Transcription
Most business owners are unknowingly losing deals that they should be winning. Not because their service isn't good enough, not because the price is too high, but because nobody ever taught them the fundamentals of how sales actually works. And once you understand the simple step-by-step process, you're literally in a position to double your revenue over the next few months.
Now, here is the thing that nobody tells you when you start a business that provides a service to a client. You can be the best in the market at what you do. You can have a track record of genuinely transforming your client's lives. You can have the testimonials, the case studies, the referrals, and you can watch your revenue flatline month after month. Because the gap between a great service and consistent and increasing sales, well, it's enormous.
And most founders try to fill this gap by doing one of two things. They either avoid selling altogether and just wait for referrals to trickle in or they throw themselves into sales tactics. So like new software, new scripts, new outreach strategies, and they hope that something sticks and magically transforms their revenue and their profits. Fortunately, none of these work long term.
What actually works is understanding a small number of core sales principles that when applied consistently make the whole thing feel a lot less like pushing a boulder up a hill and a lot more like the same amount of financial success coming out of your business as the amount of effort that you're putting into it. And at this point, I've worked with literally hundreds of service business owners. And in this video, I'm going to share the five strategies that moved the needle for them the most. Not the most complicated of strategies, not the most trendy ones, the strategies that actually get deals done and get cash in your pocket. Okay?
So, I want you to think about the last conversation that you had with a potential client that felt like it went really well, but then nothing came from it. Perhaps they perhaps they they seemed engaged, right? They asked questions. They nodded along as you give you your your your spiel and then you sent a follow-up email a few days later and you heard nothing back.
Now, here's the question that I want you to sit with for a moment. In that conversation, did you spend most of your time talking about you or them? And be honest here because the answer is you probably talked more about your service than anything else. You talked about your your process, your work, what's included, how long it takes to get results, what's not included, you probably talked a whole lot about yourself. And here is the problem. Whilst you were describing what you do, your prospect was sitting there trying to figure out one single thing. Is this going to solve my problem? That is it. That's all that they care about. They're not buying your your fancy process or or system. They're just wanting to buy an outcome to a problem that they have.
And this is what the very best sales people on the planet understand, but founders and business owners often miss. You're not selling a service. You're selling the bridge between where your client is right now and where they want to be in the future. And there's a framework that I use with every founder that I work with and it's called the reality gap method. And it's dead simple to implement and it's going to fix this issue in your sales process instantly.
So step one on your calls, help the buyer define their current reality. Where are they right now? What's frustrating them? What's what's a massive pain in their ass? what's costing them uh time, money, sleep, the the their family and their relationships. Be specific here because the more clearly that you can articulate that buyer's current reality, the current situation, the more that they're going to be able to then articulate it themselves when they start selling themsel and working with you, which then leads on to step two, which is to define their current future reality. So, where do they want to be? What does success actually look like for them? and not in vague terms like I, you know, I I want to grow my business or I want to hit some kind of arbitrary number in revenue. You want to be very concrete. You want them to be measurable. And you want this future reality to have some kind of meaning attached to it. And the more real that you can make this for your buyer, the more they're going to tie this transformation from the current reality to the future reality into your service, which is what we're going to do in the next step.
So step three, we just position oursel as the bridge between these two realities. And when you do this, you've got to avoid sounding like a a gross, sleazy salesperson. You've got to sound like a consultant who genuinely understands their problem. And often that shift alone can change the entire energy of a sales conversation from from start to finish. And the practical application of all of this is really simple. When you next jump in a conversation with a with a prospect, with a potential client, spend the first quarter or so of the call focusing entirely on their situation. Ask questions. Listen to the questions. you it's I shouldn't have to say that but it's really important right then you want to reflect back on the the answers to the questions that you just listened to and only when you've mapped out where they are where they want to get to do you start talking about how you can help how you bridge them from one side to the other and where in the sales process do you implement all this well, you do it on basically every single call that you ever have with a prospect but most importantly that initial discovery call conversation and we're going to cover that in more detail Next.
