You won't look like a pro if something does come up, and it'll prevent
the slows down of the sales cycle. You're listening to the Audible Ready podcast.
The show that helps you and your teams sell more faster. Will feature
sales leaders sharing their best insights on how to create a sales engine that helps
you fuel repeatable revenue growth. Presented by the team at Force Management, a
leader in B to B sales effectiveness. Let's get started. Hello and welcome
to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. I'm Rachel klap Miller. Today we are
going to talk about ways to save time. If you're a quota carrying rep,
you know that you need to maximize the time that you spend selling,
and we're going to talk about that today. Joining me as our own Antonella
Odey Hi, ANTONELLAHI, Rachel, Thanks for having me again. Yes,
yes, I know that there's you know, there's not a rep out there
that doesn't want to save time. So this is I'm excited to go through
this topic. And you know, sometimes it's the little things that can really
make a difference when you're trying to maximize the time you spent selling. So
came up with a couple of areas that we're going to talk through today and
provide ways that we can help people be more efficient. I produce the Revenue
Builders podcast that Force Management also sponsors, and I often hear John McMahon,
who hosts that podcast, say go slow to move fast and talking about starting
early, asking the right questions early so you're not having to rewind the conversations
when you hear that. What does that mean to you, Antonella, And
what does that mean when we say go slow to move fast as a rep?
Yeah, that's definitely a popular saying when it comes to sales, and
it's interesting saying it. When I hear it, it always makes me kind
of think about construction, So stay with me on that definitely doesn't sound like
I'm going in the right direction. But when you think about good construction,
it's all about the foundation, right, And I find that anybody that's successful
in sales, it's the same type of thing. It's like building a sturdy
foundation for a house. If you take the time to lay a solid foundation,
if you make sure that it's leveling, you make sure that it's structurally
sound, the rest of the construction process tends to go much smoother and faster.
Right, so you know, but when a contractor skip steps in making
sure the foundation is right and they rush to finish the house, it actually
ends up elongating the process. The floors aren't level, walls don't meet in
the right place, so it causes a lot of problems. And similarly,
in sales, investing time upfront understand your prospect, your customer's needs actually speeds
up the process. Why you understand the customer beyond the surface, which increases
the chances of alignment. The new stakeholders. They feel understood, they feel
heard, So now you increase your likability with them, you align your solutions
to what matters most to them. Now there's cow into supporting you and what
you're bringing to the table, and all of a sudden, things progress really
quickly. And that's a very different experience than rushing to solve problems that often
we don't have fully defined or haven't fully validated, which actually slows down the
process because as additional people draft in, they're saying things like, you know,
this isn't align with what's most important to me or what I think is
most important to the organization, and ends up stalling or slowing things down in
a significant way. Yeah, that's a great point. If you building that
foundation really makes it easier moving forward, and that's why we always talk about
it. You know, work early. How do you coach reps Antonella to
stay in discovery rather than rushing to move to the next stage. What are
your coaching techniques there? I would say probably focus on three big things here.
The first thing I would say the focus would be on is setting an
agenda that is all about discovery. I think as a seller you are given
an opportunity to set the rules of engagement. That means when you set up
a meeting, you should take the opportunity to say, Hey, our very
first meeting is going to be focused on you. My goal is to better
understand where you are, where you want to be, where it's what it's
going to take to get you there, so we can make a determination if
further conversations should be had. I know you were interested in hearing about us,
and I'm more than willing to share that with you, but I want
to ensure that anything I talk about is relevant to you. So we have
forty five minutes. I'd like to focus the first thirty minutes on you and
that we can discuss and answer questions around our organization, our solution. How
does that sound right? So very simple, getting them in the habit of
setting the agenda so that they're holding themselves accountable to This is going to be
a discovery session, so it really benefits both parties in effective way. The
second thing that I coach on is role play. And I'm a big believer
that the best performances require rehearsals and frot. When I was a sales leader,
this was a non negotiable form me. It didn't matter if you thought
it felt inauthentic to you or if you felt uncomfortable. Can you imagine like
if a Broadway actor said I can't attend a rehearsal because an actual audience isn't
going to be there. That doesn't make sense right? So in our world,
you know, who could play a better customer than a manager or a
peer who understands the customers you work with day in and day out. How
something plays out very often in our mind and in a real interaction can be
different. So you know, why did I want my people to role play?
