Why You Don’t Have More Sales Appointments and What to Do About It
Keep Your Salespeople Busy Selling
Fix This ONE THING
To Get More Meetings and Sales
How To Get More Meetings and Sales
In an ideal world your salespeople would be in front of – or on the phone with – potential buyers all day long; doing discovery, giving tailored pitches, and signing new clients.
And it’s the job of a sales leader (manager, business owner, etc.) to remove all the friction from the lives of salespeople that might interfere with realizing that picture perfect reality, right?
After all that’s whole reason you have a business development team (BDRs or SDRs) generating leads, qualifying opportunities, and then setting meetings for your salespeople. Is it not?
So why are your salespeople forced to waste time creating their own opportunities?
There is a simple answer to that question…
Your business development team isn’t generating enough opportunities to keep your salespeople busy.
And why aren’t your salespeople getting the second, third, forth, or whatever meeting they need to actually close new clients?
There is a simple answer to the question too…
Your reps aren’t getting the buy-in they need to make prospects as excited about advancing the deal as they are to earn a commission.
Sure – your team does their research, executes the prospecting and follow-up cadences you’ve given them, and prospects are even expressing interest in a meeting with one of your account executives but their busy. Your reps continue to follow-up, but the prospects keep kicking the can down the street, a meeting never gets schedule, and that interested prospect eventually cycles out of your funnel.
As a sales leader that’s the most frustrating thing in the world!
Making connections is great, but it’s not the ball game. Advancing prospects toward a meeting and then a sales is what really matters. So how do we do that more often?
Sales trainers and authors have devoted a great deal of time to figuring out some sort of hack to fix this very problem. As it turns out, if prospects are expressing interest but not turning into appointments, your problem might be a lack of micro-commitments.
Having your team focus on winning more micro-commitments on their way toward scheduling meetings can virtually guarantee a stronger conversion of leads into appointment, and dramatically shorten the time it takes to close new business.
What are Micro-Commitments?
Mark Hunter, The Sales Hunter written on his blog and in his book, High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results, about the useful qualities and importance of micro-commitments in the journey to closing a sales.
He says the micro-commitment strategy is easy to use, and effective for those clients who are a bit more difficult to engage with or advance through your pipeline.
“A micro-commitment might be as small as confirming a time for the next meeting or it could be more extensive by getting their feedback on a report,” Mark said.
In the case of an SDR, whose job is simply to set qualified meetings for a sales rep, a micro-commitment might be as simple as having the prospect suggest the date of the next follow-up. In doing so the prospect becomes involved in making the decisions and emotionally tied to the process.
Engage More Leads
With Micro-Commitments
“A micro-commitment might be as small as confirming a time for the next meeting or it could be more extensive by getting their feedback on a report.”
– Mark Hunter (The Sales Hunter)
Micro-Commitments in Sales Prospecting
Mark also pointed out one of his own strategies in his article, “Closing Using Micro Commitments.” If a member of your SDR team is attempting to schedule time with a client who is difficult to engage or it’s been hard to get them fired up about your product or service, have your rep give them a call or send them an email asking for the prospects thoughts and opinion on something. It could be in reference to an article or video that you think would be intriguing for them.
People are naturally more open to sharing their opinion with than they are to the idea of being sold something. If it’s a task as simple as sharing a thought, without the obvious threat of sales pitch, chances are you’ll get a response. Especially if you’ve crafted your question in such a way that sharing that thought or option does required a significant amount of energy on the prospect’s end.
Binary questions that allow for Yes/No answers are terrible questions during the discovery phase of the sales process, but they make great engagement trip-wires. Getting prospects to engage is usually the thoroughest part, once they’re talking to you it should be significantly easier to keep them talking.
Start stacking micro-commitments and your conversations might never end, which isn’t usually a bad thing.
SDRs need to relate to their prospects. They need to show the potential client they’re both on the same level and that humanizes the correspondence. If not, the prospect might just see your team/business as one giant, annoying sales pitch machine.
“The beauty of the email or telephone call asking for their input is I can immediately use their response to then set up a scheduled time to meet or at least talk on the phone. What I’ve done is gained another micro-commitment by asking for their time to meet,” Mark said.
Pre-scheduled meetings or calls are micro-commitments themselves. They are the stepping stones that lead up to the commitment to buy. Why not have your team use smaller micro-commitments to win the meeting?
