Creating effective sales strategies are crucial for boosting income and nurturing business expansion. When executed correctly, these strategies open up the door to more possibilities and bring your business closer to potential customers who are the right fit.
In this episode, I walk through the key concepts that really caught my attention from the discussion I had with Patrick Galang in episode 90: The Power of a Solid Sales System for Entrepreneurs.
Patrick, an expert in building sales teams and optimising sales processes has given me a fresh perspective on how I see sales strategies. In our insightful conversation, he gave emphasis on the power of using testimonials, how to set up correct payment structures, mitigating sales mistakes, and the importance of financial forecasting.
These strategies help mould your sales process into the best possible shape to handle both the prospect and sales team’s expectations and demands. I am thrilled to share these learnings from my good friend, Patrick, and for you to see how they hold the potential to elevate your business to new heights of success.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL FIND OUT…
- The power of testimonials in the sales process (03:36)
- Financial modelling or forecasting before hiring a sales team (05:20)
- Setting pay structures with your sales team (08:19)
- Biggest mistakes business owners make when it comes to sales (10:25)
- Is it better to give clients the results first versus going through sales calls? (11:13)
QUOTES
“Sales is an interesting aspect of the business. Business owners either want to get rid of it fast, or it’s the last thing they’re afraid to let go of.” -Carl Taylor
“When salespersons actually understand the story behind testimonials, it’s easier for them to weave that into their conversations with a prospect and make a far more natural sale and conversation.” -Carl Taylor
RESOURCES
Entrepreneurs Rising episode 090: The Power of a Solid Sales System for Entrepreneurs with Patrick Galang
Entrepreneurs Rising episode 068: Shifting Paradigms for Extraordinary Success In Business And Life with Dean Jackson
WHERE YOU CAN FIND CARL TAYLOR
Automation Agency
CarlTaylor.com.au
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
TRANSCRIPTION
Carl Taylor (00:00):
And either way, if you want to be able to build a business that can truly work without you, it’s not just about delivering without you that’s important and one of the first stages, it’s got to be able to market and sell without you, it’s gonna be able to produce cash if you want to, you want to able to sell your business one day or hand it off to someone or just step away for a few months, or even just one month, and not go backwards. Cash Wise, you need to have a system that generates new clients, whether you show up or not.
Carl Taylor (00:36):
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Entrepreneurs Rising. This is the show where we help you navigate your entrepreneurial journey. Whether that be you’re just starting out, you’re on the sidelines trying to figure things out, or you’ve been in business for a couple of years, or even a couple of decades, like myself.
And really, we have one killer mission help you to build a business that can operate without you becomes a more valuable business that produces wealth for you on the event that you choose to sell it or you’re generating so much cash flow out of that business, that you’re putting that into other assets outside of your business to build wealth outside the business, as well as the wealth that is compounding and building inside your business.
Now, I know that’s a bit of a mouthful. Ultimately, it’s about helping you rise through your journey as an entrepreneur from that self employed person or doing it all yourself to being a manager to ultimately leading a company where you’re now an owner.
And maybe eventually you extricate yourself and become purely an investor level entrepreneur where all you do is invest in other businesses and other assets.
Now, today’s episode is one where I debrief this week’s earlier episode. And that’s because we had a great conversation with a friend of mine called Patrick galing. And Patrick is a consultant who helps people build sales teams.
So he’s got two businesses, he’s got one business where he’s helping place and recruit remote based salespeople. And then he’s got his more hands on consulting business where he’ll actually come into your business and help you build out your entire sales team, your management processes everything.
And so I thought it was a really important thing to bring him on to have a conversation because sales is one of those aspects of business that it’s an interesting one business owners either they really want to get rid of it fast, or it’s the last thing they’re afraid to let go off.
