What’s cooking, good looking? Welcome to the third installment of our series! This time around, we have Anupreet Singh, Slintel’s Head of Sales, answering these burning questions for you!
These are recent, relevant, and crowdsourced questions that we found on the internet while scrounging to find what’s been troubling our B2B professionals the most in the last month.
Without waiting any longer, let’s dive right into the questions for the week. If you’d like to send in some questions, you can always fill out this form and we’ll try and include it in the next issue!
#1 Intuitive Selling and Soft Skills
This one is from Field Sales Talk, and the question is asking how you can improve at intuitive selling.
The idea here is to be able to gauge what the other person is feeling in real time during a meeting or a sales call. The concept of intuitive selling is focused on being able to understand emotions and work off them on the fly, so you don’t lose sight of where your conversation is headed.
The only suggestion I would give to anyone who is trying to get better at intuitive selling is to read a lot of books on psychology. Here are two recommendations I can provide:
- How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
- The Psychology of Selling – Brian Tracy
This kind of insight into your selling also helps you predict and forecast your sales pipeline a lot better, and in the right manner. When you read books like the ones suggested above and work on improving your soft skills, you learn how to empathize with your prospects and relate/connect with them on a different tangent altogether. Intuitive selling also gives way to understanding humans at large, which gives you a perspective you cannot build just through routine sales pitches.
#2 Is creativity the key?
I have answered this question multiple times, and by now, you also know how common this question is. I only have one thing to say here:
“Being creative is not the way out”
As soon as people start becoming creative, people lose sight of the thin line between marketing and sales. The moment the prospect gets a rather “creative” email, they think it is from Marketing, and your case goes cold right there!
Marketing emails are great for educating, warming up contacts for the long run. What they are NOT good at is getting you immediate demos. Using creative or clickbait-y subject lines in emails without showing actual value means nothing. You might get someone to click on “Check out your next 500 customers here”, but even if you end up improving your response rates, it’s not going to get you demos in the end.
Creativity is not the key to success for an SDR to get some meetings; but personalization is. The way to get success is by going personal and actually showing the value of your product/service right away. If you feel your offering can solve a problem for that company in particular, make sure you convey that in a crisp and concise manner. That way, the prospect knows you’re here to help solve a pain point for them, and are not just here to shove your product in their faces. Your email should make the client realize that you have done your due diligence and are to make their life easy.
Do your research before sending out that email. Look for them on the internet, anywhere you can get your hands on some information, and understand what they are struggling with at the moment. While crafting the email, make sure that the message is short, crisp, and clearly conveys the problem you can solve in particular for their company, team, or just for them.
If you look at your sales strategy and find yourself thinking “who has the time to personalize each and every email”, then I would suggest changing it up a bit. If you are sending 100 emails a day, but none of them are personalized, you know you aren’t getting out of that with a decent response rate. What I instead tell my SDRs is to rather send 25 emails instead of a hundred, but make all of them super-personalized. Those 25 emails should be so compelling that they are forced to reply to your email.
Bottom line, personalize and research the company instead of stooping to flashy messages.
#3 Demo recordings – to share or not to share?
This is a sales question from the Corporate Bro’s Sales Savages Slack group, and is asking whether you should be sending across a recording of your demo along with the price quote to help the prospect and their team go through the demo again before making a purchase decision.
Although I do agree that sending over recordings of your demos along with the price quote might help the prospect reach a decision, the risk of a competitor getting hands on your demo is much higher than the benefit of having them watch it again.
So, to answer the question, send recordings of demos to prospects only when deemed absolutely necessary. These could be cases where the client has asked for it, or someone from the team wants more information. What I would suggest is to have high level overview videos of your product ready and up on a public platform, that the prospect can view if they want another look at the product. If you don’t have any, create some. It’s as simple as a screen recording. This helps build trust in your product and doesn’t make you look shady if you don’t want to share your actual demo recording with the prospect.
Also, if it is required to send the actual recording, don’t forget to add a line in the email saying “please maintain the confidentiality of the video that I am sharing with you”.
To sum up, don’t share your video proactively with the prospect, because then you can’t add any ifs and buts because you are voluntarily sharing it. Share something more generic in the beginning and if requested, don’t forget to mention that the video is supposed to be kept confidential.
Want more?
You can check out Issue #1 and Issue #2 here for more insights and great sales questions. I hope you liked this installment of burning B2B sales questions. Do let us know how we can help you solve your sales dilemmas. We will be back with more next month!
