Jim Brown

I’m ready to launch. Let’s do this.

Jim Brown

First off, I don’t know that sales is the answer to everything, but sales is the answer to everything in business. Sales cure all.

Sales is the answer to everything in business.

I think the number one thing people have to do to get over that mental hurdle is to realize that everything you’re doing every single day is sales in some capacity. Whether it’s selling your wife on where you’re going to go to dinner that night, whether it’s selling a colleague about a project that you’re going to be working on, or selling your product or service to a prospect to get them to buy from you.

Jim Brown

Everything we’re doing is selling, and you have to get over that if you’re going to succeed in the world of entrepreneurship and business.

Jim Brown

Before we even get started with the selling process steps, the first thing we have to do is to have a goal.

I think too often, we just set out on a journey, and we have no idea where we’re going.

Let’s say I live in Indiana. If I was going to Boston, Kamala, I could get there many different ways. I could get there by boat, by walking, by driving, or by flying. I could arrive there by any mechanism.

Jim Brown

But, if I don’t know that destination, it’s hard for me to even start to plot my route. For illustrative purposes today, I’m going to say our goal is to do a hundred thousand dollars in sales over the next year.

The very first thing we have to do is just set that goal. But now, we’re sitting here, we’re at zero today, and we want to get to a hundred thousand dollars.

The four selling process steps that I put in play walks you through each of the individual steps it takes you to get there. I’m going to go through this, but I want you to ask questions as soon as you go.

We have that goal of $100,000 in sales over the next year, which may seem like a daunting number, but how do we get there?

Jim Brown

The first thing we have to do is look at what our average contract value is.

When we make a sale on average, what is the value of that sale? Just for round numbers and easy math as we walk through this because I know as you listen, it’s hard to hear and compute numbers, but we’re going to say our average contract is $5,000.

Now, the four-step process that we’re going to look at is prospects, discovery calls, proposals, and closed deals.

Jim Brown

If we want to get $100,000 in sales at a $5,000 average contract value, very simply put, we have to have 20 deals that we close over the course of the year. That may still seem daunting and like a significant number. How do we go from 0 to 20 closed deals?

What I need you to start to think about is what the conversion rate is that you’re going to have. How many proposals do you need to put out there to close one deal?

Jim Brown

Again, for math sake, we’re going to say it’s 50%. So for every two proposals we put out there, we’re going to get one sale at that $5,000 average contract value. To have 20 of them over the course of the entire year, we’re going to need 40 proposals put out there.

You might say, “How do we get those proposals out there?” How do we get 40 different proposals? Well, you have to have discovery calls. You have to run through a questioning process with your prospects. Again, I’m going to use the number of 33% here to say that 33% of our discovery calls will turn into proposals, and then, we’ll close 50% of this.

Jim Brown

If that 33% holds true, to get 40 proposals, we have to have 120 different discovery calls, and you can see, we’re starting to get up to significant numbers again. How do we get the discovery calls? We have to start prospecting.

Again, the rule of thumb just to start out with over 10% conversion rate from the prospect. Prospecting activity could be cold call, cold outreach, social selling, inbounding, or whatever. I’m going to have discovery calls with one out of every ten prospects that I reach out to.

Jim Brown

If I want to do 120 discovery calls over the course of a year, I need to do 12,000 prospecting activities. Now we’re up to a significant number again. It’s like “Where do I find 12,000 hundred prospects?” Fortunately, this is where the math starts to get easy.

There are 12 months in the year. So now we’re down to having to do 100 prospecting activities over the course of a month. There are four weeks inside of that month. Now, we’re down to having to only to do 25 activities inside of a week. Well, there are five days inside of that week, and now, we’re down to five.

If your average contract value is $5,000 and you need to do 20 to get to $100,000, you only need to do five prospecting activities every single day.

If your numbers hold true, you’re going to get to that number. That’s the quick and easy look at my four selling process steps.

Jim Brown

But realize that’s at the proposal stage of the selling process steps.

So I’ve already eliminated a lot of people before I even get to the proposal stage because I’m only converting from the discovery to proposal 33% of those.

Jim Brown

Those are the four selling process steps that we just laid out.

Jim Brown

So now, if we break down each one from a prospecting standpoint, I want you to look at your target audience.

