Tactics that Win The Complex Sale - Outside Sales Talk with Alice Heiman
Alice Heiman is a nationally recognized sales expert and trainer who brings profound changes to her clients' business and sales practices. She’s the founder and Chief Sales Officer at ‘Alice Heiman, LLC’ and a sales keynote speaker. On this episode, Alice shares the biggest challenges salespeople face when dealing with complex B2B sales and how you can overcome them. Conquer the complex sale with her proven strategies and hands-on tips!
Here are some of the topics covered in this episode:
- The 8 elements of the complex B2B sale
- Tactics to conquer the complex sale - from prospecting to closing
- How to deal with multiple decision makers and gatekeepers
- Ways to shorten the sales cycle for complex sales
- How you need to position yourself to close the deal
Dealing with price objections is one of the biggest challenges salespeople face. Watch this video to learn some actionable strategies that will help you overcome this objection and win more sales!
You can listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you get your favorite podcast!
About the Guest:
Alice Heiman is a sales strategist, coach and keynote speaker with over 20 years of experience. She started her sales career in her family business, the ‘Miller Heiman Group’, as Director and Sales Trainer. In that role, Alice worked with clients including Coca Cola, John Deere, Hewlett Packard, and other Fortune 500 companies. When the ‘Miller Heiman Group’ was sold, she started her own sales consulting firm to bring the knowledge she gained to smaller, high-growth companies.
‘Alice Heiman, LLC’ is sales consultancy that provides strategy and tactics for companies dealing with complex B2B sales to accelerate business growth. Alice’s innovative sales leadership programs, coupled with her top-down approach to creating long-term change, set up sales leaders and sales-managing business owners to get consistent and sustainable growth.
Alice demonstrates how sales performance is directly related to a leader’s mindset. When sales leaders change the way they work with sales teams, results are immediate and dramatic.
The ‘Alice Heiman, LLC’ team helps SMB companies drive sales growth by incorporating the newest research and the best practices.
Website: http://aliceheiman.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman
Twitter: @aliceheiman
Listen to more episodes of the Outside Sales Talk here and watch the video here!
Transcript - Tactics that Win The Complex Sale with Alice Heiman
Introducing Alice Heiman [00:00]
Steve: Welcome to Outside Sales Talk, where we meet with industry experts to learn the strategies and tactics that make them successful. I'm your host Steve Benson and I've helped thousands of salespeople all over the world crush their quota. Today, I'll help you crush yours.
Welcome back to Outside Sales Talk. Today we have Alice Heiman on the show. We're going to be talking about tactics that win the complex sale. So as a little background, just by way of introduction here, Alice is a sales strategist, coach, and keynote speaker with over 20 years of experience. She's the founder and chief sales officer at Alice Heiman LLC, a sales consultancy that provides strategy and tactics for companies dealing with complex B2B sales. And she helps companies accelerate business growth. Her sales career started actually in her family business, but you've probably heard of the Miller Heiman Group, and she was a director and a sales trainer there. In that role, she worked with clients such as Coca-Cola, John Deere, Hewlett Packard, and a whole bunch of other Fortune 500 companies.
When the Miller-Heiman group was sold, Alice started her own sales consulting firm to bring the knowledge that she gained to smaller high growth companies. So that's the background. Really cool. That's quite a resume, I must say.
Introduction to Complex Sales Strategies [01:29]
Steve: So why don't we jump into some questions? We have a ton to talk about today, given the books you've written and some of these topics are right on point for our listeners.
First off, what are the characteristics of a complex sale and how would you define this unique sale?
Alice: Yeah, so the complex sale, I think, is a little bit different for each company. But the basics are this. If you're selling business to business, and many times you're a much smaller company and you're selling to a very large company, that in and of itself, of course, can make something more complex. But these complex deals have a long sales cycle. And that's driven by a number of things.
Things like high dollar stakes. So when people are spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, they're just not going to do it, you know, like that. There's lots of things that have to happen first before they can spend that money. And in some cases, when you're selling to them, that money hasn't even been appropriated yet. So that can certainly lengthen the sales cycle. But more of the complexities are things like multiple buying influences. We've heard this a million times. Gartner tells us that two years ago there were 5.4 buying influences in a purchase and now there are 6.8 and I think it's growing every day. People are coming out of the woodwork, you know, putting their two cents in on these large purchases and they probably should be. It just makes it very complex for salespeople who are trying to find all the buying influences, connect with them, build relationships and determine who they really need to be working with to get the deal done. Another one that I think a lot of people forget, Steve, is perceived risk. So here I am sitting in my office and I need to purchase software. And so I've been tasked with a committee to go out and find the best software of the type that we need. Well, everybody's busy doing a million other things and a lot of it's falling on my shoulders and I'm trying to wrangle this team, right? And I'm trying to talk to all these different salespeople.
And there's so many buying influences involved, right? That I don't even sometimes know who at my own company I need to get involved. So the fact that I don't know that is gonna make it really hard for the salesperson to try to figure out, right? So the multiple buying influences each have their own perceived risks. So I might be thinking to myself as I'm leading this charge, what happens if I make a bad decision? What happens if I steer my company the wrong way? What happens if we purchase this and it doesn't work? If I'm a huge company buying from a small company and they, you know, I say, well, this is the best choice that they buy. And then that company goes out of business or something. I mean, I'm fired basically. So there's this risk with all these multiple buying influences and each one of them has their own perception of what that risk is and making a decision.
