Improve Your Deal Closing: 4x Your Win Rate - Podcast Recording

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:03

Hello, good afternoon and welcome. Welcome to the Sales Scoop. This is a show for startups who want to improve how they sell. Every week we tackle a hot topic in sales and bring you the shiniest pearls of wisdom from experienced leaders. I'm Alastair Cole, your host for today and a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. I am an ex-software engineer and computer scientist, with two decades experience in sales and marketing. And I'm joined today by my co-founder…

Kiran Gill 0:43

Yeah, it would help if I unmute myself in this digital age, and that you can actually hear me but yeah, my name is Kiran Gill. I am the co founder of the uplift partnership with Alistair and also business development experts. I've been in sales and in tech sales for about 10 years. And then prior to that I was in finance.

Alastair Cole 1:07

Thank you, my friend. Delighted to be here for a topic that is very close to both of our hearts improving deal closing, which we're gonna get into very, very soon right away. I mean, really important deal closing is so hard. I was checking out some HubSpot stay ahead of the show and closing rates. They said last year we're at 29% win rates across the board for all their sellers, just 21% I mean, deal closing is tough, isn't it? What are your What are your What are you? What's your experience of it being challenging given

Kiran Gill 1:43

Does it go up and down? Doesn't it depend on you know where we are in the world, what we're doing, what we're selling, what the economic kind of situation is out there, deal closing is either easy or harder. I can remember when I first started off selling a long time ago, it was honestly so easy. Everybody had so much cash and they were buying everything so it was easy to sell and you hit your targets whether you wanted to or not. And then in 2008, the financial crash happened and then suddenly, no one could close anything. So depending on when it is the time of the economic cycle or what you're selling, it can be good or it could be bad.

Alastair Cole 2:24

Yeah. I think a decrease in bond rates across the board as a result of that crash. But also then, just the squeeze on the economy recently. At the same time there is, you know, there's no better feeling than closing a deal, especially a big deal that just feels like a validation of the company of yourself. And as we've talked about is the lifeblood of, of any business. And certainly the businesses that we're working with the million dollar question is, you know, what's the best approach to take to make sure that your deal closing is bang on. And we've seen that professionalising an approach to closing for various methods is what gets results. And our experience in that field is quite strong as a result of our experience, but also companies who work with us as part of the partnership. We work similar to mine a couple of years ago and help them sell a brand new product, their SDK and deliver four times Warren rates for them, and a 251% return on investment. So nice words there from Justin. And we're going to pep up what we did for similar lines and what we're doing for ourselves and what we've done for other clients throughout this show. But let's start by talking about where you see dual qualification fitting care. And maybe you could just talk us through this, this visual and where you see it.

Kiran Gill 3:55

Yeah. So deal closing realistically comes into the point where the client or the prospect is in the position of interest in the solution or the service that you're selling. So prior to that there's an awareness stage where the prospect is still learning or trying to get in touch with learning about what they need. And then at that point, we're doing our prospecting, where deal closing comes is where we've got this slide is point four. So opportunity. Remember a few episodes back, we talked about a sales process. And in the sales process, we said that opportunity is a point where you meet the client for the first time, that's when you actually sit down with them or have a meeting. And that meeting is where the discovery phase, as they call it in sales, would start or where you would start the qualification. It's a two way street. So remember, your prospect is probably looking at you and trying to qualify you to think well. Can these guys or can these people actually do what they are promising to do? Can their service, their solution, do what they want? So there's a little bit more understanding both ways. From Our point of view we don't have a sales point of view, our job is to try to qualify the prospect to find out whether they are the right kind of company, the right kind of people that should be should we be talking to? And are they going to make the decision the way we think they should be making it towards our solution.

Alastair Cole 5:20

It makes sense to do closing sitting across a couple of those big buyer phases and key sales stages. And, you know, what we see through our work is that the maturity of deal closing could be stronger, right, we're about more than 50 startups have gone through our 360 degree sales diagnostic product, and the average score across the closing is 45.7%. across them, we dig into this bullet point, all these bullets here goals and targets all the way down to reporting monitoring. So robust analysis, and there are 45.7 we see professional services leading that pack much better even than SAS and IT and software service sellers and the back end, nonprofit and charity, and med tech and healthcare professional services are surprisingly very good at deal closing, they may be framework oriented. And so those are our learnings. And, you know, there are three bits that I I'm keen to cover which is the before deal closing the during deal closing and then the aftercare, I want to talk about aftercare after deal, what goes into that, that before piece is in in prospecting and lead generation, which is awareness in a cold, warm and hot prospects. And, you know, that's, that's really critical. Because if you haven't got high qualified leads, then you haven't got any decent opportunities. Could you? Could you expand on that my friend a little bit more about what, what, what needs to be done in order before deal closing can start? Okay,

