The best salespeople are those who bring value to their customers! Don't try to sell more, rather look for the best way to help your prospects.
Your problem is to know and understand your prospect's expectations. This is one of the reasons why it is unthinkable to arrive at a customer meeting without knowing the uses and needs of the company you are approaching. This information is crucial to tailor your approach at each stage of the sales cycle.
In this article, we give you step-by-step the practices observed in the best companies to successfully transform a customer appointment and thus stimulate business development.
1. Break down your customer meeting into 3 steps:
Stimulate interest in your product or service through cold calling
If your sales prospecting method is based on outbound (not to be confused with inbound), your first step is a cold call. This step is essential! It is undoubtedly the most complicated to understand, but with the right method, it is the most effective. This step should never be a presentation of your product, it is dedicated to making a customer discovery appointment . We give you our advice and methodology in this article: Cold calling: The flagship telephone prospecting technique of 2024?
Set up a discovery call in advance of your demo call.
This is the most important customer meeting in your sales process. Your discovery calls will define the trajectory of your pitch and determine how you will conduct the rest of your process.
If your discovery call is well executed, you will have developed a business relationship of authority with your prospect.
At Modjo, the sales team always arranges a 15-minute call to understand the needs and issues of our prospects.
Benefit no. 1:
> From the start, you will need to strengthen the customer relationship. This call will anchor the relationship and create a bond with the person. Selling is a matter of human relations and creating a relationship of trust, an intuitu personae with your prospect is essential.
Make the effort to listen to your prospect, understand his needs and discover his problems.
On average, the talk ratio of Modjo users is 38% during a client meeting categorized as a "discovery call". This means that the salesperson or sales force only speaks 38% of the time during these calls, thus leaving plenty of room for active listening but also for understanding the needs expressed by the sales director, sales manager, sales manager, etc. of the company being prospected.
And yes, that's how you quickly enrich your customer portfolio!
Benefit no. 2:
> You will be able to customize the demonstration of your solution in order to meet the different uses of your targets. It's helpful to introduce all the features. Unless your solution/product only serves one purpose, it is unlikely that the prospect/company you approached will be sensitive to all the features of your solution.
The best way to make a successful demo: focus on uses! Each feature you present must answer a problem.
Example: During a demo, when we present our functionality to create a library of best business practices, we focus our presentation on the issue of onboarding new employees.
Dirty questions: Are you recruiting a lot at the moment? What are your issues related to onboarding?
Prospect response: "I have a real problem with training new sales people who join the team. I'd like to speed up the training but I'm not available all day to train them on a one-to-one basis. »
During my client meeting to present the tool, I will rely on what he was able to tell me during the discovery call. I will, of course, turn my presentation to the features that can meet its needs. This approach requires a good knowledge of your product and its different uses in order to maximize my chances of signing new customers.
I am well aware that some industries do not work exactly like this, but globally the structure: cold calling, discovery, demonstration, follow-up, is increasingly applied in non-transactional BtoB or BtoC organizations, as an essential component of their commercial policy and/or commercial activity."
Use all available resources to find out as much as possible about your prospect.
> Email exchanges
> Upstream telephone exchanges
> Information on its LinkedIn
These are all levers to better understand your interlocutor.
Prospecting effectively allows you to find or create a connection with the person. In the team, it is quite common in a sales approach to contact prospects who have common relationships. Playing as a team spirit has a real impact on the overall performance of the team.
2. Our "made in Modjo" tips to validate your customer appointment:
Prove your expertise!
"You are the undisputed expert in your market and master the best sales techniques."
If your contact person feels that you are indeed an expert in your field, he or she will be more confident and will be more likely to let you accompany him or her. This can make all the difference in the long run. If you have a good understanding of his problems and you provide a relevant answer, your prospect will choose your company to accompany him.
Make your prospect say what you want to say!
When you present your solution to him or her, ask for his or her opinion on how he or she might use your product.
"It's functional, what do you think it's good for?"
If the answer perfectly matches the use cases of the feature, then you've won! Be careful not to steer the answer, but to accompany it. The tricky part of this exercise lies in guiding your thoughts.
Why adopt this strategy? If your prospect understands the benefits of your service/product, objections will be that much easier to overcome.
Objection: "On the other hand, I think the tool is expensive"
Your response: "I can understand that, but when you told me about the use you could make of it and its impact on your performance, do you think it's worth it?"
Follow up on your customer appointment:
Your call is over, you have just concluded an upcoming customer meeting to validate the sale. Be careful not to stop there! It's time to share a recap of your discussion and the points that were raised, highlighting how those points support your prospect's business goals.
Our top performers always take the time to send a note to confirm that they have understood the issues and benefits that Modjo will bring to their prospects. It can also raise some lingering doubts. Let's not forget about loyalty: you have to build loyalty with the prospect from the beginning!
Why is that important?
Your contact person may not be the final decision-maker. He or she may want to discuss this with his or her team and the various stakeholders in the project.
Structuring a note-taking will make it easier for them to share information about your business actions. It is not necessarily necessary to go into full detail about the call. Still, provide a minimum of information so that your interlocutor has all the cards in hand.
Include the link of your call in your report :
Modjo users use the call sharing feature. Thanks to this sharing feature directly integrated into our tool, it only takes one click for the interlocutor to receive a link to connect to the public version of Modjo. They can then find the entire exchange and share it with the various stakeholders with the added bonus of an automation CRM. A real time saver for him, an extra weight in the negotiation for you.
Use data to improve and succeed in your next customer meetings.
There are a multitude of subtle, yet undeniable buying signals that can help you identify how proactively interested your potential customers are in your pitch.
The most convincing example is his propensity to ask questions. Whether they're about pricing, the product, next steps or the results your customers are seeing. All these questions show you that he's thinking of continuing the discussion with your company.
Other signals of interest include words or phrases that can tell you that your prospect is really excited about your product or service, such as: "Impressive", "Congratulations", "That's great", "Nice work", "That's crazy", etc.
The downside: how do you pick up on these verbal buying signals? Today, technology allows us to create a whole new analysis grid via tools like Modjo. Our tool allows you, for example, to easily measure the effectiveness of your sales pitch and thus adjust your action plan to better manage your future customer meetings.
Modjo is a conversational intelligence platform that analyzes your salespeople's calls to identify the speeches through which they can gain efficiency and relevance during their customer meeting(s).
Of course, no matter how you do it, even if you just follow the data on a google sheet doc, it is essential to be able to measure the relevance of your sales pitch to be better in the next round.
At Modjo, we're convinced that a sales team that wants to progress must use data to improve its commercial efficiency.
Best,
