Building an Effective B2B Sales Process

Kathy (host):

Well, hello there and welcome back to another episode of “Help! My Business is Growing,” a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and the founder of NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything that you do in your business will eventually end up in your finances, and to get to healthy finances is, of course, to have a healthy business. But the million-dollar question here is, how in the world do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes in to help. A crucial part of growing a business is, of course, having a sales process in place, because it guides both you and your customer through every step of the sale, from them showing an interest all the way to actually sealing the deal. But when it comes to a B2B business, things get a little bit trickier because your sales funnel gets more complex. You will have more decision-makers, and of course, this means that you are going to have a longer sales cycle than a B2C business would. So without a well-structured sales process, your sales team can get overwhelmed, you’re going to be swamped with leads that you might not be able to qualify, your pipeline can be a mess, and that means that you are no longer closing deals. And if you’re no longer closing deals, that is going to significantly impact your cash flow. So in all of the chaos, it’s easy to lose track of your targets and where you are headed. The question is, how do you get all of this in order? Are there any solutions to specific challenges in the B2B sales funnel? And what do you need to streamline your sales process and drive the business? As a quick reminder, all of the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps for topics that we discussed, and each one has its own blog post as well. You can find all the links and the detailed topics in this episode’s show notes. My guest today is Liz Heiman. She is the sales operating system architect and the founder of Regarding Sales. Liz guides ready-to-scale founders and CEOs to take the chaos out of sales and create a more sustainable growth strategy that strengthens the pipeline and streamlines their process to increase revenue predictability.

Kathy (host):

Liz, welcome to the show.

Liz (guest):

Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

Kathy (host):

I’m so glad you’re here because we’re going to be talking about something that is really, really important in a growing business, and that is sales funnels. Specifically, we’re going to be focusing on B2B businesses. And you know, as someone that takes the chaos out of building a funnel and builds processes around it, you are the expert in doing this the right way. Because one thing that I’ve noticed in the businesses that I work with is that when you’re in chaos, and you’re with it for a while, it starts to feel like it’s just a normal way of doing business. Like you have no idea how it even looks like when it’s normal. Obviously, it’s not a healthy thing. It’s not a healthy thing for people, it’s definitely not a healthy thing for financial performance. But I want to start here first with the businesses that you work with. How does that chaos in their funnel really look like on a day-to-day basis?

Liz (guest):

So it’s interesting, because it really is true. People just think that if you have a sales team, you have to have chaos, that that is part of having salespeople in your organization. And I will give you that there may be a certain amount of chaos that is natural in the sales process, because people are unpredictable. But it doesn’t have to be so chaotic that it’s just angst. You’re throwing stuff in the top of the funnel, bringing in leads and just waiting around hoping and praying that something comes out the bottom as a sale, right? And so it doesn’t have to be so chaotic, it doesn’t have to be so uncomfortable. There’s a certain amount of control that you can put around it. And part of that is in establishing a sales process with steps in the process, but also stages in the process, and rules around that that enable people to have conversations that are more clear, more honest, more managed, and so that they can manage expectations.

Kathy (host):

Yep. And before we end, I definitely want to dive into the stages and the processes around each stage. But I do want to first define the funnel stages: the top of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel, and the middle of the funnel. How does that look like in a B2B business? And when you’re putting people there, how does that differ from each of the different funnel stages?

Liz (guest):