Okay. So, here is a pattern that I see consistently with owners of businesses that provide a service to the customers. They get a potential client on a call. The prospect says, "I've got a problem." They hold the hand up and go, "I I've got a problem. I think you can solve it." And then within 90 seconds, the founder is already pitching their solution. They can't help it. They know that they can fix it. And this is a burden that us founders of of consulting and service businesses have. I know as soon as I hear the problem that they've got, I know I can fix it. I get excited. I want to help. And so I start explaining the service, how it all works, the approach, the results I get. And what founders of service based businesses don't realize when they do this is that as soon as you do it, the prospect's guard goes right up. Because the moment that you start pitching the buyer, the buyer's wondering, is this person here to help me or just to flog me something?
And the best way to resolve this issue is to think about last time you went to the doctor. Did they immediately prescribe you surgery or medication or whatever the the the solution to your pain was as soon as you walked through the door? No, of course not. Right? They probably asked you some questions. They listened to the answers of those questions. They sent you for some tests. They probed you a little bit deeper, maybe metaphorically or very literally. And it was only after all of this when they had a complete picture of the problem that was in front of them that you had that they offered you a solution. And that's not just a good way to practice medicine. That's the most powerful sales technique in existence. And the place where you're going to implement all of this is in the discovery call. And this is where most service deals are either worn or lost. Not in the proposal, not in the follow-up. It happens typically in the discovery call.
And so there are five things that you need to confirm in every from this moment onwards every single discovery call that you do. So first off, pain. What is the specific problem that the buyer is facing? And not the surface level version of this, the the real underlying pain. We need to ask questions like maybe at the top end of the conversation, what led you to booking this call in with with us and my company today. But then we need to go way way deeper. We need to understand what happens if this doesn't get solved. What happens if this doesn't get solved within a specific time frame? What are the consequences for you, the team, the company, whoever is the environment? We need to go deeper and deeper and deeper until that prospect, we want to get them to the point where they they're looking slightly nervous at us in the call itself.
That leads on to the second thing that we need to understand and that is the trigger. We need to understand why the buyer wants to take action right now. So what has changed in the world? Has the company missed a target? Is there a new competitor? Has a team member left? Maybe a really important client has churned and that's really got their business worrying. You need to find a trigger event, whatever it is, and we need to tie that to the deal. And this gives it some real natural and powerful urgency.
And then we have step three, which is really understanding the ROI or the return on investment from working with you. And legitimately, the maths has to make at least some kind of sense. And you must do this upfront because let's say you're like me. I sell.com. We do sales mentorships for business owners. If we can help you generate another $50,000 pounds, dollars, yen a month, a quarter or a year, and my service costs 5 $10,000. Well, that's a 10 to1 return. And on a discovery call where there's already a little bit of trust being built, and we already understand the buyer's current reality, the future reality, and we're we're starting to bridge the gap between the two. We need to put this on the table because if the buyer never sees the numbers, the urgency that we've been building never becomes real. We have to give them the the rough cost of admission. Even if it's a even it's a range that we're giving if we don't want to give away the initial price in that initial call, which you probably should or at least consider, we need to give them a range because we need to make all of this real because otherwise we can't move on to step four of this process, which is the budget.
So unless we put a number in front of these people, how the heck could we ever calculate or understand if this investment that they're going to make into us, if it's even possible? And for some founders, this feels like an uncomfortable question to ask, but you've got to ask it anyway. Delaying the budget conversation doesn't make it disappear. You you just push it off further into the future. It means that you potentially now with this deal and the many others, you're going to waste hours, if not weeks, if not months on deals that were never going to go anywhere anyway.
And then step five, the next step. So before you hang up on your discovery call before it all wraps up and you're like, oh, they're like, send me some more information, you know, maybe we'll speak next quarter. Instead, you've got to end it with a confirmed action, not a sense of an over. What you need is a specific time and date in both your calendar. So, let's say you were to send over a proposal. You need a specific time and date in both your calendars to go through that proposal to run it because you're exchanging value here. You've done a lot of the heavy lifting at the top of the call throughout it to manage the entire process. Hopefully, they've got some value out of it as well. But now, it's time for them to exchange a little bit of value in your direction by booking in that next meeting.
