How To Win More Sales By Asking For The Order

Transcript From Live Show

Hello and good afternoon. Welcome once again to Love Your Business TV. I am Adrian Peck. I am the founder and entrepreneur of Better Never Stops. We deliver business advice and coaching programs to entrepreneurs and business owners who run or want to run £1 million plus turnover businesses. Every week we stream live to the nation on Love Your Business TV, and we are here to help you either fall back in love, stay in love or fall in love with your business. It’s very much, my passion is to help the business owners and entrepreneurs of the UK and indeed the world, to do exactly that. You work so hard on your businesses and you deserve to get so much out of them, so I bring lots of weekly business tips and advice for you completely free of charge to really help you do that, maximize the opportunity you have and to have fun. It’s really important that you have fun in your businesses.

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So let’s crack on with this week, we’ve been focusing very much on lead generation. This came back off the survey that I’d done with many of you and lots of business owners that I surveyed over the last three or four weeks. One of the powerful questions I asked you was, what’s your greatest business challenge at the moment? Many of you said that your greatest challenge was around lead generations and sales, so I’ve put together a string of about four or possibly five programs I’m going to do now, just purely focused on lead generation and sales conversion for you.

We’ve done the last couple of weeks. The first week we looked at lead generation channels, so we looked at what a channel is, and also making sure that you’ve got the right channel, talking to the right target markets that you have and how you get those out of that. Last week we were joined by the fabulous Mike Killen who had done some really, really good insights. Mike is a very well known sales trainer that works predominantly in the marketing agency arena, but he came and shared some insight around qualification of customers and it can help getting those converted.

Let’s move onto this week. This week, we’re going to move on to asking for the order. So I’m going to share with you some insights around some common mistakes that I see that businesses and business owners make and sales teams make. I’m going to give you some tactics that you can use and implement very quickly and easily, and then I’m going to task you with three actions that you’ve got to take away and go and implement into your businesses as well.

So let’s crack on. In terms of common mistakes, and these are very difficult things that I hear, “Our customers are like us because we’re not pushy.” I get it, you are in sales or you’re not necessarily in sales and your customers like you because you’re not in their face and kind of really salesy and pushy. “If you want to go ahead, give me a call.” These are kind of all stuff that’s said, that I hear being said when I’m in businesses and working with sales teams. This is the kind of line they give, “You want to go ahead and give me a call. I’ll leave it with you.” It’s common, end of that sales conversation, “I’ll leave it with you to come back to me,” or, “Once you’ve got the other quotes, give me a call back.” Again, these are common things I hear said by salespeople and business owners when they’re trying to sell.

Worst of all of course is that that people don’t ask at all. You don’t actually stop and ask the customer if they want to go ahead and, do they want to do business with you? Is that sale right? There’s one that I think is even worse than not asking the question is the fact that it’s been sent by email. You kind of say, “What is your sales followup process? What did you do?” “Well, I sent it by email,” which is just disastrous.

The back of all this, and I get it in terms of when I’m working with business owners and entrepreneurs, they’re not necessarily from a sales background and a lot of the time it’s quite a daunting thing. It’s not a very natural thing. Sales is not a natural thing. Some people are very good at it, but some people are very good at acting. That’s really what I lost sales is. Sales is not a natural process and you are going to get out of your comfort zone by doing this stuff. But the reality is, if you do not follow up with your customers and you do not have that kind of asking for the order mentality, they are going to go somewhere else. They are going to go to your competitors. Somebody else will ask that question.

There’s a survey done and I don’t know who it was done by, so I haven’t really kind of quoted on here, but there’s something like about 70 or 80% of customers want you to make that decision for them. They want to be asked. It’s not about being pushy, and there are some ways that I’m going to share with you that aren’t necessarily out and out kind of sleazy or salesy, in the way that it’s done, but you do need to ask the questions. You do need to follow up with that customer and have a process in there for asking for that order. Otherwise, what’s the point? That business that I see that businesses miss out on because they don’t ask it.