And Steve, what that's driving, which is making all of us crazy, is no decision at all. They'd rather live with the pain that they know, right? Than the pain that they don't know.
Understanding the Eight Elements of Complex Sales [04:55]
Steve: Yeah, and I think that's something that we see, know, across, especially if you're selling new technology or new services or something's changed. You definitely run into that. You've talked about eight elements of the complex sale. And I think you might’ve just touched on a few of them, but can you explain what those are and explain this framework and why it's so important to understand for salespeople.
Alice: Yeah, I'll run through them real fast and then we can go back and catch a few that I haven't talked about yet. So in a complex sale, again, there's a long sales cycle and multiple buying influences for sure. But the other complexities are these, high dollar stakes, multiple buying influences, perceived risk, multiple solutions. So you have competition, it's not always another company that does the same thing. So there's multiple solutions available, technical and integration complexities with a lot of what we do today. Once they buy it, we still have to make it work. And so during the buying process, you know, IT is going, I don't know if that's going to work. Is that going to integrate with what we already have? So that's another one. And then one that people don't think of again, so I mentioned perceived risk is something people don't think of, but multiple influences on your own team. So at my own company, I have a lot of people I have to deal with to get a sale closed. I have to go to accounting and I have to go maybe to the CEO for a signature or if I want to change something, I've got to go to the technical team and ask them if that can happen. And I've got my manager. So on my own team, there's all these people who are involved.
Steve: I've worked in field sales at a big company before and that can be literally as hard as getting the customer to do things. Google was a great example of this and it was a smaller company then than it is now, it was very hard to get anything done on the inside. They wanted to keep things very tightly between the lines. You could literally get the customer to move before you could get one of Google's lawyers to change a term in the contract.
Alice: Exactly. And they're lengthening their own sales cycle and then they're yelling at the salespeople, right? Sounds like a salon because the contract's sitting on your desk. My customers are in it. I mean, that's when you want to rip your hair out of your head, right?
Steve: Right, right, yeah.
Literally, and that's the thing that big companies have to struggle with is getting that faster. And I regularly fight that sort of thing at Badger and try to streamline things because I've been in the salesperson's seat. I see why it happens. One of our attorneys just came into my office earlier today and they were like, oh, we've got to talk about what's going on with this deal. And I'm like, oh no, I'm that guy now.
Alice: You've got a sales prevention department lurking somewhere in your company and you Mr. CEO or Mrs. CEO.
Steve: Absolutely, well, we got through it pretty quickly, but I was like, no, I'm creating a sales prevention department.
Alice: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so then the last one is just other things that might be unique to your sale. You know, there's basically those eight things are making it hard for salespeople to get these deals to move faster. But I will tell you the number one thing of anything is that most salespeople are very poorly positioned with the buying influences.
So we know there's 6.8 of them, right? And most of the salespeople are like...
Steve: All of those people on the CC line of that email that you get.
Alice: Boy. Yeah. And it's hard to tell which one of them are actually really going to be involved and who's the economic buyer, you know, the one that's going to really be able to move the funds around if that's needed.
Steve: I at one point thought about creating an algorithm where when I would, cause I’ll be pulled into a deal at Badger once it's a certain size or it's type of customer or whatever. And it's like, oh, we want the CEO. And so the more people that are on that CC’d email, the more I should just count that as a month longer in the sales cycle. I see there's 12 people on this email for this next meeting. Oh, this is going to be a year before we get this done.
Alice: No, it's true because you've got all this input and these people all have to come to consensus in order to buy from you. This, I think if salespeople really want to, I call it conquer the complex sale rather than mastering it because we're never going to really master it because it's changing all the time.
Steve: I'm not sure if this is something you've addressed before, but one thing that jumps off the page at me while you're saying this is that I've seen this being different in different cultures too. So like we've got our business in Europe, we've got our business in America and then in Asia and all these different places have such different cultures for this type of thing. If you're talking to some VP of sales in New Jersey, he or she can often just pull the trigger and do something. They're like, yeah, I'll put this on my credit card, done.
Whereas if you're talking to a sales management team in Japan, it's got to be approved from the very top before they can take action. I think the culture can be, maybe that's the ninth element or maybe that tucks under one of your other eight elements, but culture, I've seen jump off the page as being like that really can be different in different places.
Alice: Yes, if you are doing international sales, it really behooves you to find people who are native to that country or who have spent time there and studied it and understand the business culture because under the multiple buying influences that can include culture, absolutely. That really is, you look at all of the issues that a salesperson's having, most of them could be solved if they were better positioned.
If they knew more of the buying influences, if they knew them better, if they had strong relationships so they could ask hard questions. You know, our deal has stalled. Something's changed. Can you tell me about that? Right? What's changed at your organization? You know, and as the young people say today, well, everything was going great. Now they're ghosting me. Like, okay.
