You may find yourself in an environment where you are the lucky person to attend one of our sales trainings. Maybe you attended it while working for a previous employer. Maybe you attended it on your own time. Either way, your co-workers might think you're from Mars when you talk about using one-page proposals or other tools we provide through Selling Energy.
Here's some advice. The first thing you should do is enlist the director of sales or whoever is the head honcho at your company. Make them realize that these tactics are the next wave. Give them examples that will make them take notice. Let’s say you take one of their typical long-winded, 40-page proposals and recast it as a one-page proposal with a technical appendix. If they have any sense, they would take a moment to evaluate the improvement and appreciate its appeal.
The second thing you should do is encourage them to enroll themselves (and ideally all of your customer-facing professionals) in one of the trainings you’ve attended. If there are training materials you received during the training that they are open to exploring, give them a guided tour. We have many, including our Selling Energy Blog, Podcast, Videos, Online Trainings and our Wall Street Journal bestselling book, which is currently available in multiple formats. In fact, the e-book version of our bestseller is free, which makes it an ideal instrument for getting others on your team to be singing from the same songbook with absolutely zero cost.
In short, there are plenty of ways to get someone familiar with how and why how our success strategies and tactics work to generate more sales. Another thing you could do is arrange a 15-minute phone call between me and the higher-up who is interested. Believe me, I’m willing to do it!
I might start one of those calls by asking, “How many of the proposals you’ve pitched in the past 12 months have been implemented?” If the closing ratio is typical, it’s going to be low to moderate. The next question would be, “How do you feel about writing a typical proposal 10 or 50 or 100 pages long? How do you feel about writing 100 ten-page proposals, with only X% getting accepted? What do you think would happen if your organization adopted the one-page format?”
Or I might begin one of those calls by asking how many people on their sales team have a compelling 15-second elevator pitch? Or how many people know the difference between Simple Payback Period and Savings-to-Investment Ratio, and why it’s important to migrate the conversation with your prospect from the former to the latter?
If your organization hopes to maximize the value of our training to increase its company-wide closing ratio, and reduce its weighted-average sales cycle, you should be sharing these winning strategies with your managers, and they should be sharing them with your entire team of sales professionals.