Kiran Gill 7:07

so we're talking about win rates here. So in in complex selling, remember what we said in the last episode about complex selling, complex selling is when you have to have multiple meetings with the prospect to understand whether they're the right people who want your solution, and whether you're the right people to deliver it, and they're the right people to buy it. So complex selling is when you've got multiple, so lots of US selling tech, complicated tech or Consultancy Services, or we will go through a process well, there'll be multiple meetings with a client to understand whether they're the right people to purchase our solution. Now, before that set of process that we need to make sure there, are I ideal customer profile is the right are we targeting the right people, because if we're not targeting the right people, our win rate is going to be considerably less than if we're targeting the right people. And that was something that I spoke about in the last episode where we talked about buying window. So first of all, we need to make sure that we are targeting the right, the right people to speak to with our solution. And then we gotta speak to the right people who are in the buying window, who are going to buy our solution. If we can get those two things right, before we even start getting into the opportunity qualifying stage, our probability is so much higher. And that is that's all from preparation prior to get into that point of opportunity.

Alastair Cole 8:31

And the only thing like 15% of your potential buyers from your market are in that buying weed and ready to buy at that moment. So there's even more pressure to get it right in terms of lead gen and high quality. And actually, the next episode, we're talking about funnel mix and how to optimise that depending on your sector in order to get higher quality leads. So that's exciting. So that's that pre bid before all deals closing. Right? We need those high quality opportunities. Thank you. And really the core of it comes down to we think your ideal qualification methodology. Right? And there are loads out there on that.

Kiran Gill 9:10

Oh, God, there's so many. So those of you who have done any kind of pharmaceutical selling or have done heavy tech selling might know some of these kinds of acronyms that are flying around. There's BANT, what is budget authority needed and timeline that was invented by so this was all invented years and years ago in the 80s. When big tech started coming on the scene, IBM at that time, who were the lead players around said there needed a way they needed a way to qualify people to make sure that they were the right people to buy their products or the right companies to buy. So what they used to do is they used this four letter acronym called BANT. And that was because they wanted to make sure that the people they were talking to had the right budget. The authority was that we were talking to the right people? Do they actually need What we have and timeline? Are they going to be buying it this quarter? And that's how it started. Since then there have been all sorts, there's one called medic, what if I have to even look this up? Because it gets really complicated. What are metrics economic buyer decision criteria, decision process identified, pain champion and competition. So it's getting, and that came along in 2000. And that was from solution selling, again, more technical selling it, and I could go on for hours. So these are loads of different acronyms, they do the same thing. They're there to help you as a seller qualify the buyer.

Alastair Cole 10:37

Yeah, one that I used in the past, leading your business at eight in the agency world was Scotsman. And that was fantastic. You know, scoring one, two or three on each of the eight letters gives you an overall score, and there were various rules about going for a DLF if you had to get above a certain threshold, so there's loads out there. And you know, we know several of them, we prefer something that is much more than because as you mentioned, these are all ancient, right, and none of them have been designed post COVID. Right there, we're not really in our eyes, in my eyes not really fit for any kind of modern selling, certainly not modern, social selling. And, you know, the thing that ties them all together that are the same, are the things that you've reeled off, you know, the buyers need the authority to talk to the right people. So this, they've got the same kind of DNA in all of them. And what we're going to run through now is how we see the world, the six elements of our ideal qualification methodology, which is a kind of modified band. But we've got these six we're going to run through. It doesn't really matter what you use when you feel that these six are more important for 2024 and beyond. So we're just going to don't we're going to blaze through these six now pick each one out, have a look at it. Let's start caring. Number one, engagement. Tell us about what this is and why it's so important.

Kiran Gill 12:10

Okay, so this is something that you probably won't see in the other ones. And why we chose this engagement is so important. So even though you're, you need to make sure that the person you're speaking to is engaged. Now, it might be a group of people. So you might be scoring several people at this point in time, but you need to understand here. Are they in contact with you? Are they in regular contact with you? Or is it somebody who is basically not there at all? You're the one reaching out to them, you're the one who's triggering them? Or even better? Are these people actually chasing you? They're the ones who are chasing the deal saying hey, hey, Alastair, come on. You know, I really want you I want to talk about this because once you have that engagement level and it's high, you know that they're more in the buying window than they aren't

Alastair Cole 13:02

Yeah, and like you said that suddenly you don't see in the others and the reason that we're leading off with it is you know, things are so competitive now and you know, staying in touch with multiple people is so important that without that there's you know, your deal is in in real jeopardy let's move on to number two.