Why are they ghosting you? If you have a good relationship with somebody, they're not gonna ghost you. They're gonna say to you, listen, the big boss just said, we have to now focus on this. And so you are not gonna get a response from anyone on this team because they have all had to shift their focus and this has been put on the back burner.
Tactics for Closing Complex B2B Sales [11:52]
Steve: Absolutely. And I've seen that happen a million times. So tell me about specific tactics and approaches that outside salespeople need to adapt to successfully close a complex B2B sale. Could you walk us through examples of what that sales process might look like?
Alice: Yeah, absolutely. This is, in fact, this morning I was just talking to my sister, Liz Heiman, who's also my business partner. And, you know, I came back from a training and this is, you know, it's the same problem. And we talk about this with all of our clients every day, right? What is the process? So we know it is what it is. We know it's complex. We know those eight complexities are there. We know they're lengthening our sales cycle, but what do you do about it? Right? So there's a couple of things and I'm going to start from scratch and then go into what happens if you're in the middle of it. So if I'm starting a sale from scratch that I know is going to be complex for any reasons that, you know, it's a bigger company, it's going to be high dollar stakes, whatever it is. So I'm prospecting a big company that's going to hopefully do a big deal. Then the way I start it has to be different.
Now you hear in the marketplace all the time, account-based marketing, account-based selling, account-based everything. Wonderful. Just FYI, everybody, that's not new news. I've been around a long time and if you were doing sales right, you've always done account-based because what you do is you say, okay, here's my list of companies that I really want to do business with. And of course they match your ideal customer profile.
And you start to do your research. So maybe you have a hundred on your list. Start with 10. Take those 10 companies and do your homework. So if they're all in different industries, it takes a little longer and it's a little harder, but lucky for most of you, you probably sell in a vertical so you can know something about that industry. It makes it a bit easier, but number one, you've got to know the industry that these players are playing in because things are impacting them based on that industry.
Their competition, who their customers are, how their customers are changing. So you've got to really know the industry. And then you have to know their company, their products, their services, their value proposition, what their president or CEO is talking about, what their initiatives are, what their corporate responsibility statements are. You need to understand this company. It doesn't take long. I can do this in 15 minutes.
If they're a public company, it's all on their website. And if they're not a public company, a lot of it's on their website. And if you just watch their social media, you can learn almost all of it, right? So you just need more knowledge. Now, there are people who will disagree with me. They just say, take the list. Don't spend more than two minutes looking up. Make it your own. Start calling. I personally don't agree. I think if you spend more time on the front end, you have much higher result on the back end.
Research the companies, research their industries, and then figure out who the people are. Now this is the key to getting better positioned. You need to find at least six people, and better if you find 10, who have titles who are likely to have some input into the sale that you're making. Now we don't know yet because we haven't talked to anybody, whether those people will actually be involved or be buying influences for your sale. We don't know, but we're going to assume from all the past work we've ever done with companies that we need the CMO and we need the CFO. We need the director of marketing and we need the VP of sales and we need the sales enablement leader and we need the sales directors. You know, so we're going to go find more people and figure out what their names are and what they're about.
No, that's not hard either. You just start Googling for their company page, their about page, and they list their senior people on there. You go to LinkedIn, super easy to find them. Go to Twitter, you can find a lot of them there. Facebook, there's lots of ways to find them. There's also applications you can pay for, software you can pay for that have all of that information in them, right?
Steve: And what I guess. Could you name some of that software? I'm guessing you're talking about like DiscoverOrg, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and things like InsideView.
Alice: Yeah, so you have Sales Navigator and of course, LinkedIn's part of it's free and Sales Navigator’s better if you can do that and DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo, there's Hoovers, you know, which Dun & Bradstreet and Hoovers merged together. There's Sales Genie. They're just, they're companies that sell data and...
Steve: InsideView.
Alice: Yeah, I like DiscoverOrg for a couple reasons because the main one is it's human verified. So I feel like I get better. And I'm not being paid by DiscoverOrg to say this. I feel like I get better data from them. Yeah. However, you know, they have limitations too. So most of the companies are using several of these types of data, you know, resources so that their salespeople can find these things. Right.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Alice: So then you use every means you can to try to get the names and titles of the people who you think are most likely to be involved in this sale. And then you figure out an approach. How are you going to build relationships with them? And the very first thing you do, which almost everybody forgets to do, so listen up, the first thing, Joanne Black, I'm talking about you now, is referrals, right? The first thing you do is try to find someone who can refer you, which means give an introduction. So before you go cold calling, cold emailing, cold messages on LinkedIn, before you do any of that, I want you to look to see if there's anyone at your own company first that could introduce you. Anyone at a former company that you're still in good terms with that could introduce you. A colleague from a project you worked on, someone you went to college with.
Steve: You just gotta check LinkedIn and look the person up and see who's connected to both of you and ask around. I mean, it's funny you mentioned Joanne Black. So she was on the show a little while ago and I emailed with her literally this morning.
Alice: Well, I have right here. I have copies of her book. I have to give these out frequently to people that are ready to go.
Steve: Yeah, there is no one in sales that shouldn't think about how can I get, just bring it to the top of their mind, how can I get more referrals to the people that I get my message in front of.
