The Salesman.com Podcast

Ask a brand-new sales rep what the most important skill is and you know what he’ll say? “Closing.” That’s what we always hear, right? But ask a 20-year vet who’s seen a thing or two and they’ll tell you it isn’t the closing. It’s the prospecting. As Founder of Tenbound David Delany told me – “If you’re able to do your own prospecting, you'll never starve.” But I’d even take it one step further—nail down how to prospect like a pro, and you’ll live like a king. Now prospecting is one of the most valuable skills you can learn in your entire sales career. As Cardone Enterprises VP of Sales Jarrod Glandt shared –  “I would rather have a salesperson that could get in the door and create an opportunity in the first place, than somebody who sucks on the front side of it but is average at the end.” Which is why we created the Sales Prospect List Building Framework. This framework is just four steps. And if you want to take a deeper dive into the strategies and techniques we’re talking about here, I suggest you head over to the link in the video notes below to read the full guide. Alright with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s jump into the framework. 1. Refine Your ICP Now step one is refining your ICP or ideal customer persona. These are essentially your perfect buyers. And they’re the prospects you want to be focusing on the most. Here are some qualities to look for when trying to identify your ICP: Are easiest to close Have the pain point you’re solving Understand your product’s value Offer the fewest objections Are urgently ready to buy All of these attributes up to 1) a shorter sales cycle, 2) higher profit margins, and 3) an easier, less stressful sales process for—that’s right—you. Now, identifying your ICP takes a bit of work. But you can start by looking at past customers with the shortest contact-to-sale cycle. From there, you can bring in more data points by considering how large the sale is, whether they’ve become repeat buyers, and if they provided a glowing testimonial or referral. For an even more in-depth dive into defining your ICP, be sure to check out our Value Proposition Design Framework. It’s got an entire step dedicated specifically to finding your perfect buyer. Okay so once you’ve got about 20 to 40 past customers, it’s time to figure out what they have in common. To do that, you’re going to list out seven components for each: Job Title Industry Location Company Size Current Goals Main Pain Points Previous Solution A lot of this info you can get with a bit of online research. But some—like previous solutions, main pain points, and current goals—may require an actual phone call. Once you have that info for everyone, you’ll need to cross reference and look for similarities between your perfect buyers. What criteria do they have in common? What are some general trends you see among the majority of them? Details don’t have to align perfectly here. But the closer the match, the easier step two will be. 2. Create Your Test Audience With your ICP outline detailed, now it’s time to create your test audience. Essentially, you want to build a small list of prospects that match your ICP and then validate that list by entering them into your sales cadence. Depending on the success rate of your outreach, you can then scale up your audience or go back to the drawing board and refine your ICP to get better results. So the question is, how do you build that list? And the answer is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a fantastic sales tool I can personally vouch for. I use it myself. This tool lets you plug in details on prospects and then it populates a whole list of potential customers based on that list. It’s like a super advanced prospecting search tool. AND it’s on the biggest professional network in the world, so you’ll never run out of leads. All you have to do is plug in the ICP outline you just created into the search parameters. And then hit ENTER. That’s all there is to it. For new and unvalidated ICPs, start with building an audience of around 40 prospects. For validated ICPs, you can start off strong with 150. ProTip: Start Off Small But protip here—remember to start small with your audience. The entire goal of this exercise is to test quickly, document the results, and refine your ICP or cadence accordingly. The bigger the audience, the longer the whole process will take. Don’t worry, once you hit a solid success rate you can take off. But not yet. 3. “Test” Your Test Audience Alright now step three is all about “testing” your test audience. Here’s where you run your list through your cadences and check out the results. Nothing too special here, just start from the top and work your way down. But you do want to be sure you’re at least working off of a proven framework. Our Cold Outreach Sales Cadence Framework is a great foundation to start from if you don’t have a cadence built out already. Best of all, it’s even got three templates you can basically copy and start using yourself. You can take even more guesswork out of the equation by incorporating the messaging from our Cold Email, Cold Calling, and Social Selling Frameworks too. After you’ve run through your list and recorded your success rate, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate. What percent of your audience were you able to move on to the next step? If the success rate (e.g., meetings booked divided by your audience size) was less than 5%, then there’s an issue with either your ICP or the cadence. For example, if you run 40 people through your cadence, you need to book more than two meetings for it to count as a success. Once you’ve run through your entire test list, it’s time to decide… 4. Scale or Change If you’re below a 5% success rate, the answer’s simple—change. Your ICP or cadence isn’t performing as well as it should. So you need to head back to the drawing board. What other similarities did your ideal clients have that you didn’t test? You should also bring those new prospects who did respond to your cadence into your evaluation. What kinds of job titles, industries, etc. describe them? Once you come up with a new hypothesis, jump right back on that horse, test again, and keep iterating until you hit at least 5%. Once you hit 5, you can start scaling your Sales Navigator audience up and build out a monster list in no time. But just a word to the wise, you should keep testing and improving, even after hitting a 5% rate. With a bit of refining and tweaking, you can easily turn that into a 20% success rate. All it takes is finding new similarities between those who responded and adding those details to your ICP. And then, start the process over again! Summary So there you have it—four steps to building a sales prospecting list that’ll keep you bustling with business for the rest of your career.