So, that is the discovery call framework. But what you do after the discovery call? Well, that's where the follow-up process comes in. And this alone, if you've not got a process of follow-up set in stone in your business that happens consistently, if not automatically every time you engage with a prospect, you are leaving money on the table.
So, here's a statistic that should genuinely change how you think about sales. Most buyers say no four times before they say yes. Four times. Now, most salespeople, they give up after a couple of follow-up attempts. Most business owners, because they're not just doing sales, they're doing all these other you got your accounts, you've got marketing, you've got HR, you got manage your team, you got all this other stuff going on, most business owners don't follow up even once, never mind, multiple times after a meeting.
Now, I recently had a coaching client. He's called Terry. He's a good dude. He's a fractional operations director based in the UK here, just down the road from me in Manchester. And he was going through this exact same process. And he told me that he just hated doing his follow-up. Not that he didn't have time to do it, but he just hated doing it because he felt desperate, like he would like he was chasing people, like he was begging for work. So, he would send one email after discovery call and if he had nothing back, he would move on. And this is absolutely fine if you're like us at salesman.com for example where you're oversubscribed with people wanting to work with you and you've got a natural bottleneck in your business like I do like we do at salesman.com because I can only take on a handful of new business owners into our mentorship program each month because I don't have the time in my calendar to take on more people than the handful of people that we do.
But Terry sat down with me and we looked at his pipeline and well, he had 16 prospects enter his pipeline in the past quarter, and all of them had gone quiet after his one single follow-up message, and none of them had turned into new business. Now, this wouldn't be so bad if he had closed a bunch of deals before this, but he was really struggling revenue-wise, and he was surviving on one or two large clients that had just kept him going. And uh he was doing decent numbers, but kept him going over the previous couple of years.
So all we did was sent a simple re-engagement email to the prospects that he had spoken to. He'd had a good meeting with them and he spoken to them and that was it. Four of them responded, two became paying customers and that was another 30 odd grand a month that he added to his revenue that he just completely written off as just just dead prospects because he didn't want in his own words to be pushy with his follow-up. And the followup itself wasn't pushy at all. It was quite a pleasant email. I probably would have gone a little bit more aggressive if I was doing this for my own business.
And here's the truth about follow-up. It's not desperate. It's professional. The founder who follows up consistently is the one who actually cares about helping their clients shift from the current painful reality to to the bigger, brighter one that we know that we can help them move towards.
So, how do we implement a follow-up process without annoying people, right? Which is which is always the worry with this. Well, there are only two types of follow-up that matter. First is the value follow-up. So, after a discovery call, don't send. And this is what everyone does. Don't send a hey, just checking in or just following up on our conversation dot dot dot kind of email. Instead, send them something useful. It might be a relevant case study. It might be a short insight about the situation that they found themselves in. It might be a framework that you guys own that you guys market that addresses the problem that you discussed.
Now, it's important that after the value, we ask for the next step of the sales process to be completed. Whether that be to book a meeting in to run through the proposal that's just been sent over or whether that's for this individual that we're engaging with to send our case study to the final decision maker. Whatever it is, every touch point needs to move the deal forward. We don't want to just become friends with these people. The goal is to uh help them and drive revenue from that and buy the Porsche, retire early, whatever whatever you're trying to do on your end with the wealth that you can generate from providing an amazing service to these people. But it's much less annoying when there is value attached to an ask. So there's an exchange of value going on in an email rather than just hey just checking in or hey how are things going? These emails are terrible.
So an example of this might be hi the person's name on our call last week. You mentioned that you didn't have clarity on XY Z. Well here is a a link to a short Google doc that runs through the steps that we woke through with our clients to help me get clarity on this thing. would it make sense to you a quick call this week and I'll run through it with you. So that's the first follow-up email and we do this to re-engage clients.