Kiran Gill 13:29

So I think all of us know this need. Is there a need for your solution or service? Does the purchaser need your service or your solution in any such way to be honest, sometimes it might not be that they need your solution or service they might be able to solve this another way. So if we're going to be doing ethical selling, we're not going to try to convince them into buying something they don't need. There might be another way of trying to solve their problem. So what we're trying to do at this point of view is gauge their need is there a need for your solution or product

Alastair Cole 14:06

and the way that we we like to score need and engagement and all of these is across a five point scale you know everything from zero your understanding is that there is zero need through low moderate clear need and then finishing five out of five would be high need that's how we score those those five and like so critical and I think some of the things that are important for us I looking at the number of key stakeholders who have articulated that there is there is a need right It can't just be one person you've got to have you've got to get that that policy together. And I think that's really important. Well, how would you, what would you say my friend if you know, how important is it that they're proactively going out? They talked about being chased for engagement would be ideal, right? We'd love that fight. is coming to us. What about the kind of appetite for proactivity? Looking for a solution? How important is that? Oh,

Kiran Gill 15:07

it's the Holy Grail, isn't it? When a client comes to you and knocks on your door and says, Hey, I've looked at your website, what you're doing is amazing. Please can I buy from you, that means they've qualified themselves. That is, so that's why the weight of an inbound lead is so much more than trying to do an outbound when we're doing outbound selling. And that's what I did for the majority of my career and still do outbound selling a lot more, it's a lot more legwork. You need to contact the person, you need to make sure that are they the right person, you need to try to figure out whether they're that you know, whether they're looking to purchase or they got the need, and you're doing this process, when an inbound lead comes in, you know, for a fact. And this is why it's so important to jump on those low leads so quickly because we are moving in a fast world. So if you don't jump in into those leads very quickly, what happens is the need slips away. Or suddenly maybe they speak they're speaking to multiple vendors, or companies about the same thing. And if you've got an inbound lead, and I have seen this so often in companies, and it's one of my biggest bugbears is inbound leads come in, and no one chases them up. Because for whatever reason, I'm too busy, I was doing something else. It's an inbound lead. That is the holy grail. That's the golden nugget. If you don't chase that one down, then tell you the truth. Probably shouldn't be selling. Yeah, that

Alastair Cole 16:31

totally is reliant on sales and marketing being properly integrated, we see time and again, they're not. And so if that's happening to you, you're on your you're watching this live and recording that's happening to you alignment to sales and marketing, absolutely critical. So you talked about, you know, that need engagement going hand to hand and that makes, you know, makes perfect sense. You're in touch with somebody and they have a genuine need for it. It doesn't have to be always face to face. LinkedIn bought some shares recently stating that 38% of sellers have closed deals up to half a million dollars without having met the buyer face to face, right? So you can do these things digitally. Obviously you want to mix, but that engagement online offline, it's, it's absolutely critical. Let's move on to number three. The authority, what are you? What are your thoughts on the importance of this?

Kiran Gill 17:25

Well, you need to be speaking to the right person, don't you? So you might start the sales cycle, speaking to somebody who might not be the right person to sell to. And remember, we spoke about this last time. Sorry, if I keep on saying Remember, it's like you've told the episode before. If you haven't seen the episode before, you should watch the episode before, because in that episode, we talk about how people are purchasing now, especially in large enterprises, they split the purchasing. They're purchasing what you call a kind of committee. So it's buying with consensus. So you're not paying for making the purchase, you're not making the purchasing decision yourself, you're getting everyone else involved in it. Because if it goes wrong, everyone's to blame in your team, not just you. That's why what happened. So there's a crazy stat out there, what is your biggest competitor out there is no decision 60% of deals, clients don't make a decision to do anything, because they rather not do anything because the sellers have not been able to show a compelling reason why you should move forward. That's all of the companies out there trying to sell. So what they've done is you know what, we'll stick with the status quo, because it's not easy. However, when it comes to authority, if you're speaking to the right person, and the right person doesn't always have to be the person who's sitting on top of the tree, it might be someone a bit further down, who actually has the need for the product. But their job is then to convince the people above them to say, hey, you know what, what these guys are actually doing is amazing. We need to look at this more. And they're going to be your champion inside the company to take it forward. So getting the right person the right authority with the right need. And you can see how this all works together. And with the right engagement. Now suddenly, we've got a deal that's moving into the buying window in the right way.