Alice: Well, and first, like, don't do anything else until you've ruled out the chance to get an introduction. Yeah. And then tell them what you want. So, if you want me to introduce you to someone, fine. Hook up with me on LinkedIn. Tell me who you are. Tell me why you're special. Get to know me a little bit. And then when you see that I'm connected to somebody you want to be connected to, then say, hey, Alice, I see you're connected to Steve and I've been really wanting to talk to him. I'm like, great, what do you wanna talk to him about? He's like, hey Steve, this person wants to talk to you, it's not gonna get him interested, right? And hey Steve, this person wants to pitch you their product, it's not gonna get you interested. So we need something else that's like, my friend, Susan would like to meet you, she read your book and she follows you and she'd really like the opportunity to talk with you. Something like that, give him some help to know what to say to make the introduction and they can do it by phone. If you live in the same town, you can get together for coffee or lunch, cocktails. You can do it on LinkedIn, by email, so many ways. But anyway, that's like number one. Okay, now, let's say you can't get an introduction, which I find that hard to believe, but if you can't, and so, you know, especially with these companies, their sales reps need such high volume, it is hard to sometimes find an introduction.
But then what you have to do is introduce yourself and you have to do that in a non-salesy way or they don't want to be connected to you.
Steve: Right.
Alice: So we are email. So what I do is I found these 10 people at this company that I feel would possibly be involved in making a decision to buy my product. So now I'm gonna use every means I can. I'm gonna use the phone. I'm gonna use email. I'm gonna use LinkedIn. I'm gonna use every other social media where these people are hanging out. I might also use a trade show as a way that I might invite them or I might hold an event and invite them to my event or I might write a handwritten note to them.
To use every means I can, not just cold call.
So I set up a campaign that includes all of these methods and I write out the messaging. Now marketing, hear me. If you could help your salespeople with the messaging, that would be awesome. They need a great, strong value proposition. And then they can craft custom messaging around it. So I've got these 10 people. Since I've researched, I know their company initiatives, I know what they care about, I know what they're focused on, and I can use their words.
Steve: Hmm?
Alice: And I can also direct them to a resource of some type that will be interesting to them versus starting off with, hey, I want to pitch you on my product. Our products do this, this, this, this, this. It's like, hi, I've been following your company. I see you won an award. Congratulations. Or I've been following your company and I see you have an initiative around this. And I have a resource that I think would be really helpful to you. And I'd love to jump on a call and learn more about what you're doing and see if there's any way that we might work together. Be more human.
Navigating Gatekeepers in Sales [22:06]
Steve: So and that I think that's fantastic advice. What about if you don't get the opportunity to do that and there's a gatekeeper involved? Do you have any access? Do you have any advice for outside salespeople on how to get access to the actual decision makers involved in the complex sale? If there is a gatekeeper involved, how do you get over that?
Alice: Yeah.
So it depends again, where are you? So everything that I was just talking about is like when you start from scratch, right? But when you're already in the thick of it and you've already got a blocker and all these problems and everything, that's more difficult. So the first thing is avoid having a gatekeeper by doing what I just told you. Cause if you are building a relationship with 10 people at a time, it's going to be pretty hard to get blocked. However, some of you are in the thick of it and you've already been blocked or someone said to you, that's not me, you go talk to Ben. Ben is working on that and now Ben becomes your blocker, right? So what we have to do again is try to build a relationship that shows the blocker that we are gonna make them the hero. We're here to help them and we know how hard it is to be in their position because...
Steve: Mm-hmm.
Alice: They've got all the pressure on their shoulders to sell what you are offering internally and they really don't know how to do that. So we have to understand first of all that again that perceived risk is there and they're afraid they might lose their job.
Steve: Mm-hmm. Well, how do you recommend and obviously you've written books about this? So it's a loaded question. How do you recommend to lower that perceived risk that you're talking about? How can a field salesperson in one of these situations lower the risk that the buyer perceives about doing a deal?
Alice: I think that if you're a small company selling to a really big company, you have to show them that you're strong, that you're going to be around for a while, that you can provide all of the support they're going to need once they purchase. You're going to have to step through the proof that you can do all the things they're afraid a small company might not be able to do. Right? So you're going to sell us this. Who's going to support it? Do you have enough people to support our company?
If we don't pay you for 120 days, will your company close? I mean, really think about the kinds of things these people are worried about. So you can use case studies of other large companies if you are in that position. Now some of your companies may be newer and not have a lot of cases yet, but you do have to put their fears to rest, you know, take away some of the perceived risks somehow. So if you can ask them, tell me what kinds of things might prevent you from buying from a small company like ours. And let them tell you. And then say, these are good things to know. Let me help you understand how we would mitigate all of those risks. So that was...
Steve: Mm-hmm.
This is one that I've had to deal with myself when Badger was a startup. We were talking with a Fortune 500 company about doing a deal and they did the deal and I paid for three years of the service upfront. Which was extremely helpful to us being able to hire more engineers and really double down on the business because it was a lot of money all at once.
