Sales Prospecting, Asking for More $$, Pick up the Phone: The Friday Four

By Scott Sambucci | May 13, 2016

The Friday Four, Installment #12 awaits you below – Sales Prospecting, Asking Customers for More $$, Pick up the Phone. Read on…

1 – New Episodes of the “Startup Selling” Podcast Forthcoming

I’ve been a brief hiatus from new episodes this past month. But… This is changing this month. I have several super guests lined up, so look for new episodes coming in the next 2-3 weeks.

Sorry to be slack on this. I appreciate your feedback on these and hearing how much you enjoy these.

In the mean time, there are 21 episodes of podcast goodness available, so if you haven’t listened to every one, now’s your chance to catch up. ????

2 – Find Customers: Sales prospecting webinar

“Sales Prospecting & The Pipeline” is the theme of the month here at SalesQualia and Startup Selling.

Yesterday, I hosted a live webinar – “How to Fill Your Sales Pipeline without Wasting Time on Bad Leads.”

We looked at three HUGE topics:

– Do you know you RAP – your “Revenue Acquisition Portfolio”?
– Building a Prospecting Plan of Action
– Permission-based Selling

If you interested in the recording, just reply back and I’ll get the link to you.

3 – Grow Revenue: Ask for more $$

Working with a couple of clients this week, we built plans for going back to existing customers and simply asking – “How could we build a plan to increase your purchases from us by 10-15% by the end of September?”

You’ll be pleasantly surprised what happens when you ask this question. Think about it… Your customers already trust you enough to pay you to solve a problem for them. And we all know how are it is to find good partners. If you’re a good partner for them standing there asking how else you can help, I’m pretty sure they’re going to get creative with you.

At a minimum, you’ll learn about the internal struggles and related problems your customer has, which is great for your product roadmap and customer development work.

Secondly, you might find that adding a quick few features will add enough value to charge more for you product.

Thirdly, maybe you’ll get an introduction to another business unit that can buy your same product right now.

At Blend, one of our first customers started us on one project, and within two months, we were meeting with 5-6 internal teams that all wanted to know how our software might work from them. While we only could implement with two of those teams over the next 6-9 months, we learned a TON about every aspect of the mortgage process.

Jason Lemkin wrote a related post of this – “Next time – Ask for $1,000,000. A Year. I’m not kidding.”

4 – Build Your Sales Process: Pick up the phone

ProTip: Don’t share new information with a prospective customer over email.

I had this come up in a client call this week. Their prospect wanted a scoping document for a pilot project, including pricing.

My advice was this – Build out the scope and then BEFORE you send the document and pricing, get the person on the phone because “I’m 90% finished and just had a couple of quick questions to wrap it up.”

Then on the call, float the entire document and pricing as a trial balloon to get their reaction. You need to know exactly where you stand before you send the information, because if you don’t, then you’re sending and hoping all is well.

Worse, you’ve lost control of the sale.

Email is super convenient to send information, but think about how many open emails loops you have in your inbox right now. It’s the same with your client. And you know how hard it is to get someone on the phone after you’ve given up the goods.