Alastair Cole 19:13

And I love that trying to sell into kind of the grandparent it's about helping your buyers. Right. You know, you talked about the biggest challenge being just no decisions being made. You know, part of that is companies that don't have a deal closing framework into taking too long, right? HubSpot reported that 28% of pro say that this is the longevity that the length of the sales process is the biggest reason why clients are backing out of deals, it's too slow, it's going on too long. And that's because they don't have an ideal qualification methodology sorted. Let's skip on to number 406, which is about demonstrating the value of your product or service. speak to this a little bit Kevin, please.

Kiran Gill 20:00

So value is about the the ROI, the return on investment, the business case that you're going to put together to show the customer, the client, the prospect, whatever you want to call them, what you're going to, you're going to show them the value of your solution, and your service to show them, you know what, there's value there for you. Now remember, sometimes they might need to be shown the value, or you might need to convince them what the value is, with your case studies, we have an ROI, calculator, a multiple ways of doing this, and in your process, and what you're trying to do there is you're trying to convey the value and hopefully the person with the authority that you're speaking to, will start seeing the value themselves or start calculating the value for themselves even saying, wow, you know, actually, we could do this even better than what your numbers are. Because this can be tweaked, and this can be tweaked. And that's where the value suddenly becomes, well hold on, if this is going to cost us 10 euros, 10 pounds, $10, whatever it is, but it's going to bring back in 30. This is a no brainer. You know, this is going to make me look amazing. Why aren't we doing this?

Alastair Cole 21:12

And that articulation of the value is so critical, right? I think Brian has shared that there's a 30% higher likelihood of a quality deal. So an ambitious or larger deal than expected when value affirmation happens when sellers can kind of firm and explain the value. That just makes it easier for the buyers. And that is a challenge because I think 48% of sellers agree that they really struggle with sharing that value. So that is hard. And things like calculators, like you mentioned and our business cases. So important. Let's move on to number five. Competition,

Kiran Gill 21:55

Well, there's always going to be competition in the deal. And sometimes it could be from internal forces, the competition could be that there could be an internal if you're selling into a large enterprise, there could be competition for pool for the money that you know, your partner you're selling to are trying to maybe use that money in sales. In other places, it could be just a very simple way of looking at competition, you might actually have a competitor out there that does exactly the same thing as you slightly differently. You know, instead of having a blue logo, they've got a red logo, pretty much it's the same thing. So do you understand the competition? Can you differentiate yourself from the competition? The only thing that differentiates you is price? What's horrible? Because what we'll do is it's a race to the bottom who can discount the heaviest when the deal? Yay, no, that's not Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's the worst thing to do. So you have to know the competition. So what you can do there is differentiate yourself from the competition, before you even get to the point of starting to show your business case. Because you can already start laying traps or little, you know, surprises for the competition in places, there's a good chance you're going to be speaking to x y Zed. Let me tell you, you might do it that way. There's loads of different ways of doing this. So there's loads of different competition strategies that I could get into, because I'm quite a geek when it comes to those things.

Alastair Cole 23:21

And the way that we score competition is from unknown where you get the lowest score, strong, strong competition is a relatively low score and then challenging, you might be able to overcome it weak competition, and then the ultimate the high score on our deal qualification methodologies is not there's no competition, your fruit that gets you the highest score. Let's move on then to the last one.

Kiran Gill 23:49

Oh, timeline. Yeah, timeline. So important, isn't it? When because the thing is great. We might score highly on everything else. However, you know what? Our budgets aren't going to come in for another six months. Gonna have to wait, wait out in that time, who knows what's going to happen in six months, they find another person, maybe the person you're speaking to suddenly leaves and goes and joins another company or retires? That's even worse, because now you have to start again. So the timeline is critical. How urgent is this? How quickly do you need to move? How quickly can you make it? How, how much urgency can you bring into the deal as a seller to help your purchaser think oh, yeah, we got to do this quickly. There are ways of doing this without discounting ladies and gentlemen, you don't need to discount. That's the last thing we ever do. We actually don't really do it. If we can help it.

