SHOOT ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THESE BEFORE…

Juan Medina

Helps Sales Teams Who Get Ghosted by Customers

@ ASalesGrowth Company

An Open Letter to Every VP of Sales

Who is TIRED of Losing Deals at the Finish Line

A boogeyman is out there, haunting your sales department… 

Day 1 of a new quarter… deals look great! Weekly checkups and pipeline figures only confirm it: yes, this will be a strong quarter indeed.

But as the weeks pass, sure enough, your reps best deals are “stolen away” by a thief in the night. One by one, you find strategic deal after strategic deal MURDERED–or worse, lost in the abyss of “Next month it’ll come in, I think.”

Come end of quarter: you’re left confused and empty-handed. And your attainment? A shadow of your once proud forecast…

Your reps can’t explain it. Your managers? Even less of a clue.

At this point most of your exec peers respond by “tightening the belt.” They demand discipline from reps and managers: clear next steps, more frequent follow-ups, and “you better have access to power on all your deals!”

This backfires.

Because your subordinates don’t have a system to stop deals from pushing–they simply stop coming to you with big deals. You demand: “discipline and sense of urgency.” They hear: “Keep quiet and commit as little as possible.”

You can see how this movie ends, yes?

Consider that the average tenure for a VP of Sales has shrunk to only 19 months. You are not safe unless you can forecast revenue 2-8 months out with accuracy.

Pushed deals will kill you… But guess what?

Almost entirely *none* of the hundreds of sales execs we have spoken have implemented a system to stop key deals from pushing end of quarter, dooming their forecast and safety of tenure.

FINALLY REVEALED: The Secret to Stopping Pushed Deals

We’ve spoken with quota-hitters and missers; we’ve spoken with VPs at F500s down to first-time managers at hot startups; we’ve spoken with CROs reinventing their careers at exciting startups; we even spoke to their eager reps! (candidly, that group was just happy to have someone ask their thoughts)

With such an absurd variety of sellers–you’d think we learned nothing.

On the contrary, we found one *strange* commonality…

When we asked sales leaders *one particular question* … they were all speechless. They could not answer–or even thought to have asked it despite months of hitting their head against the wall trying to fix their team’s performance.

This question, if salespeople worldwide asked it to themselves with sincerity, could change the world. B2B forecasts would no longer be way off… Companies struggling to turn a profit would reverse their fortunes overnight.

Hell, buyers might even respect sales again…

Really, how do you know?

When you roll your eyes at one of the 86% of customers who, after many months of work, reach NO-DECISION… how do you make sense of that?

How do you know it wasn’t sales malpractice? (and that what our industry calls “sales best practices” is actually awful sales)

This is the scary possibility our clients had to face. What if their rockstar sales reps, sales managers and so on…

Actually had no idea how a complex sale gets done!

And that for many quarters, sometimes whole fiscal years–you (and our clients) have made an extremely human error…

You assumed competence in your sales team’s skills.

We had to inform our clients that their sales reps and managers had been taught wrong and weren’t even selling.

You already know our clients did not want to believe this!

We’d have to dive deep in their CLOSED-LOST and where exactly sales reps lost their customers. And we asked simple follow-up questions, and sure enough–they again had no answer.

And we’d follow this up with a simple exercise like this to find “deals sold badly.”

The BLACKOUT CRM Test

Line up your reps’ deals in a sheet. Black out the account names. And erase the assigned rep/manager’s name to avoid quota-hitter bias.

Now, using only the CRM notes, call recording transcripts, emails shared, etc–can you figure out which CLOSED-LOSTs were the sales rep’s fault? What about the CLOSED-WONs where the rep just got lucky?

Hell–if you removed win/loss result too–could you even figure out which deals became customers?

9/10 of our clients’ sales teams–before they reinvented themselves with a few simple changes–could not. They couldn’t even piece together the business cases that won them the business!

Now here’s a simple way to test your team’s business cases. . . 

Open up your CRM and go to deal fundamentals/deal notes (your reps do take good notes . . right?)

See if you can parse out these four fundamental keys that must be discovered for a purchase to happen (hopefully your reps’ talktime is all about these keys–god forbid it’s not BANT, “rapport-building,” or other common fluff):

These 4 questions form the foundation of Problem-Centric Selling and it’s how all purchases get made–whether your reps execute them or not. (91% don’t)

For Product-Centric Sellers, who neglect the business problem, this sale is invisible. Goes totally over your reps’ heads (but never over your customers’ heads).

Instead the sale happens inside your customers’ mind and in those dreaded “gonna discuss it with my team” meetings where imaginary deals are put out of their misery.

You see, these product-centric sellers, they aren’t selling at all . . .

Sure, they “do discovery.” And ask qualifying questions. But this is mere appetizer: they care about a tight talk-track + demo–not understanding your customer’s business.

On the other hand, Problem-Centric Sellers obsess about the prospect’s business and the problems dragging them down. They insist on getting the facts and the customer to agree exactly where they hurt, how much and why.