Now I do a lot of stuff on behalf of my clients and various projects we’ll go to when we’re looking for different projects and different suppliers. It always astounds me that I can go out. There was an instance a couple of years ago, where I had a client that wanted two of those big interactive televisions for a showroom, for new showrooms that they were building they wanted these big interactive televisions and were about to spend quite a lot of money.

I spoke with, I tried to contact about 12 different companies that specialized in audio-video technology. I had to research and find these companies. Out of it, astoundingly only about three of those actually returned my calls and got in touch with me. This is despite me emailing them and phoning them. Then from those people, none of those companies actually followed up with me and followed up the sales process. I ended up finding another company through some networking. They came and done a fabulous job and [inaudible 00:08:21] business, not surprising. Excuse me. So it just astounds me how poor businesses can be in that sales process and therefore this is very much a reflection of how your competitors will be as well.

What’s really then holding you back? What’s holding that back from doing those sales? A lot of the time, it’s about poor processes and about having very poor sales processes. Again, sales is not a natural thing that you do. Inevitably, unless you’re a sales organization, ie. like a recruitment company, estate agents, those type of companies where they are very much sales based. Sales is just part of something that happens in your business. It’s not core to it. Therefore, you can excuse the fact that it’s not a home science that you’ve got, but you do need to get good at it. If you’re not, get somebody in to help you get those sales processes right, because that investment will pay dividends day after day, after day.

Sometimes it comes down to a lack of focus. And I see this a lot in businesses where they haven’t necessarily got an out and out sales team, and therefore it’s a function that something else just goes on with it. Therefore, there’s that distraction. When there’s a distraction away from sales, people are always going to migrate away from sales because it’s slightly alien and it’s hard work, and you’ve got go through being rejected and those awkward questions you’ve got to ask people, people will always shy away from it.

“We’re too busy,” is a common thing I hear so much, it’s why you don’t follow up on sales and do your sales process. “We’re so busy, we haven’t got time to do it.” Then what’s the point? What’s the point in doing the lead generation and spending that time to even doing the quotation stuff if you then are too busy to follow it up? You’re better off not doing them and saying, “I’m sorry, we’re closed,” and not taking that time.

Sometimes as well, it’s the wrong customers. That is inevitably where you’ve got a sales process that you’re going on, you’ve got lead generation and that lead generation is actually attracting the wrong type of customers. Therefore, some of those customers you’re wasting your time on and therefore you’re not putting that focus into it. So the answer to that really is get the right customers to start with. See How To Define Your Target Market

There is something else as well, which I have already touched on it, which is the fear rejection. It’s a very natural human trait that we have. Nobody likes to be rejected, even salespeople, even hard and fast salespeople still don’t like to be rejected. So we sometimes, we’ll put in that picture in our head, we’ll build that barrier up that we won’t want to ask those difficult questions because of that fear rejection.

So how can we get around it? How can we get around this fear of rejection? First of all, really you’ve got to accept it. You’ve got to accept it that it’s a part of a natural sales process. Now a few years ago, there’s this guy on television, Neville Wilshire is his name. I believe he’s still with us. He was part of a, on these documentary kind of fly on the wall programs on BBC. It was called The Call Center and he was the chief executive, he was quite an out and out character. I’m sure he still. The center was based in Swansea and he had teams and teams and teams of quite young people that were on the phones, just selling all day, day in, day out.

He had this great saying, which was, “Some will, some won’t, so what? Next. Some will, some won’t, so what? Next.” He drilled this into his salespeople as part of their training process. It’s really about just how adopting that philosophy that if you’ve got a good lead generation machine going on, when you have those customers and you’re having those phone conversations, some of those customers will convert, some of them you’ll never convert, so what? Some will, some won’t, so what? Next. You just move on to the next one. You kind of have to accept that in sales you cannot win them all and you’re never going to win them all.