So let’s first talk about what is a funnel. Some people call it a pipeline, I call it a funnel because it should be shaped like a funnel, right? It’s wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. And so we have a whole bunch of conversations with a whole bunch of people that don’t buy anything and one or two or, you know, however many out of that that actually get to the point where they close. And if you have a business-to-business complex sale, that means that you are selling to another business and your sales cycle is probably more than three or four months, and you have multiple buyers in the buying process. So it’s not just the owner of the company or not just this person or that person, but there’s a team of people making a decision, even if you never talk to them, and you’re selling something that changes the way they do business. These are things that make it a business-to-business complex sale. And if it’s that, if it’s a complex sale, then there are steps that you have to go through to get to the end. So typically, we have prospecting at the top, this is where I’m looking for opportunities or deals. And that could be looking for new clients and deals with new clients or could be looking for opportunities in existing clients that we already have relationships with, but they want to buy more stuff. So that would be prospecting. It’s top of the funnel. And the next step we call qualifying. And qualifying is when you are figuring out whether or not this opportunity is real. Like, can they afford to buy it? Do they have a timeline? Is there enough of a need for them to take action? So we’re sitting there and talking to them and figuring out, is this real? Are you just kind of chatting with me? And it’s okay to just sort of chat with me, maybe you’re going to buy it next year, but it’s not really moving forward in the process. So when somebody says, “Yes, this is the kind of solution that we need, this is what we’re going to do,” then we know that it’s qualified, and we move it to the next stage, which is, it gets called lots of things. Some people call it solving, I often call it cultivating. This is where you’re talking to all of the different buyers or buying influencers, where you’re solving problems and answering questions and overcoming objections and coming up with an offer or a proposal. Now that proposal may have to go back and forth a few times. And when you get to the point where they say, “Yes, that’s what I want to buy, and I want to buy it from you,” that’s when you move to the next stage, which we call closing. And closing is when you are getting the signature, getting the money, getting whatever needs to be approved done so that you can begin delivering. So those are the stages and that last stage, we call “closed won” or “won,” but anywhere along the process, something can go to “lost,” meaning they’re not a good fit right now, that opportunity didn’t work right now. It doesn’t mean that you never are going to work with that company, it just means that they’re not going to buy that product from you at this time. So that’s how I define the stages of the funnel.

Kathy (host):

So essentially, there are four stages, then: the first one is prospecting, then it’s qualifying, cultivating, and then the last one, once the contract is signed and you’re getting the money, it’s the close, correct? Or closing?

Liz (guest):

Closing is when you’re getting the signature, because we often say, “Oh, they said yes, it’s closed.” But those don’t always close. A lot of those go away. That’s true. So if you say we got a verbal, then you have a verbal. So now you have one more stage, that’s getting the signature and payment. And I have seen that take six months. And I’ve also seen a lot of those go away.

Kathy (host):

Yeah, and especially if you have, I’ve seen that in big businesses, when you have so many decision makers and it has to go through so many people’s signatures. Finance is involved. The procurement is involved. Obviously, the salespeople are involved. It can take a while to get a signature on that contract.

Liz (guest): 

Oh, and legal? Yes, you want to see an entity that can push back a buying process. Legal can take months, and you can get to the end. And if you haven’t done the work all the way through, you can get to the end and go, “Oh, procurement said we had to become a qualified vendor. That’s a three-month process, right?” So there are all these things that can happen. Or somebody can say, “Well, we thought we had budget, but I guess we really didn’t. Now we have to wait for the budget cycles.” All kinds of things can happen at the end that are surprises. If you do all of your work in the beginning, the surprises aren’t quite as bad or as common, but it can happen. So that last stage of closing, it isn’t done, it isn’t sold, you don’t get a commission, you don’t mark it off as done until you actually have whatever it is that you consider a closed contract and potentially payment. 

Kathy (host):

And do you see the people that you work with? Is there any of these stages that is particularly challenging for people? 

Liz (guest):

