Benjamin Dennehy is the UK's most hated sales trainer. I came first across this guy on the Mike Winnet podcast / YouTube channel (who indecently puts out the funniest take-downs of online 'success' scammers). He is a very down-to-earth sales trainer with a unique perspective on how to be the best salesperson you can.
I have put together some key highlights from his interview with Sam Dunning, which I recommend you also watch.
Once we get a lead through any means, website / LinkedIn / email, we can sometimes get stuck in an endless cycle of leaving messages or emails, trying to arrange a meeting. Even if we have had our first interaction we sometimes struggle to move the prospect further along our pipeline towards a sale.
It would be great if we had a step-by-step process that we could use to move prospects along the pipeline.
Before you contact an inbound lead look into the mirror and tell yourself 'do not get attached you loser'.
When we finally get an inbound lead, and we often get those at great expense, we get so excited about the opportunity that we are convinced the prospect actually wants what we have to sell. But Ben explains that this is total rubbish and that most leads come from people who are intellectually curious and just exploring. Tire kickers in other words.
Most leads want to have a quick chat, which is code for 'I want to steal as much information from you as I can, for free, under the guise of having some interest in working with you.' 85% of leads you get are rubbish so your job is to try and disqualify them as a prospect as quickly as possible, and stop them from wasting your time.
Don't get excited and stick them straight into your pipeline, try and disqualify first.
As soon as we get the prospect on the phone we want to find out quickly what category they fall into. Are they just intellectually curious and want to pick your brain for free, or are they serious and ready to move forward? We want to find this out as soon as possible, so we do not have to waste our time.
Let's assume the conversation goes something like this:
We know now that the prospect is buying purely on price, which is fine. If they don't answer this question directly it just means the prospect hasn't though things through enough. Ben tells us we need to take control of the conversation by saying something like:
People will usually agree to these reasonable steps as it gives them an out if the conversation doesn't go their way. Our job is to control the process. We do not need to find out how to sell to the customer, or job is to teach the customer how to buy from us. They are the one with the problem, they contacted us.
It is our job to tell the prospect what the next step in the process is, and if you do not know that, you are an idiot .
The next step should either be a 'no', in which case we can end the contact. Or a 'yes', in which case we need to get a commitment from the prospect on whatever the next step is. Ben actually charges $100 for a quote, so in his pipeline the next step is paying some money for a deeper conversation, and if the client is not willing to pay then he has disqualified them. If the client is willing to pay for the quote then 85% of prospects that get a quote go ahead with the sale.
By getting the client to commit to the next step we are quickly going to see if they're serious or if they are a time-waster. Either way we are qualifying them as a lead.
If we do not get a 'no' we might spend the next three months chasing someone trying to keep the pipeline going even though we know deep down it is a 'no'.
The main purpose of this section is to make the prospect believe that you know more about their problem and the solution than they do. That's it.
Through this process we will discover whether they do or don't have a problem we can solve. Paint them a picture.
We need to know where the prospect wants to go and what they want to get out of this interaction. This kind of questioning will get the prospect talking and hopefully tell us what the trigger event is. Why have they now decided they want to solve this problem. If it is compelling and powerful enough then we know they're serious.
Ben uses this tactic to find out if there's any emotion behind the interest, or if it just an intellectual exercise. If they're just fishing for information Ben can decide at this stage that they're not ready to move forward and may actually say:
At which stage they might say 'you are right' and then we can end the conversation or they'll say 'no, I am ready' in which case we have gotten more buy-in, and they are more committed to moving forward.
If you have the enviable position of getting a lot of inbound leads then you may be in the position where you're spending all day responding to these requests, 95% of which are garbage. A simple solution that Ben suggests is to start charging a small amount for a phone call / follow up. This will get rid of all those prospects that aren't serious and you can spend good quality time with those that are left.
This is obviously an edge case and requires that you've got lots of inbound leads and that your product is priced high enough that a small introductory fee is trivial.
Having your first conversation end with a question from the prospect like 'Can you send me a quote?', instead of a more concrete agreement on the next step, is a bad sign. What this demonstrates is that they just want your quote, they are using you for information. This is a key indicator of a tyre kicker.
If a prospect wants a quote then what they're going to do is compare your quote against all the others and they'll pick the lowest one. So you have to decide whether you want to play that game.
Am I going to get involved in a beauty parade in which the lowest [price] is going to win?
Ben states 'If I know the deciding factor is going to be price, and I know I'm not the cheapest then I am not going to participate'. This has the paradoxical result of sometimes getting the prospect more interested in what Ben is selling.
Certainty is your friend in sales. It just means you have to do more prospecting, the number one things salespeople hate doing.
Ben likes to ask a prospect simple questions so that he can understand exactly what problems they might be having that they themselves do not know they have. Let's look at an example:
What Ben is doing here is getting the client to paint the picture of their problems. At the beginning we only know that they want a new website, but that could be for any number of reasons. By asking them to elaborate on their problems we know that it is not a new website they need exactly but perhaps better search engine optimization (SEO), better branding and better sales funnels.
By asking these questions we have now narrowed in that the prospect has at least three specific problems that they need solved. Your job is to get the client talking about their problems and to see where products that you sell can help them.
We need to get the prospect to tell us why they are in pain and that they do not know how to fix it. It is at this point that we can offer solutions.
In sales we need to know exactly the sort of questions to ask to find out all of a prospects pain points
We also need to find out exactly when and how much the prospect is willing to spend on a solution. And do not accept wishy-washy answers by asking direct and probing questions.
So at the end of this interaction we should have answers to the following questions
Your job is to challenge the prospect to get the information you want, and to either disqualify them or get them to the state you want them in.
Prospects think nothing of using you, they think nothing of taking all of your knowledge and information and using it to get a better deal from someone else.
Your job is not to get drawn into the game of desperately fighting for your prospects love and attention. Disqualify them, or get them to commit.
You will get a lot of 'no's with certainty. Salespeople generally don't like 'no's with certainty they like 'think it over' with hope.
Treat yourself as someone who is worth more than how prospects normally treat you. You have skills and a product which can solve serious problems that prospects have. You do not need to justify your existence to the prospect, the prospect has come to you, so it is your job to qualify the prospect and see if they are worth working with.
You are not [on a call] to impress [them]. You are not a dancing monkey.
Sales is about controlling the process. You have to remember that the person with the solution makes the rules, not the person with the money.
I've had a fun 'down the rabbit hole' experience with Ben on his various podcast appearances. Sam Dunning does a great job at asking the right questions on this topic, so I stress again that you should check out the original YouTube video.
I have failed miserably in sales in the past, and I wish I had access to Ben's insights while I was in that role. If you've got some further thoughts or insights you'd like to discuss with me shoot me a DM on twitter.