So the first part of it is to accept it and build that saying, well, some will, some won’t, so what? Next. The other bit is to find out why. A really good practice is to ask your customers, the ones where you don’t convert, “Do you mind if I just ask you why you haven’t used this?” Hopefully they will give you some honest answers that you can then use and you can use to improve, and that’s key to it as well. Accept what’s happening, find out why you’re not winning it and then improve what you’re doing and repeat, and keep doing that process. It will get better and get better and get better. But it’s really key to ask that improvement question, your customers will tell you so much about why you didn’t win business.

So let me share with you now some tactics that you can use. There’s three key tactics I’m going to share with you. The first one is about qualifying your customer. The second one is about asking the right questions. Then the last one I’m going to share with you is about getting permission. So the first one, we’ve touched on this last week with Mike, and if you want to jump back onto YouTube or Facebook or one of the podcasts from last week where we went through about qualifying your customers better, that was the show with Mike Killen. You do need to make sure you qualify those customers. Sometimes it’s about making sure that they’re actually in the right process to buy. Process is not quite the word, but whether they are at the right step to actually buy your product. I’ll give you a [inaudible 00:14:32] example for this.
I’ve done some work, and they’re still a client of mine, they’re a building supply company. We went through their log quote one day and they had something like, it was about £1 million worth of business in [inaudible 00:14:52] quotes. Phenomenal amount, some of these quotes went back 18 months. Now, clearly those things weren’t going to convert. Well, what we found when we’d done the analysis and we spoke to some of the customers and we found out why we weren’t winning the business, invariably is that they were quoting for business themselves. What we found is that we were spending a lot of time or the business was spending a lot of time doing quite detailed quotations for the customer to find out that actually all they really needed was an estimate. They needed something a bit more down and dirty than that.

Actually what we’d done is we changed tact on it. Firstly, we asked the customer at the point of call, “Have you got this business or is this business that you’re trying to win yourself?” We kind of got some qualification questions in there. Then where they said that actually they were quoting themselves, we just gave them an estimated quote rather than spent an hour or so actually building a very detailed quote up because that’s all they actually needed. So there’s ways that you can speed the process up, but still keep in touch with that customer because you’d go back to them. “When is the quote got to be in? When do you think you’re going to win the business?” You can go back to them and find out when it is and then do the follow ups from then.

That brings me nicely onto the … I’m going to touch on number … ask the question, I’ll [inaudible 00:16:21] that in a second. I want to take you through some questions you can ask, but the one thing I’m going to share with you is number three here, is get permission. One of the things, a tactic that I get salespeople to use all the time is about whenever you’re having that conversation with the customer, get permission for the next step. Let me explain how that works, so it’s about getting permission for the next step.

The conversation would go something like this, “Hello, Mrs Jones. If you can’t make a decision, then when would you like to go ahead?” “Well, I’ve got to go and talk to so and so.” “Okay, great. When would be a good time for me then to recontact you, when would be a good time for me to recontact you?” “Okay, next Tuesday.” “If I gave you a call for next Tuesday, would that be okay?”

What you’re doing, you’re getting permission to do the next step. Now, one of the push backs that you’ll get from your sales team is that they don’t like to be pushy. They don’t like to be a nuisance, and they don’t like to feel that they are kind of harassing people in terms of their sales. But if you get permission all the time for the next step, when you then do the next step, you can start that conversation with, “Hello, Mrs Jones. It’s Tuesday afternoon and as promised, I’m phoning you back.” You’re just following up from that previous conversation that you’ve had. Therefore, you’re not pushing. You’re doing everything at the pace that they have allowed you to resume at, so that’s very key.
Let’s move on to some sale closes, and this is kind of this number two, which is about asking the right questions. These doesn’t have to be pushy, these don’t have to be difficult. They can be as simple as, “When would you like to go ahead?” So a part of that sales processes is at the end of it you say, “When would you like to go ahead?”