No, I think every company has a different point where they’re really effective. And every salesperson has a point where they’re really effective. So some salespeople won’t qualify anything out. Like they just keep working on it or leaving it in their funnel, right? They just won’t do anything because they don’t, they’re afraid to let it go and say that that isn’t going to happen. But for me as a business owner, if my salespeople are just leaving stuff in qualified, I don’t really know what my funnel looks like. So qualify it in or qualify it out. But don’t just leave it there. Another thing that happens that’s really difficult is we get so busy with the other stages of the funnel. And all the time it takes writing proposals and going back and forth and cultivating, that we forget to put stuff in the top of the funnel. So I set up rules or KPIs with my teams where the rule is that every day, every week, whatever it is, there’s just a certain amount of time that is prospecting time. However you prospect, whether you go to a trade show, that’s prospecting. And then you have to make follow-up calls or whether you’re picking up the phone and calling people or you’re getting referrals, whatever that process is where you get prospects, that has to be happening constantly. What happens is salespeople get really busy and the top of their funnel gets really empty, and then they start struggling to close stuff that isn’t going to close, and they’re afraid to qualify it out. So that’s another thing that happens a lot. And I think the other place where people have trouble, and again, it depends on the kind of the complexity of their sale. But during that solving process, if they haven’t identified who all of the different buyers are that are involved or all the decision makers, because there isn’t a decision maker, that always makes me nervous. “Oh, the decision maker, this is the…” No, no, no, no. In a complex sale, there are lots of decision makers. There may be some with a final say. We can call them an economic buying influence who can say yes or no. But there isn’t a buyer. There isn’t one decision maker. And so we want to be really careful about that. And what happens is if we fall into that trap of thinking there’s one person who has the authority to make this buying decision, that’s when surprises happen. “Oh, well, you didn’t talk to procurement. Oh, you didn’t talk to legal? Oh, well, you didn’t talk to quality.” Or, you know, whoever it is that you didn’t talk to. And any of these people can come back and say, “Well, we can’t do that, because…” And while quality control may not have anything to do with this buying decision, if they determine that there’s going to be a user, but then they determine, “Wait a minute, if we do that, that impacts our quality scores as a hospital,” or as an entity, whatever it is, then they’re going to say no, and there’s no way you’re going to buy that until you can solve the problem that is the quality issue. A really common place that you see this kind of thing right now is in hospitals with medical devices that have apps that talk to your phone. Anything like that is now an IT and a quality issue, right? Because now you’ve got cybersecurity issues, you’ve got all this other stuff in there. It’s not just a decision about a doctor and a patient. It’s much more complex. So those are the kinds of things. And I don’t think any is particularly the one that is problematic. I think, depending upon who your sellers are, and what your sales process is, the culture of your company, any one of those could be a stumbling block. 

Kathy (host):  

Yeah, that makes sense. It would be specific to your customers, also your size, what type of deals you’re doing. I could definitely see that. The answer to this next question is probably going to depend, obviously. But I do have to ask, you know, as someone who looks at the finances, I’m also interested in obviously the operational KPIs and the sales KPIs, because that is going to significantly impact the business revenue and the cash flow in the future. So when you’re looking at these different funnels, are there any specific KPIs that you can attribute to every funnel, when you could say, “This one is slipping, we’re going to have an issue down the road”? Is there anything that you could say that is universal, or would it be again, industry and company specific?

Liz (guest):

So it has to do with ratios. Your company has a set of ratios. So there’s a certain number of phone calls, outbound calls, you would have to make to get to the point where you have enough to qualify to get to the right… So there are ratios between the first stage to the last stage. So a lot of times, we assume it’s like a 10 to 1 until you can really clarify and calculate and see the numbers run. You just assume it’s 1 to 10. So for 10 prospecting activities, one thing might fall out the bottom of the funnel, meaning I might sell one thing out of the 10 people that I talk to. And then that probably means, and these are just, these are like the norm, but not necessarily your norm, that maybe out of the 10, seven of them will have a conversation with you about qualifying. Do they really want it? And then maybe out of those, 50% will get qualified and go into the process of solving. And then from those five, maybe two of those will say, “Yes, this is what we want.” And then we assume out of those two, one of them will close. Now, is that 100% accurate all the time? No. But what I can say is, if I have a six-month sales cycle, and I don’t have 10 things in the top of the funnel for every one thing that I want to close, I’m not going to hit my numbers. And if stuff’s not moving through the funnel, so just because I have seven qualified things for every one thing that I want, or seven things in qualifying, the process of being qualified, for every one I want to go out the bottom, that doesn’t mean necessarily that everything is hunky-dory. It might mean that things are sitting in qualified but nobody’s willing to get rid of it. So what we find is, if there’s not enough going in the top of the funnel, then stuff gets stuck in the middle of the funnel because we’re afraid to let it go. And if we have too much coming in the top of the funnel, then salespeople don’t have time to do all of the follow-up. So they have to have an amount of work that is manageable for one person or stuff gets left behind because they were just too busy to deal with all of it. So the big thing, when you’re setting KPIs, the KPIs should be in alignment with the ratios in your funnel. And then anybody can look at any time and go, “Uh-oh, we don’t have enough at the top of the funnel,” or “Uh-oh, six months from now, we don’t have enough that we’re proposing right now to hit our number three or six months from now.” So you can look at those ratios at any time.

