Why Conventional Sales Tactics Kill Deals (and the Modern Sales Motion that Wins)
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Conventional sales tactics are getting in the way of building the types of productive relationships that lead to strong bookings and sustained growth. Join LinkedIn Sales Solutions as they dispel traditional sales ‘myths’ and share the modern sales motions your team can adopt to succeed in today’s buying landscape.
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Why Conventional Sales Tactics Kill Deals (and the Modern Sales Motion that Wins)
- 1. #AccelerateQTC Steve Sanders Why Conventional Sales Tactics Lose Deals And the Modern Sales Motions That Work
- 2. Enterprise Sales Leader Steve Sanders
- 3. 3 Conventional Sales Wisdom Call High Lead with Great Questions Touch 7 Times
- 4. Call High 4 6.8 Decision makers per deal 58% Decisions made outside of C-suite
- 5. 5 Lead with a Great Question 77% Buyers who believe sales doesn’t understand business
- 6. 6 Touch the Prospect 7 Times I’m constantly bombarded by people trying to sell me things. I essentially write them off. —COO, Tech and Telecomm “ ”
- 7. 7 Conventional Sales Wisdom Call High Lead with Great Questions Touch 7 Times Complex Buying Committees Hightened Buyer Expectations Conventional Tactics Don’t Deliver+ =+ =
- 8. 8 The New Sales Motion Target the full buying committee Understand before you ask Engage from 1st contact to final contract
- 9. 9 The New Sales Motion Target the full buying committee Understand before you ask Engage from 1st contact to final contract
- 10. 10 Billions of Members, Trillions of Data Points World’s Largest Social Network World’s Largest Professional Network World’s Largest Presidential Megaphone Share Ideas Provide Updates Follow Influencers Get Advice Learn Skills
- 11. 11 Target the Full Buying Committee Buying CommitteesPotential Customers
- 12. 12 The 10 New Sales Essentials The three account mapping tools The two engagement tools Sales Filters Lead Bot Social Proximity Graphs The five social signals
- 13. 13 Account Mapping Tools Sales Filters Lead Bots
- 14. 14 Andrew Taylor Senior Director, Sales & Partner Enablement We track customers who are champions. When they make a career move, we consider that a sales ‘trigger’ for a new opportunity. “ ”
- 15. 15 The New Sales Motion Target the full buying committee Understand before you ask Engage from 1st contact to final contract
- 16. 16 Tap Into Social Signals to Understand Your Buyer Buying Committee Social Signals Account Sweet Spot
- 17. 17 The 10 New Sales Essentials The job change The hiring burst The new connections The content shares The social comments The three account mapping tools The two engagement tools Sales Filters Lead Bot Social Proximity Graphs The five social signals
- 18. 18 Social Signals The hiring burst The social commentsThe job change
- 19. When former colleagues in the CRM space follow a company, I drill down to find out more as there may be a project in the works. John Sears Regional Sales Director “ ”
- 20. I use Sales Navigator to target leads and get triggers based on significant events such as an acquisition or promotion. Rick Vangrin Sales Director “ ”
- 21. 21 The New Sales Motion Target the full buying committee Understand before you ask Engage from 1st contact to final contract
- 22. 22 Engage from 1st contact to final contract Sales Pro Mutual Acquaintance Customer
- 23. 23 The 10 New Sales Essentials Feedback loopsConnection paths The job change The hiring burst The new connections The content shares The social comments The three account mapping tools The two engagement tools Sales Filters Lead Bot Social Proximity Graphs The five social signals
- 24. 24 Engagement Tools Connection Paths Feedback Loops
- 25. I was intrigued by a post my prospect wrote and reached out with my perspectives. She agreed to a meeting and introduced me to the right decision maker. Jeff Andrews Account Executive “ ”
- 26. As a best practice I schedule 2-3 hours to review what my prospects are sharing and use these topics to open the dialogue. Michelle Johnson Enterprise Sales Executive “ ”
- 27. 27 Good News. Bad News. 90% Top Sales Pros Using These Techniques 80% Stealth Competitors In Accounts
- 28. 28 What are you doing to dispel sales myths in your organization?
