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Are you going to take the blue pill or the red pill for sales or sales systems?
That comes from the movie, The Matrix, created in 1999. What it comes down to is that the red pill is the willingness to learn a potentially life-changing truth that could be unsettling. Alternatively, by taking the blue pill, you could choose to stay in contented ignorance.
What has happened is that the market seems to have conditioned everyone to gear themselves towards taking the blue pill, which represents automation.
One of my mentors is well-recognized and has done some amazing things. He gave a talk once and sold $3 500 000 in a forty-five-minute presentation. When going over the concept of automation, he went on a rant about how his Twitter account got hacked. He reached out to them multiple times, told them what had happened, and asked them to help him shut his account down, but he never heard from them again.
Twitter is a publicly traded company, yet they ignored a massive security breach to someone’s account. I have seen that happen with other social media networks too. It happens because, once you are in the matrix, you become nothing more than a number.
When people adopt either digital or other customers, they think that if they automate everything, their work is done, and they never need to talk to their customers. That is living in ignorance, so I will give you a tangible example of something you can use to avoid that. You will notice the difference in your results if you use it.
This example is relative to sales:
Rep A had $1,200,000 in the pipeline and monthly recurring revenue and worked for 55 hours per week.
Rep B has $ 500 ,00 in the pipeline and monthly recurring revenue and worked for 35-40 hours per week.
At the end of the year, Rep A got $75,000 in net new monthly recurring revenue.
At the end of the year, Rep B got $125,000 in net new monthly recurring revenue.
The difference is that Rep B got 150% of the results while working 20 hours less per week. If you scaled that to a team, can you imagine what that would do for you, your company, and your team?
The simple difference was that Rep A took a quantity approach, and Rep B took a quality approach.
The quality approach taken by Rep B was deeply seated in him spending quality time with his customers and becoming emotionally connected to them.
Rep A used automation as much as possible and blasted out tons of content with email messaging.
Every organization typically has a sales process and a market strategy. We included a relationship strategy for every account to scale from zero to $30 000 000 with only four salespeople.
A relationship strategy is when you have a longer sales cycle that involves multiple people (say between five and thirty) in a complex solution. It works for smaller deals as well as for super-large deals.
The process for creating a relationship strategy:
- Take all the players into account, and map them out by department ( IT, Finance, and Operations/Sales/Marketing).
- Prioritize the departments (I call them decision-making funnels) on a scale of 1-3 (1 being heavily influential with budget and authority). That will clarify the department on which department you should focus most.
- Insert the players in those departments vertically. (The C-Level, the VP, the Director, the Manager, and the end-user in that department)
- Rate your relationship status with each of those players. Use the scale of 1-10 as you go through the sales cycle and have different checkpoints at each point in the sales cycle. (E.g. after the initial meeting, after the demo, after the discovery, after the proposal.)
As you go through a longer sales cycle of three months plus, you have the time to reflect on, upgrade, and transform your relationships. So, for example, you can upgrade a relationship that started as a 1, into a 10, over time.
By attaching this one simple exercise to your sales process, you will know exactly what the opportunity is when you get to the end of the process. You will also feel pretty confident that you will close the multi-million-dollar, life-changing deal for your organization. You cannot automate this process, however. You have to do the work manually to get the deal done.
This process is sure to make a big difference in your business, but only if you take the red pill and implement what I shared with you today.