Alastair Cole 24:41

Yeah, and timeline, you know, critical, not as important as some of those early ones engagement need. Absolutely central actually, we only have four levels within the timeline. It's easy to be unknown, it's weak. It's vague, or it's fixed. That's how we score just for there whereas other areas we get far If there's more waiting to those are important areas. So those, that's it, those are the six elements of our dual qualification methodology. And, you know, so no surprise, we see working with clients that when we use a framework like that, and we stick to it, and they and they stick to it as similar as I did working with Justin lion and the team that they're able to, there's more clarity. And as a result of the increased clarity in deal closing, the sales team had more confidence, they quadrupled their win rate, they were three times happier and 24% less stressed. So like it works, you know, demystifying it works in that way. So those are the six. And actually, after there are, there are a couple of additional kind of things that we track after those, those six clear and you want to just chat about the last the last few, unless

Kiran Gill 25:59

these six are qualified correctly, I will tell you, you're not ready to present to the person you're selling to in any such way, if you present, and you know that if we will use this as a barometer, and let's say this is all in the middle, that means you don't really understand the deal well enough, or you haven't conveyed the value enough. And if you at that point running to the position where you're going to start presenting your solution, I'll tell you this, now you're gonna come unstuck. So what you want to do is make sure that everything is as high as you can possibly get it. And when you've got it there, you're then allowed one sorry, allowed, who am I to stop you, then what you should be really doing at that point, that's when you're supposed to be showing, that's when you do your business case, that's when you do your presentation, that's when you do your demo demonstration, that's when you know that you're ready, you've got everything that you need. And that's why your win rates are going to get better. It's like trying to shoot at the goal. When you know that the defenders are out of the way and the goalkeepers going the wrong way, of course, you're gonna have a better chance of scoring, you still might miss Yeah. But the chances are better, it's better than doing that, that than trying to, you know, kick the ball from the halfway line with everybody in front of you, which a lot of sellers do, because we can be lazy sometimes.

Alastair Cole 27:18

So as we chatted through there, these things are the six and we score on the six and four or five areas, we also score beyond that in terms of how well the presentation is ready, objection handling and close. So there's another phase actually nine areas that we score our deals on in ideal qualification methodology. And we believe in this new approach so much that we have built that framework into our SaaS product revenue coach, you can head over to revenue coach.ai It's free at the moment. And you can load in your deals by hand very simply and the revenue coach will give you personalised sales coaching on every one of your deals using our deal qualification methodology, that is, at the heart of how we run our deal closing and how we help our clients and our customers to improve their deal closing. And we know it's an absolutely critical area, right, you've got to be you've got to be on your toes, and you've got to be fast and have that framework, you know, and 86% of sellers struggle to adapt to the changing needs of buyers in that deal. closing phase when the information starts to come out. It's really hard for people to struggle to be dynamic. And by using a framework using a revenue coach using the app with partnership, we're able to put that framework in place, which means you're saving time, which means you can use additional time to tailor your responses, go back with a personalised approach and be dynamic. And the opportunity is huge. Like I said, you know, Gartner states that HBr it was that there's a 30% higher likelihood of a quality deal. So an ambitious beyond target deal if you can articulate the value during a be dynamic during that last phase. Two more things. For us to mention. One is that a lot of the data that you saw today comes through a 360 degrees sales diagnostic tool, which includes a full score and breakdown of your sales function after 75 minutes on the phone with some bespoke recommendations and a revenue roadmap about how much additional income you could generate by improving your sales function. And lastly, our next show is in three weeks. Tuesday, the ninth of April, same day of the week, same time, seven o'clock on the east coast, the US midday in the UK and 1pm In Europe, how to make your phenomics sector specific, we're going to dive into the science of funnel mixes and show some examples of the peg examples that you can take for your sectors of how your funnel might be, might be different. So I'm very excited about that one. Good. And thanks very much for today. Any any,

Alastair Cole 30:24

You know, we're just about out of time. But any final thoughts on on deal closing, or something a startup or business should should do right away, following this, this session,

Kiran Gill 30:34

start start deal closing, if you want to improve your deal, win rate, it's the simplest thing you can do. The difference between winners and losers when it comes to this kind of selling of this kind of enterprise complex selling is the ones that do qualify are the ones that hit their targets. The ones that don't are random ad hoc, they might get lucky occasionally, but they're not going to have sustainable selling. So if you want to start being consistent, you want to make sure that you're doing it correctly, go to the website, revenue coach.ai. Get into the tool, start using it. If you need any more answers or any more. You have any other questions, please reach out to us. Always happy to help, especially, you know, startups, it's so hard out there. That's the reason we're doing this.

Alastair Cole 31:20

I'm gonna do a qualification methodology. Go get one and come and talk to us. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can just search for the app with partnership.

Alastair Cole 31:30

That's all for today. Thanks very much for your time. I really enjoyed it today. It's a big, big passion area for both of us. And I'm sure that I'm sure that came through. All right. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks, everybody, for watching.

Kiran Gill 31:43

Thank you everyone.

Alastair Cole 31:45

Bye. Till next time, bye.