That was definitely a concern of theirs. They were like, I mean, this is a small company and we're giving you guys three years of service. How do we know you're going to be here in three years? And that was a big, we really had to let them dig under the hood of check all our finances, got the business growing. And ultimately, I think the way we ultimately got around that was we created one of those situations, I forget what you call it, but it's like a lockbox type situation where if we went out of business, we signed a contract that's like, well, if we do go out of business, we're just gonna give you the code and you own, like if this should go bankrupt, you could just get the code for it and you can spin it up on your own servers and so you get it for free forever then. They were like, well that's good.
Like they're like we hope you don't doubt it. We hope you don't go out of business, but that would be easier if we could just have it...
Alice: That's a great solution.
Steve: It's a service like a, I forget what it's called right now, but it was like, like there's a company, there's companies that will just like hold the version of your code. And even if you just, you know, get hit by an asteroid, they've still then, then they're like, they can go to that company and be like, hey, they got hit by an asteroid. I mean, you can't even find them. They're in like Hawaii or something. Uh, can we have that code please? And they'd be like, yeah, we'll try to get ahold of them. Nope. Can't get ahold of them. Here's the code. Yeah.
Alice: That's a good, that's great. That's the kind of thing that you have to be able to do, or you have to be able to take, you know, give them a money back guarantee or put their money in some sort of escrow account until you've delivered or you've got to do something.
Steve: I think that's actually what it was called. It was like a software escrow company.
Alice: Yeah, possibly. I think that...
Steve: That’s a big word that I couldn't...
Alice: But you know, Steve, salespeople don't always have control over these things. You know, it's the people like you, the owners. So when they're coming up against all of these kinds of objections, I highly recommend they come back to their team and say, hey, these are the objections we've been hearing out in the marketplace. Let's work together to solve these. And then we can go back out and say, okay, we've solved that. Can we talk again?
Overcoming Sales Objections & Unsticking Stalled Deals [28:05]
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. You have to elicit the objection or you're not going to be able to overcome it.
Alice: Yeah. You know, earlier you asked me about, you know, like specific things that salespeople can do within these complex sales. And I started with, you know, when you're starting from the beginning, right? But right now these salespeople are listening, you're probably in the thick of it and they have one or two contacts and the deals aren't moving forward or somebody's ghosting them now. They're...
Steve: Yeah, how do you, what do you do when that happens? How do you unstick it?
Alice: Right. How do you unstick it? Right. Well, I'll tell you this. It's hard to have a storm with one brain. So you got to go find some other brains and you got to brainstorm. You just simply cannot do it yourself. But we still have companies who have just individual contributor salespeople out there trying to knock down these huge companies on their own. Those days are gone. We need to stop selling that way.
We have to put teams against these big companies. And even if there's still a main salesperson who's responsible for going out and building those relationships, there is a team of people helping to research and listen to the marketplace and feedback and have strategy sessions with that salesperson. So they have a brainstorm. They can say, okay, you're stuck. There's these two people. And they can start asking questions like, well, who else do you think might be involved?
And then start digging around on all those sources we mentioned earlier and find five or six more people and then talk about, well, okay, these two people are the ones you've been talking to, they're ghosting you, so what if we contacted these people? What would the approach be? What would we say? Since we've already talked to these two and we're afraid to make them mad, but we need to go around them because they're not responding. So at some point you have to ask yourself, what have I got to lose?
Steve: Yeah, one thing that I coach my sales team on is I'll have them bring me into a deal and match me up with an executive on that side so there's the person who is kind of driving the deal from their side and there's our salesperson who's driving the deal from our side and there's you know our people who work who you know help them get the stuff running and going and then there's the you know more the technical or IT people on their side that work with that group and they'll have them match me up with an executive on that side. And then if anything goes sideways at any point in that, anyone else can reach out to their kind of the person who they've been introduced with and they're managing that relationship and paying them and see what's going on and keep the ball going. And we've done that a bunch of times where like, they're like, hey, this is kind of stuck. Then Steve, you reach out to the person that you met on that call and ask them how things are going and see if they want to meet.
And you can often get information and see what's going on and try to elicit the objections you can overcome it at that point. Another thing that we'll do that's been really effective is we'll send people a breakup email. That's like where we're like, it's like a John Doe letter, like, and we'll send them a letter being like, hey, it seems like maybe this isn't a priority right now. Is there a?
Maybe in the future, let me know if this is, I forget exactly how the, we've got like a templated, like nice breakup email. It's very polite and very professional and very like no big deal if you don't want to do this now but later, like, or if you don't want to do it ever, like, I forget how they word it, but having like that just at the salespeople's fingertips, and if something has gone cold or they're being ghosted, that can be a really effective way to elicit like, oh, hey, no, we still want to do this. This is obviously still a priority. This is still a problem for us. It's just, you know, this thing over here set on fire. And so the team has been dealing with that right now. And I've just been, you know, put, is kind of on the back burner, but we want to do it in Q3, you know? So that's been powerful. You know, those two, the teaming up with at multiple levels, like you talked about, and then also the breakup email are two of my favorite things to unstick a stuck situation.
Alice: Yes, both of those are very valuable. And I use some words like, well, you know, the timing may just not be right right now, but would you let me know either way so that I know the appropriate way to follow up with you?