- 29. 29 3 Things You Can Do Today sales.linkedin.com Arm Your Team with the Right Tools Train to Listen for Social Signals Measure for Success and ROI
Editor's Notes
- Let’s start by talking about targeting the full buying committee. So this is the reality for an account-based seller. If you work, for example, on a team that is servicing an enterprise account, you literally could have thousands of people that you need to build relationships with. If you have multiple accounts, you could have tens of thousands of people that you need to get through. But at the end of the day, what you really care about is the small group of decision makers that are ultimately going to make decisions about your products and services.
- So this notion of taking this vast universe of info and boiling it down to a very discrete set of DM’s is daunting, ultimately that’s the goal of every sales person: go from the left to the right. How do we do that? We want to get you a set of tools, we call them the 10 essentials.
- I want to share a couple of quick tools and examples of how this comes to life. So the first two shots are from LinkedIn Solutions. On the right-hand side, there's a Twitter component. Sales filters here on the left, you can see very well-dialed in to what a salesperson cares about. Then, in the center, these are actually lead bots. So as you start to search through LinkedIn, LinkedIn will proactively, via a tool called Sales Navigator, start to publish to you other people that you might want to look at. You're all familiar with Twitter as well, and oftentimes Twitter will start to push to you people that you want to follow. Twitter is paying attention to your behavior, where you're posting, where you're engaging, and as a result of that it gets really smart. It knows that it's got literally hundreds of millions of folks on the platform, and that's overwhelming for you. So it makes the world very small, going from the big circle to the small circle.
- I love this story from Andrew Taylor. Andrew is a sales director. Andrew pays attention to the relationships he's built. When someone moves the company, he immediately reaches out to that person. This is an example of social proximity. Andrew and the contact are first-degree proximity. They know each other. As soon as his contact moves to another account, suddenly he's got a first-person proximity relationship among a pool of people that he hasn't met before, and that brings that whole pool closer to him. He's able to monitor, based on the movement of his contact, what's going on and when he needs to reach out.
- Let's focus on understanding before you ask. I truly believe this lies in listening to social signals. This is perhaps one of the most exciting innovations in sales that's happened in literally decades. So if you've done your job right, you know your account. Hopefully, everybody knows their accounts. But beyond that, you've used filters, you've used lead bots, you've used social proximity maps in order to figure out who the buying committee is that matters to you. But that's not enough. The reality is the buying committee, while they are responsible for making a certain set of decisions, they're not always going to be thinking about your products and services, as much as we'd like to believe that's the case.
- So it's not only important that you know who they are, but that you know when you need to reach out to those individuals. Timing is critical. This is a very select group of people. If you burn bridges with one, they're all connected, you're going to burn bridges with the whole committee. So you've got to be very careful about the timing. That's where understanding before you ask comes into play. The sweet spot sits in between the buying committee and the social signals that indicate the intent that the buying committee is ready to move now.
- Five essential social signals that every sales professional should pay attention to. Number one is the job change. It's interesting. On LinkedIn, we have a little bit of data. We're able to follow the data and find out when behavior ensues. A job change is an indicator that behavior will ensue related to new systems, new processes, new technologies. That is one of the best times to think about reaching out to a decision maker. It makes sense. They want to leave their mark. Number two is the hiring burst. When you see hiring start to spike in Sales Ops, they're going to need systems, processes, services in order to support that ramp. A critical social signal. Number three, new connections. A proliferation of new connections means something is going down. If you see that happen, a person is connecting with companies, they're connecting with people, they're trying to ingest information and expand their network. There is a motivator behind that, and it usually means they want to buy something. Number five is the content share. Now, people are getting into a community, where they're exchanging information. They're asking questions. They're sharing content. They're liking things. Again, that's a behavior that indicates the time is ripe for selling. Then, lastly, the social comments. You can learn a lot about someone in terms of their disposition, what they care about, where they're coming from, based on the tone of comments. Are they positive? Are they negative? Are they neutral? Are they uninformed? All of these kinds of comments would be an indicator to how you would want to approach that person moving forward.
- So John Sears, interesting person. John pays attention, and when a company starts to follow another company, he takes notice and he starts to reach out. John also shared, behind the scenes, he's connected with a lot of other people, he sells CRM, a lot of colleagues that sell CRM, because they used to work together and now they don't. When he notices activity where his colleagues are connecting, he can guess it's probably because they're in a deal. So he starts to look around.
- Another one, Rick using Sales Navigator, he's able to look at significant moments. Did the company acquire another company? Did someone just get promoted? Job change? He knows that those are key moments when he can reach out.
