect commits to becoming a customer. The sooner you can help them make that psychological shift, the shorter your deal cycles will become and the easier it is to increase deal sizes. So remember to ask yourself, “is this going to increase or decrease the prospects buying temperature” every time to attempt to interact with them. And that leads us into our third sales strategy. This strategy is how you practically increase your prospecting buying temperature by leveraging the “curiosity loop”. The Curiosity Loop The curiosity loop is essential when prospecting to book your first meeting with a buyer and when you’re trying to get a deal over the line. When you implement the curiosity loop you eliminate the risk of oversharing which is a trap most sellers fall into. Most sellers try to explain the problem that they solve and then how they solve it in their communications to the buyer. This often leaves the buyer with the feeling that they know the “how” and so they can then go and resolve the problem themselves. Of course nine times out of ten, they don’t solve the problem and continue living in pain. A much better way to increase buying temperature whilst keeping the attention of your prospects is to open a curiosity loop and then only close it on the next meeting. For example, in your cold outreach you might explain that you hypothesize the buyer has a problem. You share that you might just be able to solve this painful issue for the buyer. But rather than tell them how you will solve it, you ask them to jump on a quick call to see if you might be a good fit to work together. If you’ve sent the correct hypothesis of pain (right message), to someone who has this specific pain (right person), at a moment of time where they have the budget to resolve the issue and the power to make that final purchasing decision (right timing) then this person would be crazy not to jump on a quick call with you. Humans all, naturally have high levels of curiosity. When you can pique it and then give them a logical next step to fixing an issue, you’ll see your calendar get flooded with new meetings.