Steve: Everybody always wants to be appropriate. That's one of my favorite words in the world.
Alice: And seriously, like, who's gonna balk at that? I mean, I always get a response when I do that. They're like, yeah, we've been so busy. Thank you so much for your great follow up. Yeah, would you get back in touch with us in a few months? We'd really appreciate it. You know, but the problem nowadays, and especially using AI, now that I'm against it, but it's like, we send out these masses of emails that are really just so not customized, right? And people are just deleting them.
Of course you're not going to get a response, right? We have to be humans and the AI can help us be more human and to customize, we have to start any communication we have and it's got to, with about, you know, about the other person, start the communication about the other person, about what they need, about what they care about, offering them something helpful, right? And then you can move on from there because what they want to see is that you're just not going to try to pitch them immediately.
And why would you waste your breath? You don't even know if they're a prospect yet or not. So let's just build relationships because maybe they can't buy from you, but if you build the relationship the right way, they might tell someone else about you and introduce you and say, you know, we can't really use what this firm has, but the salesperson is fantastic. And I think you could use it. I just wanted to introduce you. How did it happen?
But not when you send spammy emails that are all about you, your product or company, your services and nothing about the other person. Sorry that your AI is building those kinds of emails for you or your marketing team or whoever's doing it. I'm really sorry, but don't do it. You know, don't tell them, no, go and say, this is not the way to do it. We want to get qualified leads and this is how you get qualified leads. So when you're, you know, when you're starting again, if you reach out to a lot of people at once...
Steve: Yeah.
Alice: It's easier not to get blocked, but once you are blocked, you've got to build a strong relationship with that person and help them understand you're on their side. It's like, hey, Steve, whether we end up doing business or not, you know, I really want to see if I can help you. You know, tell me how it works at your company. What's the buying process like? Who are the other people who are going to get involved? What's the best way for you and I to help them know? I've got one client that loves to do videos, they’re great at it. So when they get a person who's telling them, oh, just only talk to me and I'll kind of guide you, but you can't talk to this, but whatever. That person, again, doesn't know how to sell for you internally. So make a video. Hi guys. You know, I was talking to Steve and we are talking about getting this process implemented at your company with these products. Want to quickly show you how it works. Short bites, three minutes, five minutes. And then that person has a great video to send out to the team.
Steve: Mm.
Alice: Now the team gets that video and usually what they say is, we'd like to talk. We want to talk to that person. Can you organize a meeting for us?
Streamlining Sales Processes [35:35]
Steve: Yeah, what a great way to empower your sponsor to companies is giving them using video and I think very few people are doing this well. One thing you just brought up there that I want to dig into a little more is, you know, in complex sales processes, I think often marketing and customer support and the sales team can all trip over each other because they're all going after the same account and in different touch points and different ways.
Alice: Right, right.
Steve: What would you say the key is to developing a common process to present a unified voice to the buyer?
Alice: Yeah, that's so important. And I'll tell you, it's interesting. I just listened to a podcast on this the other day. I can't even remember who, I think it was Donald Miller's podcast. He does a podcast, his company is called Storybrand. And he was talking to somebody who wrote a book about handing off the customer and how that works. And I think that communication is what's lacking. Well, there's process and communication. First of all, we need to build the process and follow it.
And that process has to involve the proper communication. Sometimes if the salesperson can, and if the company can support this, get the onboarding, customer success, customer support team, account manager, whatever it's called at your company, you can get them involved a little earlier in the process. It makes for smoother onboarding. The other thing I think that helps is when we, again, the day of individual contributor is gone. Stop saying, I, I do this, I do that, I help you.
Say we, my team, I have a great team, they're gonna help you. Once you purchase this, here's how it works, here's how our implementation works, here's all the people that are gonna be involved. And so if the salesperson has a process for handing it off, it can go really well. And part of that process is introductions. Let me introduce you to my team that's going to be helping you with the onboarding and get this implemented at your company. And then if for some reason, you can't get ahold of them, you can always reach back out to me. I also wanna introduce you to my manager who's happy to help you if you need it and our CEO. So you can make a list of who the people are and how to reach them and send that out. You can have the CEO like yourself, write a nice welcome aboard message and get that out. That's another way once you've closed the deal, even if you haven't been at the higher level.
Another way to get to that higher level once you've closed the deal is have your CEO send these welcome messages out to all the senior people. We're delighted to be working with your company. I want to know that you can reach me personally. We're going to be providing you with some stats and results or whatever it is that you do once you implement. So I think that handoff needs to improve because customer retention numbers are abysmal.
You know, people are bringing them in the front door, you know, at a great pace and losing them out the back door at a faster pace.
Steve: Doesn’t work. And that's a product problem, it's a customer service problem, it's a customer success problem. I think most businesses under invest in making their customers successful with their product. And there's few things that are more important than making sure they do because you know word of mouth and happy customers is what great businesses are built on.
Alice: Think of all the referrals you can get from your customer if they're happy.
Steve: Exactly, right?
