Two Things That Will Help You Sell More Now
If you want to sell more now, or any time, there are only two things you need to concern yourself with. Everything else is secondary, and I mean EVERYTHING else…
You want to sell more now. Doesn't everybody? While there are a lot of tools out there to help you do just that, there are really only two things that you can do to sell more, now or any time.
Even though the concepts are right in front of you, you're probably looking right past them. Most people do. Are you ready?
Here they are...
Spend more time selling
Make sure you're advancing your sales processes
Some of you just slapped your forehead...
I can't make it any simpler than that, yet these concepts seem to still be too complicated for a lot of sellers. Get out of your own way, and do your job.
You're not in front of your customers enough
Take a look at your calendar over the past few weeks (yes even these past few weeks). How much time have you spent interacting with customers and prospects? Remember, as a salesperson, this.is.your.primary.job.
Was it 5 hours a week? Did you even have a meeting a day? Was it less than that? Let's call a fair workweek 50 hours... We'll say that you're "open for business" and willing to interact from 8-6 every day, Monday through Friday... Did you even spend 10% of that time interacting with your customers? Why not?
I get it. There are a lot of other things you need to do to even get those meetings. You have to research. You have to prospect. You have some mandatory meetings with your team and your leadership.
With all of that going on, it can feel like you don't have much more time. But let's get real and do the math... I'll be generous and give you credit for an hour a day worth of "essential" meetings, and two hours a day for research and outreach. That's probably more than what you're already doing, and it still only eats up three hours of your workday.
Where is the rest of your time going?
You're going to tell me that have to update your CRM and make sure all of your apps are synced and working together properly... You have so much email to tend to... You have to monitor social media... You have to clean your desk...
All of that stuff is designed to help you sell. If it's preventing you from selling, then you're doing it wrong.
Get your head on straight and take control of your time. Block time around prospecting and research. The meetings will probably be blocked for you. If you can stay away from your inbox long enough to meet with a customer, you can stay away from it long enough to find more customers.
One meeting a day with customers seems like a meager goal, but imagine what could happen if you actually accomplished it? What about two? The math is startling if you look at it, and if every meeting was an hour long? That's still only 4-5 hours a day. The time is there, and if you were meeting with two customers a day, you'd be tops in your company.
Your customers need you to lead them
it boggles my mind how many professional sellers, most of whom only get paid when purchases are made, refuse to ask for next steps in the sales process.
Contrary to what you may have heard, the buyer is not going to make all of their decisions on their own. They're going to need to be nudged. In many cases, they may not even know how to buy from you!
It's not enough to make a killer presentation and say, "What do you think?" You need to have a specific idea of what you want to happen before you go into the meeting, and then you need to make a suggestion during that meeting to take those steps. That's your job.
Those steps don't need to be enormous, they don't even have to happen that quickly, but they do need to happen. Every sales call should have some sort of call to action.
How many "great conversations" have you had with prospects that have gone nowhere? How many times have you been stuck trying to follow up on those conversations only to be ghosted or to have the opportunity dry up?
There's no such thing as a great conversation that doesn't have a mutually agreed-upon and scheduled next step, even if that step is to have another meeting to discuss things further. Your prospect is open and in front of you. Your calendar should be too.
Imagine how much more time you'd have if you didn't feel like you had to follow up all the time?
Selling is a verb, not a passive state. Sales don't close themselves, they require someone to steward the process along. That's you.
If you can manage to spend more time in your sales processes and make sure that you're always moving those processes along, even a little bit at a time, you're going to sell more.
This is one of the concepts I lay out in my new book Rethink The Way You Sell: When It Goes Sideways. You can download it here for free.
What do you think? Too simple? Or have you been overcomplicating things? Join the conversation here.
Jeff Bajorek
Real. Authentic. Experience.
There’s a big difference between knowing how to sell and being able to. Jeff Bajorek spent over a decade in the field as a top performer. He’s been in your shoes. He knows what it will take. He can help you succeed.
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