Who are the people you typically sell to? What are the characteristics that make them up? Where can you find more of them in a database?

That could be the size of their business. It could be the profile of the type of industry they’re in. It could be the type of services that they buy on a regular basis. It could be how they purchase complementary services.

Jim Brown

I want to look from a prospecting standpoint where those people can be found, and how I get in contact with them. Is it online, via phone, or email? Then I just start making the plan to go through that activity. Prospecting is the first step of that process.

Jim Brown

As we go over now to discovery, what I want to do in discovery as the second step, I want to start to lay out all the features and benefits of the product that I have. I need to know what those are. However, I want to throw them out the window because they don’t matter.

Jim Brown

I need to list those out, and then what I want to do is I want to figure out the questions that I need to ask that reveal the pain, that align with how that feature and benefit could uniquely solve the pain they have.

Jim Brown

It’s entirely my belief that sales is not selling because you can’t convince anyone they need to buy something. They have to realize they want it, and they do that by you, exploring the pains they have and revealing to themselves the opportunity they have.

Stage two of the selling process steps is discovery. It’s how to run that discovery call.

Jim Brown

I’m a big fan of the phone.

Jim Brown

I’m a big fan of cold calling. I think it’s a lost art, and I think that the phone does not ring as much you would think it would on the buyer’s’ end.

Here’s the thing. I don’t know how old you guys are. I’m 35, but I can tell you, I grew up with a phone in my household. I still remember making calls and what not.

This next generation of business professionals that are now graduated from college did not grow up on the phone. They grew up with a phone on their hand, but that phone was used not ever for making calls. It was used for Snapchat, Facebook, and all the different types of text messaging, but they didn’t grow up with a phone.

Eventually, we have to get those people who are now the ones creating these businesses to realize that who they’re calling on, the decision-makers now, these large organizations, they grew up with the phone. They want to talk to human beings on it.

Kamala, I’m a big fan of still picking up the phone and cold calling.

Jim Brown

The third step is that proposal piece, and this proposal could mean anything. I don’t say you will write a 20-page document. It could be doing a demo. It could be doing a pilot. I could be writing a two or three-page contract.

Jim Brown

The proposal stage is your presentation to fulfill the gap between where a prospect is and where they want to be.

In my opinion, it’s the only way you can get somebody to move and to budge because you got to be answering yourself in that gap fulfillment is “Why do the change?” “Why us?” meaning “Why you and why now?”

Again, that gap fulfillment stage whether you call it presentation, demo, proposal, whatever, you need to be able to answer those questions. That’s how you get someone to reveal to themselves there’s a better world out there if I just come and work with you on what it is you’re trying to accomplish.

Jim Brown

That’s the closed one. That’s when we get the contract, and that’s when we get the signature event.

Here’s the thing, and here’s the problem that I have with this.

Jim Brown

Most salespeople and most entrepreneurs look at that signature event as the culmination. We finally won! We did it! But the only one that cares about the signature event is you. Your buyer just thinks that that’s the beginning of the process. Now, you have to deliver.

When you start thinking about this, how you’re going to go from prospecting call, which is the first step, all the way to closed one, you have to build out your process to extend well into your buyers’ purview.

What is the critical path that it’s going to take for them to find delight on the other end of that?

For me, when you start thinking about that closed one period, you have to start building out. Is it two months from now when we send this contract that they’re going to find delight? Is it two days? Is it two years? What is that?

Jim Brown

We want to start to build things that lead up to that so our buyer can truly understand that we are not going to make them look silly for trusting in us and buying from us.

Jim Brown

I’m a big believer in honesty and vulnerability. I read a book a couple of years ago from Brené Brown called Daring Greatly, and it truly changed my life, and I don’t say that lightly.

I’ve always been one that has been very guarded in separating business from personal, and there have been some events in my life that have forced me to go through some emotions. I just now come out and I just tell you who I am. I tell you what I am about, and I’m just real, and I’m honest.

What I’m finding is the more honest I become with just people in general, not necessarily only buyers and prospects, the more open and vulnerable they will become to me, and that’s when you can just indeed move boulders.

Jim Brown

Just become honest. Be real. Be blatantly honest with your buyers, and only with people in general, and you’re going to do some amazing things in your business.