Jeb Blount

I am ready to launch.

Jeb Blount

Well, let’s step back and let’s talk about probability because to me, sales is all about probability.

For example, let’s just say that you walk into a casino. There was one slot machine that said, “This slot machine pays out 90% of the time.” Another slot machine pays out 30% of the time. Where are you going to spend your time? Where are you going to put your money? You’re going to go to the 90% pay out slot machine. Only a moron would pay the 30% slot machine.

We think about sales. Everything I think about sales is about probability.

Jeb Blount

If I’m bringing a prospect into my funnel, I want to make sure I’ve got a prospect that’s qualified so that the probability of closing that prospect is high.

I want to make sure that I’m targeting prospects that have the highest probability of converting.

When I’m out doing outbound prospecting, I’m looking for prospects that fit into my sell cycle and I want to make sure my sell cycle is set-up in a way that’s going to give me the highest probability of closing a deal.

When you look at it in those terms, there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are not just doing digital sales like selling things online, online courses, and things like that but there’s also a lot of companies out there that do inbound marketing.

What they’re doing is they’re going out using some sort of a content marketing piece and they’re trying to convert prospects or people who hit those pages and the leads that then, their sales team will reach out to and call, and there’s mash ups to that. There’s mash ups of companies.

Jeb Blount

I’ve got a client that I work with right now that has an inbound funnel where they’re trying to convert people into immediate sales. They have an inside sales team that takes calls. So if the people on a shopping cart got a question, they can actually talk to the chat team.

There’s an outbound team that talks to people who came into the funnel, went into the shopping cart or had a question and didn’t finished their transaction. There’s an outside sales team who for their larger prospects, after they’ve identified them, actually go out there and meet them and build relationships with them.

All of these things are in play with this company to improve the probability that the money that they spend and they spend a ton of money on AdWords and Facebook advertising to bring people in. Every dollar spent gets converted and the people coming through the funnel get treated in different ways.

Once you understand that, the next question is, you start looking at your funnel as best practice to ensure sales effectiveness. What do I leverage to get as much juice out of my conversion funnel as possible?

There’s some entrepreneurs who for example will start with the conversion funnel. You guys teach them fantastic stuff. They come. They get educated. They learn how to do this with you and the tools that are coming through the online space right now that allow you to amplify funnel and to build courses and build online products is just getting better and better every day but the problem is there’s a lot of people that basically, they’re reaching out to lots of people. They had people come in and they convert so many.

I’ve always lived by the rule of thirds and the rule of thirds simply says that, a third of the people are probably going to do business with you just because you showed up. You send them an email. They came through your funnel. They hit your page. Some percentage of those people are going to show up.

I just use the rule of thirds because it’s easy but depending on what you’re selling, that conversion percentage can be smaller.

Jeb Blount

There’s another group of people that there’s nothing that you could do. There’s not a thing you could do. You could send the greatest message in the world. You could give the product away for free. They are going to bounce. They’re not going to engage. They’re not going to follow through on your social media post, your advertising, your email that you send out. They’re not going to do any of those things.

Then, there’s about a 3rd of the people that if they hit the page and you talk to them or you give them some additional value, you reach out to them, you have a conversation with them, it’s about a 3rd of those people that will end up buying from you and those are people called “The toss ups.” They’re iffy and they need human touch.

I’ve got a client of mine who was using chat to reach out to these iffy people but they were doing a very poor job of converting these people and moving them to the telephone.

Jeb Blount

You typically do that. Some of that is done through robotics to ensure sales effectiveness. Let’s you have chat box in there. Those are pretty lame and they don’t work very well.

I don’t think most businesses have the capacity to have someone there 24 hours a day. The company I’m talking about is a big business and they don’t have that capacity but what they do know is when most people are coming in. So, that’s predicated this particular client.

Jeb Blount

Two years ago, they were doing zero dollars on chat. Today, they’re doing a million dollars a month on chat. Just to give you an idea of the numbers. They’re massive numbers.

The difference was they started manning chat when they knew most people will be coming through. They spent a lot of money on AdWords. So a lot of AdWords spends are going out. So they’re managing their online advertising buys to get people to their page, and when people hit the page, the chat box pops-up. So the person has the ability to come in and initiate the chat. But where they’re making their money is on proactive chat.

What that means is that the person is there looking. They’re engaged. There’s some piece of content. There’s something they’re looking for. They got captured in some advertising and is the nuance. This is a little bit of nuance of learning how to engage the customer on the page, the prospect on the page so that you don’t push them back off the page, so that they stay on.

So, you ask them a provocative question. You do something and then you convert that into a phone call and some of them stay on chat. Some of those conversations remain on chat and they end up buying from that chat messaging.