Most of our business comes from everyone. Everyone tells us, if you ask, where’d you find out about it? I'd like to say it's all my brilliant marketing stuff that the team does, but really it's all about happy customers, referring other people, telling their friends about it. Like, hey, this helped me and it'll probably help you too. You've got a field sales team too. That's where the vast majority of the business comes from. And we can't control that other than by making the product better and by making sure people are onboarded well and they're happy with the product and they're successful with it. That's the way you move the needle on that.
Alice: Right. And basically what you want to do is get them to say, wow, this is great. Your onboarding process was so easy and you helped us get the user engagement we need and whatever else you helped with the implementation. Your IT people were amazing. That's what you want them to say to you and then capture that on film or in writing, of course, for your website. But if you don't have customers saying that, you need to take a serious look at what's happening because it's going to hurt the salespeople in the end. We're not going to be able to, you know, if the word in the marketplace is, yeah, well I used them for a while, but you know, this is what happened. It's going to be tougher for the salespeople. So we do have to have both ends of it really working. Bring them in and you keep them.
Sales in 60 Seconds - Quickfire Sales Tips [40:39]
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the next section, I'd like to ask you a series of questions. I call this section, Sales in 60 Seconds. So the idea is I ask you a series of short questions and you give me an answer in under 60 seconds. All right. So it's rapid fire here. So first of all, what specific skill set, or I guess what is the most important skill set for outside salespeople to master a complex sale?
Alice: Well, I guess I would say they have to become a private investigator. That's the skill set.
Steve: Curiosity, I always say that's one of the most important attributes in a salesperson.
Alice: Yeah, if you're curious and you learn, you will have lots of things to have great conversations about. And that's part of it. If you want to get people on the phone, if you want to get people to meet with you, to talk with you, you have to have something interesting to say and not interesting to you, interesting to them. Right. So if you have curiosity, if you are a great private investigator and you can dig up all kinds of cool things and bring insights to the table, people want to talk to you. But hey, I'm just checking in or hey, I want to pitch you my product. No, I don't want to talk to you. But if you can tell me some things about my industry, about my customers that maybe I didn't notice or maybe I missed or maybe I'm just really interested in talking about, then I want to talk to you. So you've got to be really curious and be a great learner and know how to get that information and use it to have great conversations with buying influences.
Steve: So what's your best advice to shorten the sales cycle for a complex B2B sale?
Alice: Get positioned well.
Steve: How can salespeople differentiate themselves from their competitors?
Alice: Ah, differentiation. Yes, my friend Lee Salz just wrote that book. So pick up a copy of his book and read it. He does a great job explaining how to differentiate yourself. If your product or service is very similar to all of your competitors, you don't have an easy job. And that is the case a lot of the time. So then what's next? Well, your customer success can help differentiate you, the way you onboard.
You can also differentiate with the people in your company and how they interact during the sale. So as you and I were both saying before, matching like levels, bringing the CEO in to the right level, right? So if your product or service isn't that different and there's nothing really very unique about it, then the way you sell has to be unique. It has to be all about the customer. It has to be all about the people and helping them and using your whole team to make introductions and help their team to make a good decision. Because it's hard. You have to bring all these people to consensus, right? So the way that you sell can be your differentiator.
Steve: And what would you say the biggest challenge is for outside salespeople when dealing with complex sales?
Alice: I think the biggest challenge is they haven't had the training that they need. They're sort of thrown out there. Most, and especially if they're younger and right out of college, haven't had a lot of years in sales, most of us have only been involved with business to consumer transactions that are very different than a business to business complex sale. You can't treat a complex sale like a transaction. It's just, it doesn't work. I mean, occasionally, yes, you'll close a deal that way when somebody really needs what you have and they like yours best for whatever reason, know, hallelujah. But how often does that happen? Right? So I feel like the challenges that I've seen is that the salespeople haven't had the training to get positioned. They don't know how to do the things you and I've been talking about. And to get positioned properly, you have to have a great value proposition.
And you have to understand your customer, what's inside their head, and you have to understand what to talk to them about. So if I've got to talk to a CMO and a director of marketing, a VP of sales, and a CFO, they all have something different that they're thinking about for their company and for this purchase and just as a human being. And if I don't understand what's on their mind and I'm just thinking about my product and service, how can I communicate with them? So I think that we have to teach salespeople how to do this. It's just critical that they learn how to approach people and build relationships with them for a complex sale, which means lots of people who have all this different perceived risk, who all are afraid they might lose their job, and they all have different reasons for wanting a solution or not wanting a solution.
We just don't give our salespeople enough tools to manage that.
Steve: Well, I guess as a final question then, what should the field salespeople listening today do as a first step to win more complex B2B sales?
Alice: Take a step back and just like remove yourself from your day to day. Get in a place where you're not going to have a lot of interruptions or any interruptions if possible and take a look at what's in your pipeline or funnel as I call it. Look at the deals that are most important to you. Maybe they're the biggest deals. Maybe they're the most prestigious deals. Look at those deals and just ask yourself, how am I positioned to close this deal? Do I really know the right people? Do I know enough people? Do I know the right people? Do I know what they're thinking? Do I know what they're afraid of? Do I know why they might buy from me or why they might not? Do I know what the other solutions are that they're considering? Are they gonna do this in house? Are they gonna do nothing? Are they gonna buy from a competitor? Just go down the list and ask yourself, what do you really know and what information is missing that you need to go gather?