Kathy (host):

You know, I’m working with companies that look at this on a numbers basis. One of the issues that I have just looking at it from a pure numbers perspective is that, you know, it looks great on a spreadsheet. Obviously, you can calculate it. And it gives us a certain amount of comfort, I guess, especially in finance. But the issue with that is that there’s the other side of it too. If the top of the funnel really is quality prospecting. So where does this quality versus quantity come in? Because from what I’ve seen, in a lot of companies, you know, everyone will go into the top of the funnel, everyone and their mother is in the prospecting. But the qualification is really when they start thinking about this quality. Is this really a quality person, quality company that is a fit for us? So what is your take on this?

Liz (guest):

So I think it’s really important. A lot of that has to do with having what we call SDRs, or sales development reps, who are dialing for dollars, right? All day long, they dial and try to get somebody to agree to a demo or an appointment or a meeting. So if the criteria around those is just, if you get somebody who says yes to a meeting, do it, well, that’s fine. But then you’re going to assume that the quality is very low, because there’s no one kind of saying what are the rules around who we actually want to talk to. The other place that it happens is in a marketing funnel. So as leads come through, if you think about the marketing pipeline, right? So the leads start at the top, where people are engaging with you. So somebody goes onto your website, they read an article, then maybe they have to download something, or they have to put their name in, and then maybe they put their name into several articles. Well, a lot of times, we just apply a number to activity. So somebody reads 12 articles on your website, they must be a great opportunity. They download this and this, that makes them a great opportunity. I personally get those calls all the time. “Hi, are you looking to buy a CRM?” I’m like, “No, I’m a sales consultant. I evaluate tons of CRMs.” “Oh, no, I’m a sales consultant. I’m just looking at this information because I’m trying to figure out a problem.” Now they’ve wasted an SDR’s time because nobody looked at my title or my company that they made me fill in before they start dialing. And so the other thing is, what is the conversation we’re having with these people when they first communicate? So the question here is, how do you define a lead that’s qualified for sales? Or what we call an SQL, a sales qualified lead? How do you define that? Because if I have a very expensive sales team, before I turn a lead over to them, it better be worth their time. And if they’re working on $10 million deals, and I’m giving them leads that aren’t going to purchase, that really aren’t qualified, they’re not going to focus on it, because their eyes are on the $10 million, right? So those are the things that… and it’s a common conversation. “We’re giving them leads all the time.” Sales is like, “Give us good leads.” And it’s a common conversation. It’s just, it’s all in the definitions and the rules.

Kathy (host):

Yeah, it’s funny, if you spend some time on LinkedIn, you will see this tension between sales and marketing people of sales saying, “Oh, that’s marketing’s fault,” marketing, “Oh, it’s sales’ fault.” “I sent you good stuff, and you didn’t close them.” So it can be pretty comical.

Liz (guest): 

It is pretty comical. In fact, many years ago, my sister is also a sales consultant. And so many years ago, we did a video with one of us wearing a sales hat, one of us wearing a marketing hat, and having that really common conversation about, you know, “This is not working.”

Kathy (host):

I mean, it’s just, it’s definitely a conversation worth having. You know, let’s stick with the sales and marketing because I think we talked about this when we were prepping for the podcast as well, that there can be a disconnect between the two. And when there’s a disconnect between the two, none of them are going to work in an optimal way that they need to be working. So what do you see when you go into the companies? Like, what is that major disconnect there?

Liz (guest):

So there are a couple of things. One is that sales and marketing perceive different things about where marketing fits into the buying process, or the sales process, which is essentially the same thing lined up next to each other. If you are a company that depends a lot on repeat business, and marketing thinks their primary job is filling the top of the funnel and they don’t have any role in the rest of the process, then there’s a disconnect between what you need to achieve and what you’re going to achieve. If you are a company that’s really focused on new logos, which is the way they talk about it in SaaS, or new clients, and marketing is not, you know, they’re not really clear about who those new clients need to be and they’re just like, “Get us interaction.” So marketing often gets measured on conversions, right? This word “conversion,” what does conversion mean? To me, it’s not converted until it closes, right? In marketing, it’s converted when they’ve done certain things, when they’ve asked for a meeting, or they’ve downloaded a certain thing, that’s a conversion. Well, if you can’t follow the lead from first interaction through close, and then actually future business with an original lead source, you have no idea if your lead development process is working or not working. So marketing is doing a lot of activity, but they only have the numbers to the point where they’ve handed it off to sales. And many people don’t use their CRMs properly to manage that original lead source all the way through. So they can go, “Oh, this really works,” or “Oh, this really doesn’t work. We convert them to a sales qualified lead, but they never get any further.” So if you can’t measure it, you can’t make it work well together. And if there’s no communication between sales and marketing, if sales keeps getting leads that aren’t qualified, and they’re not sitting down and having a conversation, saying, “Here’s why this isn’t a qualified lead. Here’s why it isn’t time yet.” They’re just gonna… marketing’s just gonna keep doing it because it seems to be working.

