#37: Understanding A Sales Process in Less Than 4 Minutes (a guide)

Read time - 3 min

Happy new year everyone! LFG…

Today, I’m going to discuss how you want to think about putting together a repeatable and predictable sales process.

The two biggest culprits that lead to disaster for early stage companies is, (1) Not having consistent TOFU coming in. And (2), if you have no sales process, leads that are being generated, I can almost guarantee you are burning them.

There is nothing worse IMO than not closing an opportunity that is closeable. Sales is tough enough, and if a prospect is willing to give you their money and you miss the opportunity to take it due to not understanding how to do so, then it’s time to reevaluate.

Today I’m going to show you an easy system that will help.

Goals provide direction, but systems drive progress.

~James Clear

There are 6 steps to a sales process that needs to be understood. There is some nuance here when it comes to deal size, and markets. But this system will work for 98% of B2B saas, or non saas companies.

Step 1: Lead generation
Lead generation and sales should take precedence over everything else. Why? Because you want to sell before you build, and you can only sell if there are prospects to sell to. You want to understand everything that is needed to build a consistent TOFU.

At Rampd we focus on 2 channels. Cold email and LI. With cold email you want to buy seperate domains and warm them up. Usually takes around 3 weeks. We use a tool called instantly.ai for our entire outbound flow. You want to create 4 emails dripped over 12 days. Test different subject lines and keep them to 1-3 words. For example, we ran a campaign that had a 100% open rate (No BS.) The subject line was “demo day.” Use words that invoke fear like (churn, burn rate, attrition, burn out, inefficient, etc)

For LI use Sales Nav to build lists and expandi.io for setting up the automation.

Step 2: Discovery
The discovery is designed to qualify the prospect as an opportunity. There are 4 benchmarks. Budget (money), Authority (DM’s), Needs, (use cases) and Timing. Your goal is to establish these 4 things on every discovery call. The discovery should not be longer than 30 minutes. If this is done correctly you are 80% closer to the finish line.

Step 3: Demo
The discovery is designed to establish how managing this workflow now (current) and how they want to be managing the workflow (desired). The demo is designed to show them a path from where they are, to where they want to be using your technology. You should create a deck to navigate the demo. Pricing will be presented, and an offer that removes all friction to get them on a paid POC.

Step 4: Scoping Call
The goal of the scope is to drill down on the success criteria they are looking to validate during the POC. If you feel you can deliver on expectation you move forward with your risk free offer. If not, you do not move forward.

Step 5: POC
For the POC you should have milestones setup that you want to target over the course of the pilot. Also setup a shared slack channel for easier communication.

Step 6: POC Recap
Here you want to recap all the criteria they wanted to validate during the POC. You reiterate everything that was discussed on the scoping call, and if all objectives were met review pricing once again and close. The recap should be setup the day following the end of the POC.

This is how you setup a sales process. Any areas you're uncertain of, go back and read some of the previous issues of the newsletter. Everything discussed here has been written about in past issues extensively.

Key Takeaways

• Build TOFU

• Qualify deals

• Demo the solution

• Create an offer

• Do a scoping call

• Run paid POC’s

• Close following a successful POC

That’s it for today folks.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more you can book a call with me here.