Because it minimized the risk of losing a valid opportunity So if you're a
seller out there, my best advice to you is seek out your manager,
seek out a pear, and practice. I have never heard a seller say
I practiced in practice and for an upcoming conversation and it actually made it worse.
That's because it actually allows you to capture your thoughts, think about where
the conversation may go, and you have an extra set of eyes and ears
to point out some blind spots. The third thing that I will typically coach
on is and it's not really coaching, it is coaching, but it's that
number one, demonstrate myself, you know what I'm asking them to do,
and then coach on that. So this whole idea of demonstration. As a
leader, if you're asking people to execute on something, it's your job to
be able to execute on it yourself. And for many people like me,
I learned best when I can see what good looks like. So don't miss
out an opportunity to say, hey, I'm asking you to spend more time
on discovery. I'm asking you to ask for follow up questions. I'm asking
you to go deeper to quantify pains and outcomes. Let me show you what
I'm asking for and as a leader, I felt like demonstrating what I was
asking them kept me very sharp in what I was doing as well. The
one thing you just need to be cautious of as a leader is not making
this something that your team members become dependent on you for to find line there
and I speak from experience unfortunately, but demonstrating what you're asking them is,
you know, a great way to show the how how do I conduct a
good discovery session? And then once you demonstrate it, it's now your seller's
turn to deliver, right, So it's your turn to coach, be candid,
be constructive in terms of feedback so that you can give them an opportunity
to continuously get better. So those are my big three. Those are great,
great, And I guess the other point I wanted to talk about when
we talk about go slow to move fast is gathering the right information early,
which we talked about, but it's almost like you gather it before you need
it right. You might use it later in the sales cycle, but it's
easier to ask for it early, if that makes sense. Totally makes sense,
and I think that's there should be a level of expectation in terms of
how much data you should be gathering early for a number of different reasons.
I think the first one that should be most obvious to everyone is is there
a deal to be hat Like, our time is valuable. Spending time on
the front end can help us qualify an opportunity in and out, you know,
in or out earlier, which potentially can save us time and resources and
all of the things that come along with that. So that's definitely a huge
benefit of doing it early. I would also say like it provides us with
the real understanding of the customer's needs. And the caveat here is as long
as your intentions come across as being about them. So what I mean by
that is there is there a genuine interest in getting to know and understand your
buyer. If there is, they're more likely going to want to share information
with you. If your discovery is self serving, if it's leading in,
you know, in terms of the types of questions that you ask, they're
going to see that and they're going to avoid giving too much information. So
it needs to come from a place of service, genuine interests, you know,
genuine curiosity. It also can speed up the sales cycle when it becomes
apparent that they want or need what you have to offer, and that's really
I think the big take away from a really good discovery session and doing a
lot of that early is that by articulating what they want or need, it
starts becoming really apparent to them that they may want and need you, and
so that very often can feed things up and create a really compelling case for
them to move forward with you. And I'll also wrap it up with saying
getting that information early also allows you to present your solutions in a way they
actually care about. Right, So you're going to have to give them some
information about you along the way, and you don't want to do it in
this haphazard sort of way where you're like just throwing things at them seeing if
something sticks or not. If you have a good understanding of what your customer
wants or needs, it provides you with the basis to connect your solutions specifically
back to those wants or needs, and therefore, you know, creates this
whole idea that what you bring to the table is really valuable. So all
those things in combination or some of the benefits that you really can get out
of getting information earlier in the process. Yeah, taking those steps to save
you time, and you mentioned role play, which also goes into the next
point, to just take the time to prep because even though you're spending the
more time you spend prepping, probably the better execution you will have when it
comes to your conversation. So talk a little bit how the prepping saves us
time. My experience has shown me that every single interaction there should be some
sort of focus and direction, and preparation really allows you to establish what that
focus and direction is in terms of where that conversation may be going. And
I think one of the most valuable things we can do as sellers is really
think through how something might play out. What questions we want to ask,
how might a customer respond, Who's doing what? Now? We know full
well that it may not play out that way, and we have to make
adjustments, you know, based on what's happening in the moment. But at
least that provides us with a level of confidence as we enter into these conversations.