Micro-commitments win micro-commitments. If your salespeople can’t set the meeting their after, don’t let them settle until they get some level commitment from a prospect. When they start getting bigger commission checks they’ll thank you.
Close More Complex Sales
Using Micro-Commitments
“Every day you’ve got to put things in the pipeline. Then, step number 2 is to move things through that pipeline.”
– Jeb Blount
Micro-Commitments in Closing Complex Sales
Sales trainer, Jeb Blount posted a video on his blog called “3 Things Salespeople Must Do” where he sat down with Jennifer Gluckow from Sales in a New York Minute to chat about prospecting and asking for the next step in the process of making a sale or closing a deal.
He also wrote about it in his bestselling book, Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling.
Jeb is famous for his practical approach to ensuring healthy outbound sales activity, but even he admits that adding new life to your pipeline is not the only part of the a winning sales equation.
When Jeb’s team gets to work they put away their laptops and social media. They then focus all of their attention for 60 full minutes on what he calls a “power hour” of phone prospecting. Later in the day they’ll have another block where they prospect solely on social media, and another one for email. That way they are reaching a bunch of audiences from all different platforms.
“Every day you’ve got to put things in the pipeline. Then, step number 2 is to move things through that pipeline,” says Jeb.
The reason why things aren’t moving through the pipeline for some businesses is because their salespeople aren’t constantly asking for the next step. That is why the micro-commitment strategy is so beneficial.
Sales professionals aren’t going to convert every prospect into an appointment and every meeting in to a sale. Especially on the first attempt. That’s why following up is so important. By asking the prospect how to proceed however – asking them what they think should happen next – your follow-up can be significantly more efficient and effective in advancing deals.
Jeb makes an excellent point about micro-commitments in his conversation with Jennifer Gluckow. His point is that after all of the micro-commitments, if done properly, closing the deal or signing the contract will seem like something simple for the client. By that time, they’ll have no more questions or concerns.
Commitments You MUST Have in Order to Move Forward With a Client
After your rep has had a moment with the client, held a conversation about something not related to the deal they’re trying to make, and they’ve scheduled their meeting, they need to start thinking about the next level of commitment that will be need to close the business.
Buying decisions can be daunting. The bigger the price tag the more intimidating it can be for a prospect to buy.
By breaking that decision into bite-size pieces however – by stacking micro-commitments over a series conversations with a prospect – your team will build a degree of know, like, and trust that makes buying from your company the only choice a prospect feels comfortable with.
Author and blogger Anthony Innarino created a list of the top ten necessary commitments that sales professionals need to get from clients in order to close a deal.
Commitments Necessary to Closing Sales:
- Time
- Exploration/Discovery
- Change
- Collaboration
- Consensus
- Investment
- Review
- Compromise/Resolution
- Decisions
- Execution
Now, as a sales leader you can’t expect your newest sales talent to be familiar with these techniques right off the bat. The idea of winning micro-commitments on the way to winning a sales should be a part of your on-boarding program.
Of course, some of these steps aren’t always going to be necessary with every prospect. It will depend on the client. Some clients might already feels comfortable spending more time on a project.
The idea of securing micro-commitments is about buyer-centric selling. It’s about slowing the process down to a rate in which the prospect is still comfortable. Move too fast and they’ll feel like their being manipulated, but at the same time you want to keep deals moving.
You don’t want your team to allow deals to linger without a clear next-steps. That’s how deals stall in your pipeline. Remember that when you’re training representatives.
Close More Sales
With Micro-Commitments
From writing about sales for StartInPhx, I’ve noticed that the best thing to teach your sales team is that building relationships with clients is very similar to developing personal relationships. Or at least they should be.
Thought and effort are crucial to success when it comes to developing business relationships. Making these micro-commitments and following through with them is going to establish trust with business connections, just as it would if it were a commitment you made to anyone else. When there’s trust, clients are more apt to pay for things.
Not only does the concept and strategy of micro-commitments help salespeople close the deals currently in their pipelines, but a good client experience is something they’ll want to mention to other people who might consider buying from you too. If buyers feel like they’ve been treated well and you have a mutual trust build upon all those mini-deals you’ve made, you could gain a great deal of referrals as well.
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About the Author: Carly Trombley is a writer and social media strategist living in Vermont with big dreams of moving to a more metropolitan area. She is a recent college graduate who loves photography/videography and the impact that they have on society. Follow her on Instagram or connect on LinkedIn to learn more.
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