What we coach people to do is use proactive chat. What I mean by proactive chat is you’re initiating a chat. The person is on your page and you’re initiating the chat. You do that and then, you got to get the person to turn around.

Let me give you one other way you can do that so that you can be there. We use a tool called, “Tellwise” and you can learn more about it at tellwise.com. Conrad and his team that run this company do a great job. What they do is they offer a way to send emails. Now, the emails are effectively one to one emails. Not like a MailChimp campaign where you blast out to tons of people. You’ve set-up a campaign. You send short spurts of emails and then, you can either link a webpage into the email or you can link a document into the email or something that you’re adding value to them.

Jeb Blount

Let’s say that I was offering a course and so, I had a free guide that went along with the course. What Tellwise does is when you add that particular resource, they set that up as a page and that page begins a webpage and then, when the person comes in, they get your email. Your email has to be interesting. It has to get open. It has to convert them to take action. When they click on that, then they start looking at the resource.

What we typically do is create some sort of a PowerPoint document that has more than 3 pages that allows them to browse through that. While they’re browsing, and this is the nuance, now, we’re waiting for them to come in and as they come in, we’re reaching out and we are chatting with them. We have to give them just enough time on the page. Once we get them on the page and we give them time, then we ask them a provocative question.

Again, our emails are targeted so we know the people that are there. We ask them a question and that allows us to get them on the telephone. If we get them on the telephone, our shot at converting them is pretty high. I’ll give you a good number on that.

If we send out an email, we do 2 things.

1. We send email blasts.
2. We look at open rates.

As soon as someone opens their email, we call them. When we call them, we have about a 34% higher probability of converting them into the sale than if it was just email alone.

Jeb Blount

Well, we know a lot of the phone numbers. I’m a little bit bigger than most companies but I’ve got all kinds of tools that I use to grab data and scrub phone numbers, and because a lot of my inbound market provided me phone numbers.

So if for example, we did a webinar and we had 5200 people show up for the webinar. We ask for a phone number. So we required that to come to the webinar. Now, the webinar was really high value. We also got some additional demographic information that was really important for us to go back out and target those folks.

During the webinar, we offer them a link to a free course that we had on one of our sites, fanaticalprospecting.com. As they hit that site, then we were able to see that they were there looking around.

There’s a tool called Zopim that you can use. We’re able to use that tool that sees people that were on there and when they went to the 2nd page, we engage them. They had just a conversation with us. So they knew who we were but it was that engagement and then the people that we got on the telephone instead of buying a $20 course, we were up-selling them into $3,000 coaching programs, which are high value.

Jeb Blount

Absolutely.

I’ve got an inside sales team that when we get someone’s phone number, we’re reaching out and we’re calling them and sometimes, we don’t have a phone number. So what we’ll do is we’ll use email campaigns, webinars, online courses, and events. We’re doing a lot of that at Atlanta. We’ll use all of those things to continue to get better and better data on people.

These days, they are some data engines. If you got the money, there are amazing data engines. For example, our inbound marketing hub is HubSpot. So we’ve got plug-ins on HubSpot.

So if someone comes in through one of our web forms, they hit HubSpot. We connect that to some other data services that are able to give us information including phone number and feel entitle in those types of things for that person.

It’s not a 100%. It’s not going to work all the time with every single prospect but it allows us to continue to scrub our data so our data gets better and better. That way we’re able to combine both inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Our outbound prospecting and sales calls is really powerful.

Jeb Blount

We talked about proactive chat.

So, on Zopim and Tellwise, you can get online and take a look them.

Jeb Blount

So when you’re having people to come into your funnel and they hit a page, what proactive chat does is you are reaching out to the prospect and getting them to engage with you, and there’s a couple of things that you want to do.

You want to be patient to ensure sales effectiveness. Give them a second to be on the site. Don’t just jump in their face. You want to use the soft approach. You’re not using a selling approach. You’re trying to pull them in and you’re trying to hook them to get them to engage.

The key is 2 things.

1. You have to ask provocative question that make them think and create curiosity.
2. Humanize the experience in order to improve sales effectiveness.

What you say and how you say it in a particular moment has got to be in a format that makes them see you as a real human being and want to engage and chat with you.

Once they start having a conversation with you, it’s really natural. Say, “I think it might probably makes sense for us to hop on the telephone. What’s the best number to reach you?” Unhook your chat. You leave that up and you pick up the phone and you give them a call. Once you get them online, what you’ll find is that you’re not only just going to build to convert people into whatever you’re selling in the moment.

What we have found is that the dollar volume that we’re able to convert them into programs that we have that are a little more complex and require someone to actually explain the value of the program that are sells in those programs go up exponentially when we get people on telephone. So, our talk campaign becomes more profitable.

Jeb Blount

Thank you. I appreciate it.