Then we've got the second type of follow-up email and this is called the breakup email and this is used when the prospect has gone completely quiet after multiple attempts of engaging with them. So we might send them one final message and it might be so I typically don't say hi at the beginning of these messages. I don't know makes a bit more a bit more conversational, mysterious maybe, but I just go the person's name then a comma and next line is the salesman.com mentorship not a good fit at the moment then cheers my name.
Now this feels slightly counterintuitive but this single message is going to reactivate more cold prospects than basically any other approach. Why is this the case? Well, what you're doing here is you're relieving all the pressure from the prospect. And you're giving them an opportunity to explain to you, yes, but so yes, this is a good fit, but I need to get my finances in order or yes, this is a good fit, but I need to get Jeff to sign off on it or or whatever needs to happen internally. And the value of this is once you know the objection, then we can deal with the objection and can still progress the deal forward. Don't forget it over the line.
Which leads on to the next thing that business owners often stumble over when they're trying to close clients. And that is handling objections, which is crazy. It's actually quite easy. So, here's a scenario that every business owner knows. The discovery call has gone brilliantly. Like, you give your pat yourself a pat on the back at the end of it. The prospect seems genuinely interested. Perhaps you talk about the investment at the end of the call and then they go, I just need to think about it. And I've been there as well, right? something deflates inside of you and you know the the objection I just need to think about it almost always means that the deal is dead according to your own experience of hearing this many times over and over especially if you're not following up right or you don't know how to deal with objections but here's the thing that most business owners don't realize that objection didn't come from nowhere it was kind of building it was like bubbling smoldering the whole time it was quietly there throughout the entirety of the call just waiting for the end of it and there was a specific moment usually somewhere in the middle of the conversation where it could have been addressed and just dissolved completely.
And the best sales people in the world, they don't overcome objections at the end of calls, they prevent them from ever forming in the first place. So, how do we deal with objections before they even arise in the the buyer's mind? Well, every objection that a prospect gives you falls into one of three categories. There are circumstances. So, this is time, money, fit, and these are all surface level objections. So, we don't have the budget right now. Oh, we're too busy. It's not the quite the right time or you know something like that.
Then we have other people objections. So this might be a we need to speak to a business partner or the board or the spouse and you're basically going to hear I need to run this past someone else.
Then we have objections about themselves. So this might be doubt. It might be fear of failure. It might be past bad experiences. And this is going to materialize with them saying something like, "I've tried these things before and it just didn't work."
So all you got to do is work out which category the objection belongs to and then you can just address it proactively before it comes up at the end of the conversation. For example, if during the call your prospect mentions that they've uh you know with me they've tried sales training before and it didn't deliver results. Well, that's telling you that there is a self-doubt objection coming later on in the call and it can absolutely derail a call right at the end of it. So what do we do? Well, we address it headon. We might ask something like, "Well, what do you think went wrong with the previous training that you were doing?" We then listen. We pay attention, right? And then we might ask, "Well, what would need to happen differently this time for it to actually work?"
And with this second question, they're now going to tell you how to deal with the objections. So, let's say the response is that sales training didn't work last time because the person they hired didn't keep them accountable. So they never got their sales system sorted because the business owner got busy and just didn't didn't do the work that the sales trainer, coach, mentor suggested to them. Well, now proactively before this objection raises its head again, you can say, "Okay, well, if I hold you accountable, do you think all of this would now fall into place?" And at this point, the prospect's kind of got to agree with you because they're the one that offered up the solution to the problem. it would be completely illogical for them to use this as an objection further down the line that sales training doesn't work or it won't work for my business because they've given you the reason why it would work and you've given them a solution to it.
And once you've dealt with all of your prospects objections, not just in the discovery call, but these will crop up throughout the entirety of the buyer's journey, it's time to move on to the next step of the sales process. And if you skip this one, any chances of you hitting your dream revenue numbers are just going to disappear in one fell sweep. In fact, I'd go as far to say that if you're not doing this one simple step, you're not doing this with every single prospect that you engage with, implementing it could double your revenue basically overnight.