Hitting quota, buying that dream Porsche, taking the family to Disney Land. These are all noble financial goals for salespeople but they’re all dumb. In this video I’m going to explain the only financial goal that you should have and if you’re watching this video right now, you’re probably further away from it than you think. The only thing you should be aiming for in your sales career is financial freedom. Otherwise known as early retirement. Why Would I Want To Retire Early? Why?:  Because working in sales will kill your soul. It’s emotionally draining. But… It’s the fastest way to make insane amounts of money legally and ethically. It’s the safest way to make money (no risk of starting a business or investing capital). You’re in control of your own success. Assumption?: This works on the assumption that you actually want to retire early. If most people believed it was possible, most people would aim for it. Most people believe the lie that you have to work until you’re 65 before it’s possible to retire. This isn’t true. Conclusion?:  Sales is a great medium term (5-10 years) career to acquire significant wealth to retire early on. It’s probably not the most fulfilling longer term (11-30 years) career. It’s a trade off:  Work hard now so that your future self can live the life that you dream of living now. How Do I Retire Early? First off let's define what early retirement is so that we know what we’re aiming for. Defined: When your assets generate more income each month than you spend. Two ways to get there: Reduce costs (need less money from assets to live on) Increase income (can buy more assets to increase income) So with the definition and the basic steps to retire early, lets get practical. Steps To Retirement From a Sales Role Calculate your number What is your ideal monthly retirement income? What level of risk are you willing to tolerate with your assets? How likely are you to continue generating income in your retirement? How much/many assets do you need to throw off your ideal monthly income? Calculate the retirement date Very specifically, when do you want to hand in your notice in your sales job? Reverse engineer your required income Take the total asset price, divide by the number of years and then months. The tough questions Are you capable of generating an amount of value in your market that will warrant the market giving you enough commission to acquire the retirement assets? Does the sales role you have right now have the scope to pay out that level of commissions? Do you have the balls to stick to the plan and make this happen over the medium term (5-10 years)?

Few things are as foundationally important to sales success as your value proposition statement. In just one sentence, it captures who your buyers are, what problems they’re facing, how your product solves that problem, and so so much more. And when constructed properly, it should drive nearly every action and strategy of a business. But when your value proposition is off, well that can spell huge problems for attracting the right buyers for what you’re selling. Now before we get into the Value Proposition Design Framework, I want to point out that we’re going to be doing a brief overview. For those who want to dive deeper into each of these steps, I suggest heading over to Salesman.org. There you can find an article that talks about each step in-depth. Alright with that said, let’s dig in. 1. Identify Your Value (The Value Diagram) So step one of designing your value proposition is to identify your value. In the framework, we call this filling out The Value Diagram. And it’s got three sections: Your Products Perk Producers Strain Reducers Your job is to fill out these three sections. You can start by listing out all the products or services you offer. Try to be thorough here. Because the next steps are to fill out the perk producers and strain reducers of each. What are the benefits your products add to your buyers’ lives? Do they outperform your competitor? Do they lead to a positive social consequence like boosting their reputation? Do they create cost savings? Write those down in the perk producers section. And how do these products eliminate hardships your buyers go through? Do they fix frustrating solutions? Eliminate risk? Limit or get rid of common mistakes buyers make? List them out in the strain reducers section. 2. Find Your Ideal Buyer (The Buyer Breakdown) Finding your ideal buyer, a.k.a. the Buyer Breakdown. Just like in the previous section, this section consists of three steps: Your Buyer’s Jobs Perks Strains And yep, that means we’re listing out each. First, what are the jobs your buyers perform? The functional jobs (like work duties), social jobs (like proving they’re competent and worthy of respect) and emotional jobs (like feeling accomplished). Next we’re listing out the perks—the benefits your buyers want to see in your product. There are four types of perks to consider here: required perks, expected perks, desired perks, and unexpected perks. Be sure to head over to Salesman.org to read the article if you want to learn more about each. And last, what are the strains your buyer’s facing? These are the pain points of your existing customer profile. What annoys them before, during, and after they’re trying to get a job done? What are the risks that keep them from working as efficiently as they could? 3. Find the Fit Now that you’ve got both your Value Diagram and your Buyer Breakdown filled out, we’re going to do some cross-referencing between each. All you have to do here is determine which jobs, strains, and perks in the Buyer Breakdown the strain reducers and perk producers on the Value Diagram address. Go through each job, strain, and perk one by one, placing a checkmark next to the ones that fit. At the end, simply remove the ones that don’t have a checkmark. After that, all that’s left is crafting your value proposition statement based on which elements are highest on the list of importance. 4. Create Your Value Proposition Statement So, how do you create your value proposition statement? Simple, you plug in the info you’ve just written down into this template: So remember all the jobs, perks, and strains you matched before? Simply fill them into this template. So for me at Salesman.org, it might look like this: Our Selling Made Simple Academy (product) helps sales teams (buyer) who want to achieve higher close rates (buyer job) by teaching effective sales strategies (verb, perks) and simplifying the sales process (verb, strains) unlike traditional sales training programs (competition value prop).  See how that works? Now the trick here is to be flexible. Because after you’ve plugged all your info in, you still need to… 5. Verify Your Value Proposition To settle on a compelling value proposition, you’ll need to test whether it resonates with your buyers. And that means you need to: Generate a hypothesis about your ideal buyer and what they value Create a value proposition based on that hypothesis Design experiments to verify the effectiveness of your value proposition Run and collect results from your experiments Reevaluate and tweak the components of your value proposition based on the results Repeat the cycle There are plenty of ways you can test your value proposition, including: Ad and link tracking Split testing emails Split testing landing pages Buyer interviews Buyer behavior data analysis Crowdfunding In the end, just be sure you’re continually re-evaluation and iterating on what you learned along the way. Remember, this is a process, not a one-time effort!