It very often results in a more efficient and purposeful conversation that the customer
appreciates. I'll also add this, prepare for what the next steps are if
the meeting is successful, and articulate that to your customer. It could sound
something like this, but at the end of this meeting, we both feel
it's worth our time to continue this conversation. I'm going to ask you to
include the project doner, or the economic buyer, or a key stakeholder in
the next meeting. It eliminates that awkward what do we do now moment at
the end of a meeting that sometimes transpires, and it moves things along quicker.
I think also, you know, in terms of prep it provides us
with some options if something unexpected should happen. So one of the most valuable
things that we can do for ourselves is challenge ourselves to think through what might
happen that we aren't expecting. It could be an objection, it could be
additional stakeholders that might be involved. It could be someone saying, you know,
I'm not aligning with what we're all talking about here. If you think
that through ahead of time and how you might handle it, you will look
like a pro if something does come up, and it'll prevent the slows down
of the sales cycle. And then at the end of the day, it
all leads to a higher likelihood of success. That takes time, but I
find that the time spent the front reduces the risk of elongating the timeliness of
closing the opportunity, and very often increases the chances of success. Right.
That's a great point because the sales cycles they can be short, they can
be quick, and they can go on and on and on. I love
the tip about preparing for how you want to end the meeting. We actually
have a great podcast called Owning the Next Step, and I will link that
in the show notes. That's a great listen for those of you we're interested
in that particular tip. The third way to save time that we're going to
talk about today is really building a cadence around the muss does. We all
have things that we know we need to do but we don't like to do.
For me, it often has to do with putting stuff into salesforce or
some expense report or something. But what's your best advice, Antonella for building
a rhythm around things like pipeline, gen referral, salesforce tasks, et cetera.
I'll leave you with three tips here. Number one, I must leave
to my calendar, you know, and there's definitely things that I don't like
doing, and the way I typically tackle those is by scheduling time on my
calendar. If it's not in my calendar, I tend to push it off.
But because it's on my calendar, I consider it a must do.
So I always schedule time kind of in the same vein you know, breaking
things up. So don't say the tasks you hate until a deadline or allow
them to pile up. It don't feel like you're climbing a mountain where you
just can't see the peak and you don't know where it is. You just
keep climbing. It's important to break things up and make them consumable. And
I want to emphasize the word consumable, small bite sized chunks of time that
don't make me feel like my life is passing me by, And I'll spread
it out and I'll lock in thirty minute blocks on my calendar throughout the week,
so I'm doing what I need to do, but in timeframes that don't
feel super tedious to me. And the last step I'll give is there are
tons of tools and apps out there that you can that can help you simplify
what you enjoy leaves. Maybe it's an apper tool that simplifies outreach to customers.
Maybe it's a proposal tool, or maybe it's an AI powered assistant.
I often find the benefit of those types of things outweigh the cost and both
time and sometimes sanity as well. So don't be shy about leveraging tools and
applications that are out there in addition to maybe the ones that your company provides
you to help you save you time and take things off your plate that you
tend to not light so much. Right, I love that. I love
that, And you know, the calendar tip people always say that, and
it really does help because when that notification pops up, you know, you're
like, oh, whoops, I gotta do this. But you know,
sometimes where I find it helps me is not necessarily getting going on a task,
but knowing when to end it because I could spend six hours writing something,
or I could spend you know, hours writing LinkedIn posts or publishing,
but I shouldn't be spending my whole day doing that. So it's almost like
it gets me going, but it says, Okay, after the sixty minutes
it's done, I'm moving on to the next time to stop. And that's
that consumable piece of it. Right. So making sure that it's just nice
little bite sized chunks, so it doesn't feel like you're in the midst of
doing something for an extended amount of time that you just totally dislike. Amen,
amen antonello Ode, thank you so much, Thanks so much for having
me, Rachel right, and thank you to all of you for listening to
the Audible Ready Sales podcast. At Force Management, we're focused on transforming sales
organizations into elite teams. Are proven methodology. These deliver programs that build company
alignment and fuel repeatable revenue growth. Give your teams the ability to execute the
growth strategy at the point of sale. Our strength is our experience. The
proof is in our results. Let's get started. Visit us at forcemanagement dot
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