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Hi Reader,
Notes from a Female Founder
I used to be a teacher. When I became a salesperson it seemed very similar to me. Sales is a helping profession. It's about caring, about helping people solve problems and make good decisions, and those are very feminine things in this crush it sales economy.
We keep teaching salespeople to go out there and crush it, sell them, close the deal. What if instead we said, go out there and help them, care about what they're trying to accomplish, care about them as humans, help them solve. That mindset shift changes everything.
What if your salespeople cared? Not about making quota but about those they serve and the outcomes your solution provides.
We need to allow sellers to stop working from fear of not hitting their quota. To work from the joy and abundance of providing outcomes to those they serve. Your company has something people need or you wouldn't be in business. Your job is to help salespeople go find the people who need it, sell it to them because it solves, and be joyful about it. That's what makes selling easy, when you're helping someone who's curious and interested instead of chasing someone who isn't ready.
Sales Sharpenher
If you want more conversations that turn into deals, start with how well your team actually knows the buyer. Buyers don’t want to talk to sellers who are more concerned with their quota than the solution that will work best. Sellers need to be retrained.
Ask yourself these three questions this week:
1. Visibility: Do your sellers know your buyer as well as you do? Most CEOs became CEOs because they knew the buyer's world inside and out. That knowledge has to transfer to the team, not stay locked in your head.
2. Consistency: Are your sellers trained to ask or trained to talk? A seller's job is to ask questions that help a buyer see a problem they didn't know they had, not to talk about the product.
3. Leverage: Use current customers or your own team to help sellers learn who their buyers are and what they care about so they can have higher level conversations with them and add insights.
This week’s conversation
All the way from France, I got to talk to my friend and sales expert, Becc Holland. Becc is the founder of Flip the Script, a sales training company built on one idea, flip every outdated sales habit into something buyer centric. She’s real and raw and tells it like it is. I love that! She’ll tell you and you’ve heard it before, 87 percent of buyers don't want a seller involved at all, and only 3 percent see sellers as trustworthy. That's not a buyer problem, it's a training and possibly hiring problem.
She shares three things every founder CEO needs to hear.
• Your sellers need to know your buyer as deeply as you do. Look up the top industry benchmarks your buyer is measured on and make your team devour them before they make a single call.
• Buyers don't lose interest in the discovery call, they lose interest right after. 95 percent get past a permission based opener, but sellers lose them when they don't bring anything new to the conversation.
• Stop treating prospecting like demand attraction. Ask questions that surface a problem the buyer didn't know they had. That's what actually opens the door, not another templated email.
Becc is absolutely right when she says,
"Strategy starts with understanding the buyer's world, not just the product. Without that insight, sales efforts miss the mark."
👉 Listen to the episode - and forward it to a female founder who wants her team to have more conversations with people who can buy.
On LinkedIn this week
I was thinking, what do you do today to Score More Sales?
👉 Read the LinkedIn post
To Your Sales Success,
Alice Heiman
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