Because the customer has no choice but to spill the beans… the sale now occurs in the open.

Imagine this: your sales reps and your customers cooperating and agreeing on business problems and their causes. With this info–your rep can now actually influence and control the sale (and forecast it for real).

And this influence is earned: Problem-Centric Sellers help your customers put the puzzle together. No more deals left on the table.

Which begs this question . . . 

Considering that the overwhelming majority of professional salespeople are still Product-Centric . . . you’re almost surely losing huge revenue.

Consider our clients’ improvements after instructing their teams on Problem-Centric Selling…

On average–our clients went from close rates of 13% to 34%–and even more remarkable–their revenue forecasts actually aligned with what closed: an average of only16% variance.

This more than just performance. Our methods change how sales are perceived by their firm: from a bunch of cowboys riding on the seat of their pants to credible detail-oriented professionals.

How much is this worth to you? 

Impossible to say, without discussing your business problems.

The easiest way to know what Problem-Centric Selling can change for you is to sample our sales process while asking yourself:

“Is this how I want my team to treat our customers?”

Want to golf like Tiger Woods? The most logical route: go golf with Tiger!

Evaluate our sales process as a potential buyer–and decide if it can transform your sales or not. (and while you’re at it–try the same for other methodologies)

Here’s how we treat + qualify our potential clients…

1. We send you a copy of Gap Selling, the controversial bestselling sales book that started A Sales Growth Company. Our founder Keenan wrote it so sales teams can finally stop pushing product and be problem-centric. If we meet, it’s essential we talk the same language, so you get it at no cost: we want you in the know.
2. A real discovery call with a *trained* Gap Seller. No pitching, no shenanigans: “Just show me the demo” prospects get shown the door! Our mutual goal: understand what your reps are doing right and wrong–both as individuals and as executors of your systems. Then, we determine the bottom-line impacts on your business and whether changing them can have explosive benefits to your revenue–or not (not all problems are worth the trouble).
3. Ditto for sales leadership. Where are front-line managers–and their superiors and their superiors, potentially–holding you back? Make no mistake–if your reps are wasting your customers’ time, that is your responsibility first.
4. If we agree there is a problem and that we can fix it together and that the problem is worth fixing–we can discuss a variety of options to address the root causes we discovered together. These range from full-on live sales training, to more specific programs for problem areas like how to build reliable 2023 pipeline or how to raise your win rate with SMART deal reviews, to asynchronous online training–this depends, like all purchases, on the nature of your business problem and the cost of change to resolve it.

The clients we do take on see explosive gains to KPIs and revenue. And for a very rare reason in B2B sales: because of the insight shared by our sales reps!

There’s no reason your reps can’t do this too: sales should always be the value-drivers for your customers . . . not just the signature-getters.

This is exactly why we’ve come up with a way for you and other sales leaders to absorb our secrets–in only 45 minutes. See:

Curious Sales Leader: we offer you a Discovery Audit

Which is to say–you are invited you to speak with our trained reps and walk through your sales org: from discovery to performance metrics to hiring and more. No cost.

That’s right: we are elite enough and confident enough at selling to offer discovery calls.

Your competition? Their prospects would rather die than spend an hour with a rep just to get pricing + demo.

(How do you know your prospects don’t feel the same about you?)

Now, here’s what will happen on our Discovery Audit–

The Goal: to identify business problems and addressable root causes you might not have realized were there (the pressure points behind macro-problems like, “we missed quota by 37%”).

Your Incentive: ask yourself–“is this how I want my reps to sell?” “What are these Gap Sellers doing different in these conversations to engage me, the customer?”

If we find a business problem and root cause we want to solve together–that’s almost certainly bottom-line impact for you. If we don’t find a business problem (or one we can’t help with) you still sampled Problem-Centric Selling and get a fresh perspective on whether your teams are actually selling or merely pushing product (odds are 9/10 your team is pushing product).

You won’t find better ROI on your time.

And–like we mentioned above–this conversation starts with you getting a free copy of Gap Selling beforehand…

“Keenan’s book, Gap Selling, rocked me in its simplicity and power.” Zachary Bromberg, VP @ MB Financial

“Welcome to modern day sales!” Chris Nadeau, Sales Executive @ Presence of IT

“Wow. Just Wow. How many sales books have I read in my 30 years of selling? Most are recycled BS written by people who cannot sell or have never sold. This book however is something else. I can’t recommend it enough.” Simon Hares, Consultant @ SerialTrainer7

So, in short, if you request a Discovery Audit you get to:

• Steal ideas for your sales team by giving our Problem-Centric Sales Process a spin…

• Test if our trained reps are “bulletproof” by asking the toughest most damnedest sales questions (take care you’re not the one getting tested, detective…)

• Score a free copy of Gap Selling: the sales exec manual that’s sparked the transformative gains we’ve founded with our clients…  

Put your sales department to the test below!