Okay, so this one is almost embarrassingly simple. And yet it's it's one of the most common reason that people who own service businesses lose deals that when they should be winning them. There should be no reason why they lose them and then they get lost. It's just that they just don't ask for the business like not directly in a in a really clear way. Not in a way that forces the conversation to a point of decision. You've got to get to and I know this sounds so simple but it's so important. People don't do it. You've got to get to a yes or a no outcome. You must be putting the prospects at the end of your sales process at the end of the pipeline. They can't just sit in the decision category forever. They've got to be moved into closed won or closed lost. And they've got to be the ones that tell you whether they're going to work with you or not. If you don't do this, you're not selling. You're just like pissing around having conversations with people.
And at this point, I've reviewed genuinely countless sales calls that business owners had with their prospects. It's part of what we do with our mentorship, right? You can send me call recordings and I'll review them and give you feedback on them. And the pattern is very consistent. The call goes well, the business owner feels like they've done a good job and then right at the end when it really matters, they go a bit soft. They say something like, "So, you know, feel free to have a think about this and come back to me when you're ready." And just like that, you've now lost all the momentum of the entirety of the sales process of of the call itself. the prospect goes back to their day, gets busy, and then that decision never actually gets made.
So, how do you ask for the business without sounding salesy or gross, which is on you, right? You're you're the one who feels that rather than the other person who it might be waiting for you, like begging you to ask them whether they want to move forward with your service. Well, here is the framework and it's just two sentences. After you confirm the pain, the trigger, the ROI, and the budget, you then close with what I call a micro close. It sounds something like this. You might go based on everything that we've just covered, does it make sense to get started? That is it. It's not pushy. It's not manipulative. It's not It's not even a trick, right? It's just a direct honest question that forces a clear yes or no but answer.
So, if they say yes, great. Move on to the next steps immediately. Get the invoice sent over, whatever you need to do. If they say no or they say or I need to think about it or there's some objection on the end of the the no answer here, then you ask a follow-up question. Okay, so what needs to be solved, fixed, in place, whatever it is, to get this to a yes for you to say yes to moving forward with this project.
And then this is critical. Stop talking. Just shut up for 10 seconds. It's fine if it feels a little bit uncomfortable as well because they're probably not going to feel as uncomfortable as what you are because they are thinking of an answer to the question whereas you're just sat there in silence either in front of them or on the phone or or stirring at their like pixelated face over Zoom. You got to give a moment and then let them answer because that answer is going to tell you exactly what's really stopping the deal in its tracks. So nine times out of 10 it's something that you can probably address right there on the call which then leads you back round to asking the microclosing question again. So you go, "Okay, well, we've resolved that based on everything else that we've covered. Does it now make sense to get started?" And you do this over and over again until all the objections are dealt with and they give you a clear yes. Or they go, "Honestly, no. This is not a good fit. Sorry for wasting your time." Then you update your CRM. You celebrate either way.
Because remember, the only way to increase revenue in your business is add people to your sales system, nudge them along it, and then get to a yes or no at the other end. If you want more revenue, all you can do is add more people in the front end of the system or increase the conversion rates between each step in the system itself. That is it. So, don't tie any emotional baggage to the B2B sales process. It's really that simple. I've given you 99% of what you need to have success as a service business owner in this very video. You just got to sell the outcome, not the service. Run discovery calls like a doctor. Follow up and get a definitive answer either way. and kill objections before they kill you at the end of the process. And then just ask for the business. Use use the micro closing question that I outlined. Then none of this process is complicated. None of it requires expensive software or a dedicated sales team typically. It's just a series of simple steps and a little bit of consistency and and a and a willingness potentially to get a little bit uncomfortable with conversations every now and again because sales at its core, it's just a series of conversations between a person with a problem and a person who could potentially solve it.
Now, if you'd like to learn the simple sales system that eliminates the inconsistency in this this boom and bust cycle that most service business operate under, well, click here to watch this video where I explain why this happens and that might surprise you and how to eliminate it with a single change to your sales process.