And either way, if you want to be able to build a business that can truly work without you, it’s not just about delivering without you that’s important. And one of the first stages, it’s got to be able to market and sell without you, it’s gonna be able to produce cash, if you want to, you’re gonna be able to sell your business one day or hand it off to someone ought to just step away for a few months or even just one month and not go backwards, Cash Wise, you need to have a system that generates new clients, whether you show up or not.
And so that’s what I really wanted to talk to Patrick about, we want to talk a lot of about sales. So if you haven’t already, and you’ve got the time, as always, I do encourage you to listen to the full hour long episode.
But I get it, you’re busy, you’ve got you know, you don’t have time to fully dive into that. So this is a little taster episode of my biggest takeaways, this is where I summarize the things that really popped for me from the conversation, the things that stood out, doesn’t mean that there’s not even more value in the episode things that I missed that maybe would be valuable for you.
But this is the things that really stood out to me that I wanted to reinforce and make sure people got so we’re gonna wrap this up in probably another 10 minutes from now if that. So let’s talk about it.
What were some of the key things? Well, one of the big things I took away was, I didn’t tip was a tiny little TV game, but it really stood out to me that to help you train your salespeople, give them testimonials, but don’t just give them all his you know, he’s a big sheet of testimonials.
You know, pick five 610 I don’t know pick some really hand selected testimonials, ideally, videos if you’ve got them, but if not, but with the testimonial that you give your salesperson, then give them the story, go and record another little video of you explaining the story or do a written case study.
But give the story. Why is that powerful? Because you want the salesperson to be able to get on a call and be able to say, hey, you know, you remind me a lot like Tony, Tony came to us and he was feeling this and this and this is what was going on for him. And what we did, we worked with him and we did these these things.
So very similar to a case study structure. Here’s the problem he had. Here’s what we did together. And then here’s the result. But when when the salesperson can not only see here’s a testimonial or a case study written but actually understand a bit more of the story behind it.
It means that the salesperson on the call can weave that into their conversations with a prospect and potentially say hey, like you can see actually check out his testimonial, Tony’s testimony on the website or I’ll send it to you, or I did already send it to you, but they can just weave it in.
It makes a far more natural sale and conversation when they’re telling a story about a prospect rather than just like oh have you seen all our testimonials? On our website, so give them some hand curated testimonials that really best represent the kinds of prospects you have.
And then teach them the story behind every testimonial. Here’s the video testimonial. Here’s the story, here’s the video testimonial, here’s the story. And that way they can learn and train on those to be able to do that.
The next thing that really stood out to me was an issue that true in my business, we’ve recently gone through a process of recruiting and tried to build out more of our sales team. And the problem we kept coming across was trying to get the numbers, right.
So one of the biggest takeaways here is, before you go on, recruit, and bring on a salesperson, pay someone, your accountant, a financial advisor, someone who can do some financial modeling and forecasting. You know, give yourself a budget of 1000 $2,000.
I don’t know how much it’s gonna cost you. But you know, even if it cost you $2,000. To do that today, before you go and invest in these salespeople, I highly recommend it to make sure you’ve modeled will the commission structure or the base plus commission that you plan to pay actually be viable long term?
What are the numbers need to be because as we pointed out on the conversation with Patrick is, if you’re currently converting, let’s say you currently convert 60% of calls, and you bring on a salesperson, and in the beginning, they’re converting 20% of calls.
Not only are you paying a commission, to the salesperson, which is now eating into your margins that you may not have been paying previously. So you’ve now cut into your net margins from the Commission’s but you’re also going to have a higher acquisition cost of client meaning the paid ads that you’re running, you’re going to have to spend more on ads to get that customer.
And so if you’re not aware of those numbers of we’re spending more to get the customer and then once I get the customer, I’m giving a clip of that to the salesperson, you may not realize it that you’re actually putting your business backwards. Now, it’s not about not investing in your business for long term, it’s about getting the understanding of what’s happening.