And then be methodical about it. Okay, I need to know more buying influences. I'm going to go research and I'm going find four more people who might be involved in this deal. And then I'm going to figure out an approach. I'm either going to ask the people I do know to introduce me, or I'm going to kind of on the side, go try to develop relationships myself. But just get the information you need and then be methodical about going through each step. There's a great book that you can read called Strategic Selling.
My father, Steve Heiman, and his partner, Bob Miller, wrote that book. It will help you walk through this process. So it's quick and easy to read. I highly recommend you get a copy of it.
Steve: I've got that one myself. I've read that one.
Alice: There's a few blog posts, mostly I write for the sales leader or the business owner, but in the blog posts that I have kind of these step-by-step instructions about how to do this. So take a look at my blog and kind of search through for different terms about prospecting and buying influences. And there's some information there too.
Summary and Conclusion [48:01]
Steve: All right, well, we've covered so much cool material today. I'm gonna do my best to summarize it in one minute here. So first of all, some of the characteristics of a complex sale are they have a long sales cycle, you deal with multiple buying influencers, there are about 6.8 on average involved in a sale today. There is a different perceived risk for each of those buying influencers. There are high dollar stakes in these complex B2B sales.
There are multiple solutions available, meaning you have competition, you have to deal with technical and integration complexities, and you have multiple influencers within your own organization. These things all make it very difficult for salespeople to move a deal down the line. One of the biggest challenges is that salespeople are poorly positioned with buying influencers. You have to truly stay on top of any changes in the buyer's organization and understand the goals and needs of the various decision makers. Account based selling has been around for a long time and it's still relevant today. You have to know the industry of your prospect, have to truly understand their company, their products, their customers, and their value proposition.
Alice: Wow.
Steve: You have to do thorough research. These are your words. I'm just regurgitating your knowledge to the world. So do thorough research on these things before approaching the prospect. This is key to becoming better positioned with the buying influencers. Some great tools to use for that research are LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo and DiscoverOrg. And after that try.
Try to get a referral from someone to that prospect first before you start cold calling. If you can't get an introduction, use social media, the phone, email, and even events to approach people that you think are the buying influencers. When you reach out, be natural and start the conversation about them. It's not about you, it's not about your product. You could try sending a video message that quickly introduces you and how you could help the prospect and their company. And you can use videos to move deals down the line mid-cycle too to help enable your main proponent of the company to better sell internally. Remember that the buyer perceives a high risk, especially when you're a smaller company. You've got to show them that you're strong, that you'll be around for a while, and that you can provide the support that they're going to need. Case studies are a great way to prove that and show them that there are other big companies that are successful with your product.
If you're stuck on a deal and a buyer goes dark on you, find out who the other buying influences are and reach out to them. As a last resort, if nobody responds to you anymore, send a breakup email. You can see if that creates more urgency for them to get back to you. Communication and effective processes are key to align your sales, your marketing, and your customer support teams to provide a better buying experience.
Make sure you send a small welcome email to the prospect that introduces all the people on your side that will be involved in the deal and how each one will assist the buyer. This creates a really great onboarding experience for them and it will start the relationship off on the right foot. Being curious and willing to learn about the buyer, their organization, their customers and their industry is key to handling complex sales successfully and building great relationships with your buyers. Differentiate yourself.
Differentiate yourself with the way that you sell. Make it about the customer and focus on the people you work with. As a sales manager, it's important to enable your salespeople to get positioned properly by helping them understand the different buying influencers. To get started today, look at the deals that are most important to you and ask yourself, how am I positioned to close this deal? Do you know all the influencers and their various goals and challenges and the risks that they perceive?
If you're not well positioned, get the information you need to move the deal forward in a strategic approach and become a private investigator. So that, that was a lot of, I don't know if I got that in under a minute, but we covered a lot of topics here.
Alice: Wow, you are good at that.
Steve: Thank you. So Alice, where can listeners read more about your work and how can they reach out to you?
Alice: Well, you can find me on LinkedIn and I'd love to hear from you there. Please let me know that you heard this podcast, Outside Sales Talk, right, with Steve, so that I know how you found me and send me a message and I'd be happy to connect with you on LinkedIn. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. If you like to use that, I'm on Instagram. And then of course my website, which is aliceheiman.com.
And if you really are stuck on something and you just want to get another opinion, then set up a time to talk with me. I really make time to talk with salespeople to help them bust through tough deals. And if it's not me, somebody on my team will definitely be happy to help you. If you are really stuck and just want to get an outside opinion, don't hesitate to let us know and we'll schedule a call.
Steve: I love it. We're all in this world of outside sales together. That's for sure. Well, I hope everybody enjoyed this episode of Outside Sales Talk. If you have any feedback or suggestions, always feel free to reach out to us at feedback@outsidesalestalk.com. If you really like the podcast, please subscribe to it, leave us a review. It really helps us spread the word to get more outside sales people just like you to find out about us. So take care until next week and thanks a ton, Alice, for being with us here today.
Alice: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.