Another one you can use, “If you’d like to secure that price, I can take a small deposit by card now. What card would you like to use? Can I take your long number?” It’s those kinds of things you can use as part of a close. “What card would you like to pay by?” That’s that kind of question you can ask as well. “Is there any more information you need to make a decision?” The customer says no says yes, then you answer that question. Then the next question, if they have a question back, you answer the question. “Have I answered that question for you? Is there any more information that you need to make a decision?” Again, if they come back with no, then, “Would you like me to dispatch that today?” Or, “Would you like to now go ahead?” It gives you the opportunity now to do that close, because you’ve asked them an open question and you can now close it with a closed question. “Would you like to go ahead?” Or however that looks like according to your business.

The fifth one then is based on what I’ve told you. “You’ve said you wanted to have this delivered by the 30th of June, for us to achieve this, you’ll need your confirmation by next Monday. Are you in a position to confirm that now?” So again, you can use this as a sales tactic, that where you’ve got a deadline for something you can put another deadline in it and say, “Look, I need to know by then, but actually are you in a position to make a decision now?” If they’re not, “Okay, can I phone you on Monday and get a decision from you then, otherwise we won’t hit your deadline.” So you can put, manifests some deadlines in there. Just, if you feel uncomfortable about asking some of those questions, it then feels a little bit more natural.
The last [inaudible 00:20:14] go ahead one then is where you can use that double tactic, in terms of getting permission and also using a sales close. “Would you like to go ahead?” “No, I need to speak to X.” “Okay, when will you be able to make a decision?” They come back with an answer. You say, “Okay, so if I call you on Thursday afternoon,” so it kind of goes, “Would you like to go ahead?” “No, I need to just confirm with my husband, my wife or my business partner before we can just go ahead.” “Okay, so when would you be able to do that?” “I’ll be able to have that conversation with them on Wednesday.” “Great, so if I gave you a call on Thursday morning or Thursday afternoon, we can then wrap all this up.” “Absolutely.” You can kind of see how the conversation goes. So you can kind of put a soft close in there and then get permission for that follow up.

I’ll share some more, I’ve got a whole load of these. I’ll put a few more on again with this recording and I’ll upload with it and I’ll put it onto our website as well, so there are loads more closing questions as well for you. Your action this week really to take away is first of all, to measure, if you don’t measure, you can’t manage. Put some measures in place so you can actually start measuring your sales conversion.

The second one then is to look at your sales processes and review those sales processes. What I’ve shared with you today, are you falling into some of those traps, are you making some of those mistakes? I’ve given you lots of hints and tips about how you can overcome those. Then the last one is, ask the bloody question. Start asking some of those difficult questions and really start closing some of those sales. The fortune is in the followup is one of the mantras I throw out quite a lot. The fortune is in the followup. If you do not follow up, don’t be surprised you don’t get the sales. Keep following up, keep following up, get permission, keep following up.

Remember, only shit happens. You need to make this happen. I share this content every single week. It’s now really down for you to go implement it and make it part of your businesses. Now, if you need any help, of course reach out to me. I’m here to help you in any way, shape I can. I’ve even forgot to mention this week, I don’t know how, but of course all this content is in my free book, how To Fall Back In Love With Your Business: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Rediscovering Your Mojo and Enjoying Every Day by Living Your Dream. Everything I share is in that book. There’s lots of more free content on the website as well, on betterneverstops.global, and you’ve go to free business tools. There’s lots more content on there for you as well.

If you’d like to know how well your business is doing, I’ve put together a health check for business owners. You go onto peckuk.scoreapp.com. There’s a very comprehensive business health check that you can take your business through. Again, off the back of it there’s lots of hints and tips about how you can improve your scores as well, across six very key business areas.

So as always, stay safe, reach out to me, adrian.peck@peckuk. You can also go on to loveyourbusiness.tv. That takes you onto our Better Never Stops website and you can catch up with all our content on there. Next week I’m going to be looking at how to run effective marketing campaigns. I should be joined, I’m just waiting for confirmation, I should be joined by Jake Mason, who is previously involved with Netflix and doing the marketing for Netflix. So he’s going to share lots of great content with you next week, so I look forward to seeing you then. As always, this has been Love Your Business TV. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Please share the content. Subscribe to us. I look forward to seeing you again next week and remember better never stops. I’m Adrian Peck.

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