So you can make an informed decision of okay, at what point as things start to change to how many sales calls do we need to have, because that’s going to give you an idea of how realistic these numbers are, it can be very easy to go hard, it’s gonna be utopian, I’m gonna go on and get my salesperson, and you’re gonna get a salesperson, I’m gonna give them 20% or 15%, or 10% commissions, and it’ll be great, their commission only doesn’t cost me anything, because that’s the mindset, you got to commission only, there’s no risk to me only get paid if I get they only get paid if I get paid.
But that’s not entirely true, because you’re still spending money on ads. And when you then do get paid, they’re taking a big chunk of it, because a percentage of revenue that you’re giving commission is immediately taken off the bottom line, it’s very different to like when you’re just paying someone a salary or small amount, like it’s a set percentage of revenue, you’re instantly killing your bottom line with that. And so you need to have that model and forecasted properly to determine what do those, how many calls do I need to be converting for this to actually now be putting me in front and not backwards?
So again, this is not to scare you off from hiring salespeople. It’s just about understanding the impact financially, that when you do this, what it’s actually going to cost you and at what point does it become positive, and you’re in a better position.
The other thing we talked about these different pay structures, and one of the tips that Patrick gave that that stood out to me was your appointments set, as he says you typically would give them a base plus commission.
So the appointment set is the people who are, you know, their job is to get someone to book into an appointment. They’re not converting them into a customer, they’re just getting them to agree to a call. They might be doing that through chat, they might be doing that through calls that outbound like various different ways, but they get a base plus commission.
Whereas he was saying that closes, the good closers. They’re just going to be commissioned only. And that was interesting to me. Because to me, I, in my IT company back in 2000, I think was 2009. Maybe we hired I had a bad experience. I hired a commission only salesperson was first time ever trying to hire sales. And I was really green at it.
But we hired this commission on the salesperson. And my experience of it was they never stopped looking for a job. He one day we came back to the office, I’m saying when I’m talking about what I’m saying my dad and I, we had this company together, my dad and I showed up and under the door was a key and a little handwritten note saying sorry, I got another job from this guy that we invested a lot of time training.
And so I kind of got a bit burnt by that experience that I’ve come away with the story in my head for the last more than a decade. I’ve had the story that commission only salespeople are unreliable, because, you know, they’re, they’re only taking the story I told myself is they’re only taking the commission doing the job because they’re just like, I need cash.
And they’re never going to stop looking for a job because they need cash. Now, I think that was true of this particular guy. I don’t think that’s true of every salesperson. I think if you’ve got a good offer, you’ve got a good lead flow. And you you’ve got an offer that can be converted then you’ve got these hungry people, they’re probably actually going to make some money and they’re not going to just jump ship.
But that was a story that I definitely had that was holding me back. So make sure that you’re aware. This tip here, if you go for closers, he’s recommending focusing on commission only type people this is this is in the online space in particular, maybe different if you’re in a different industry.
And then for the appointment setters, it’s more base plus commission. So that was his tip. One of the other things, too, I asked him at the end, what was one of the biggest mistakes business owners made?
Carl Taylor (10:29):
I liked his answer. He’s like, You got two extremes, you’ve got the people who are under managing, like their higher salesperson, then just kind of leave them be and don’t. They’re not involved.
They’re not checking in, they’re not, you know, seeing what questions are coming up what, you know, what are we hearing from the market? How’s the pricing going? What objections are you hearing? Like, they’re just not getting involved. And then you got the other extreme of there to involve to micromanaging going, we need to have daily huddles, and we’re having this hour long meeting.
And he said, you don’t want to be either of those. You want to be too high touch and you don’t want to be so off. You want to be around you want to be supportive. You want to be asking you how things are going and be aware. But you don’t want to be every day going, what’s going on? Who told me this?
How are we converting bla bla bla bla bla, that was his experience anyway. And then the last thing I kind of want to talk about, I guess, and when I did mention on the episode, I’ve been thinking about a little bit since Patrick and I spoke and building a sales team is great.