- Let's talk about the last point. How do you engage from the first contact to final contract? Cold calling doesn't get it done anymore. People are impatient. They don't answer the phone. They don't respond to email. That is more and more a tactic of the past.
- Think of a relationship as a chain. You're the first link in the chain. The person that you'd like to interact with or engage with is the last link in the chain. If you're fortunate, there are no links in between you. But the reality is, most of the time, there's a link in between you, a mutual acquaintance that knows you and can validate who you are and what you stand for, and knows the person that you'd like to engage with. It's important to understand that chain and how it plays out. Once the chain links you together and that third-party steps out, the job isn't done. You've got to continue to drive value to stay in the account. The best way to do that is to set up a feedback loop. You send something out, you get signals back. They liked it. They didn't like it. They're engaging with it. They're not. Based on those signals, you know that you want to do more, step on the gas, you want to put the brakes on, and maybe try a different tactic.
- So the last two tools that account-based managers need to be aware of, one is the connection path. Number two is the feedback loop. Think of a connection path a lot likes Waze, a lot like Google Maps, where you put in a starting point and a destination, and the tool does the work for you of figuring out the fastest path between A and B. That works with people, as well.
- I'll give you an example. On the left-hand side, this is an example of a connection path. This is you. You want to get to Noah. Sarah knows both of you. The best tools can show you the in-between connective tissue and recommend a path that allows you to engage. Feedback loops. At LinkedIn, we've got a product which allows you to send out a set of documents. You get a signal back. The person you sent it to just read the documents. They just spent 5 seconds on that slide, but they spent 10 minutes on that. They just forwarded it to another person. These are all very strong signals that say, "The person is engaged. You hit the jackpot. If you don't get any of that back, you know that you've got to switch tactics." Marketo has some great solutions. You send things out in Marketo, and Marketo says, "Hey, that hit the spot. That didn't hit the spot." Solutions like Outreach.io, another great example with email. Are people engaging with your email? There are technologies out there today that close the loop and bring information back to you, so that the next time you reach out, you have even more value to offer. It's closing that loop that's making the best sales professionals even more effective.
- A couple of quick examples. Jeff Andrews did a lot of research to find information about a person that he wanted to connect with, built that rapport, and then that person introduced to the person that really mattered. A lot of times, account-based sales is like a chess game. You can't go from Point A to Point B. There are a number of moves in between. I love Jeff's story, because it demonstrates that he thought about the long game, that connection path. Who's the person, from a social proximity perspective, that I'm the closest to, and then how will this play out over time?
- Another great example, Michelle Johnson. So she actually, as a point of her strategy, every specific period of time spends two to three hours researching, so that she knows that that first payload she sends out is going to matter. She then, as she gets signals back, is able to modify her change. Because she's got this time on her calendar to research, she's able to make sure that everything is on point.
- Okay. Good news, bad news. LinkedIn ran a really interesting study last year. This was a study of over 1,000 sales professionals in the United States, LinkedIn members, non-LinkedIn members. We also went global, so we looked in Europe. We looked at APAC. We wanted to, first of all, find out who the best sales professionals were, and we were able to ascertain who was exceeding quota. In terms of standing relative to peers, who was on the top of the stack. We were able to identify of the survey participants who the best were. We then wanted to focus on their behaviors. What we found is that the tactics that I just shared with you in this presentation, over 90% of the best sales professionals were using in some form or another. What we know is that there is a correlation between these behaviors and outcomes, like closing deals, making quota, exceeding targets. That's the good news. <CLICK> This is the bad news. All of you are aware that there are competitors in your accounts. That's just a reality when you think about selling into an incumbent. Here's what's really scary. For every competitor in your account that you're aware of, there are likely four competitors in there that you didn't know about. This is a study that was run across hundreds of companies, and that's the data that came back — 80% of the competitors in an account are in stealth mode. Why does that matter? The reason it matters is because those competitors are probably using the same tactics that I just shared with you. So it's not that these tactics are secrets, that they're unknown. They'll absolutely make you better. But more and more, they're becoming the table stakes, the way that good sales professionals are engaging with customers.
- Here are 3 things you can do today to ensure your team is ready to dispel conventional sales myths: 1. arm your team with the right tools to succeed in the modern sales landscape. 2. train your organization to listen to social signals as opportunities to engage 3. measure for success and ROI