However, it could be worth asking yourself the question, once you do the numbers, right, you go and get the forecasting to see what it would cost you it could be then us worth asking yourself the question, Is it cheaper and easier to just give the client the result, rather than getting them on a call and convincing them to pay me to get the result.
So Dean Jackson, one of our most popular episodes, we’ve probably ever done and referred back to so many times with other guests. Now highly recommend listening to episode if you haven’t, Dean is a great guy. He was one of the things that Dean has said over the years that’s always stuck with me is that he’s particularly at a business where he sells websites to real estate agents.
And he found that it was cheaper and easier to just go and build the website for the real estate agent and give it to them and say, Hey, once you get your first lead from the website, that’s when you have to start paying me, he found it was cheaper and easier to just go and build the website for a whole bunch of real estate agents than it was to get on sales calls and go through the process of trying to convince someone to pay him to build a website.
Just really think about that for a moment. And so in automation, and see, one of the things that we’re actively been playing with these last few weeks is going well, we’ve always stayed away from free trials. And we’ve done all sorts of different offers.
But we’re playing around at the moment internally going, well could we would it be cheaper and easier to just give the result, give them a trial, give them free access, let them use the service, let them use the services that cheaper easier, then getting them on the call and going through the process that we’re already doing.
Because the way our current process is, we do what we call a fit call where we chat to a client a prospect and go like, you know, tell us what you’re after, we’ll explain we’ll give a bit of a demo of how our process works, how the platform works, and see if it’s a good match and tell you which plan would probably best suit you.
Then after they sign up, we get them to book a kickoff call. And a kickoff call is where we basically train them on how to use the platform. And there’s a little bit of double up, to be honest, is a little bit of double up. And so the thought process in my head, especially after we have had some challenges trying to get our commission structures to work for salespeople is well, what if we only did the kickoff call was our sales process? What if the kickoff call was that fit call?
What if we gave them the result gave them access to the service, let them use the service. And then on that kickoff call when we’re training them how to use it, we also weave in a bit of the checking in like whether or not they’re a good match, because that’s all the Fit call for us really is is avoiding the wrong people signing up, and making sure their expectations are managed correctly.
Like oh, I want to do this thing. Sorry, we don’t do that. Or yet we can do that. But you got to understand it’s going to work in this process. So that could be the kickoff call could become effectively our sales call. But it’s happened after we’ve already given them the result we’ve given them an account, we’ve given them access, they’re a different level prospect versus someone who we’re talking to, to convince them to give us a go, they’ve actually chosen to give us a go.
So I could report back later on how well that’s gone. But that’s something that we’re internally looking at. And it’s all seeded from that thought process of is it actually cheaper and easier to give them the result than it is to have a whole team and a process trying to convince them to pay me for the result. So build a sales team, by all means, and we’ll still have a sales team on the internal side running that kickoff call effectively.
But it’s just a question of you might be thinking I need a sales team. And maybe you could try some other offers that would like Dean, like what we’re talking about here will allow you to give the result in a way that works out more effective, more cheaply and is just a no brainer for prospects to get the result than anything else. So that Sit for me for today. I hope this has been helpful in terms of thinking about sales, thinking about building a sales team and some big takeaways.
Again, I do encourage you go and listen to the full episode with Patrick it’s always worthwhile. Also, since it’s become up so many times since we did it I highly recommend if you haven’t, go back into the archives and find the episode I did with Dean Jackson. I think it was episode 60 softlink ish 6566 Something like that maybe. So go back find that episode and have a listen to it. Highly recommend it. And until next time, keep up the journey
Outro:
You’ve been listening to Entrepreneurs Rising. Thank you, dear listener for tuning in. I appreciate your time and look forward to connecting in future episodes if you would like show notes or any resources from today’s episode, you can find them at rising.show rising.show you can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes as well as links to socials and or the ability to reach out and connect with me make your suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep up the journey.
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