Kathy (host):

And you mentioned setting up the CRM properly so that you can actually track these activities. How would that look like?

Liz (guest):

Oh, it is so complicated. So everybody thought, “Just set up a CRM, it will solve all of your problems. It’s magic beans, right?” It’s not, because all the CRM does is mirror your processes. And if your processes aren’t good, they’re mirrored in the CRM and they’re still bad. So there are a couple of things about setting up a CRM that are really important. One is what I talked about, which is lead source, managing that original lead source, and then secondary lead sources all the way through relationships, not just on the lead, which is a current one-person, but then when you create the company, that original lead source needs to go to the company. And then when you purchase, that original lead source needs to feed over into the opportunity. And then when they’re buying their next thing, that original lead source needs to still come from the company over and create it. If you continue to have that original lead source feeding, you still may need to track secondary. So my original lead source was a trade show. But my secondary lead source was a white paper, and that’s the one that pushed them to close, right? You have to be able to measure both of those things. So that’s just on the sales and marketing alignment part. There are other places that are really problematic. Like I talked about stages as periods of time while you’re doing a certain activity. We are qualifying, right? This is the qualify stage. We are in the process of qualifying. We are in the process of developing a solution. But what a lot of companies do now is they have activities that… they have stages that are activity-based, meaning first appointment, demo, second appointment, proposal, close. So what happens when you do that? Well, if you have a very, very simple sales process, and you do not have a complex sale, and it’s one person to one person, and they’re either making a decision now or not, then that activity-based sales process that you’re mapping in the CRM to measure stages is okay, because they’re either buying or they’re not buying. Now, if you have a complex organization that you’re selling into, and you think doing a demo defines a stage, well, what stage is that? Because who are you doing the demo to? Are you doing it to somebody who’s actually part of the final buying decision? Or are you doing it to the person they sent out to do the low-level research or they sent out to go, “Find out, what are our choices? Here’s what we want to… go get demos and see, decide which ones you’re bringing back to us.” We’re not even qualified yet, right? We’re not quite… that this person has no authority. But we now say, “Okay, they’ve had a contact, they did a demo, they asked for a proposal, they’re ready to close.” Well, they’re not ready to close, they haven’t even started the majority of their buying process, because that first proposal was just to bring to a team to assess whether or not they want to continue with that company. And so what happens is, instead of having a funnel that looks like this, you have a funnel that looks like this with a big bowl at the bottom like a vase, right? And nothing, very little is coming out the bottom because they are really ready to buy at that point. You’re not in close, you’re not ready to… they’re not ready to close, they’ve just started their buying process because somebody now brought to the team what they need to do. So what happens when you do that is you have a very inaccurate funnel, which doesn’t allow you to predict, right? So CEOs come to me all the time and say, “I’ve got all this stuff at the bottom of the funnel and nothing is closing.” I’m like, “Well, it’s not really ready to close.” Or the other thing that happens is they start skipping steps. “Oh, this proposal is in close, but now you have a whole bunch of work to do because you might have three or four iterations of that proposal. You might have 10 people you still need to meet, you may need to do three more demos.” But if it’s just sitting there in close, I can’t measure momentum for that buying process. So unless we really understand the buyer’s buying process and our process that aligns with that, we can’t measure it accurately. And therefore, you can never predict. You just have a ton of stuff sitting around at the bottom of the funnel. And I’ll give you a really extreme case of this. I had a client that would give a proposal to people who were taking that proposal to go get funding, right? So they’re a year or two away from buying anything, but it’s still sitting at the bottom of the funnel because they got a proposal, right? So really thinking about, what is that buyer doing? That isn’t even an opportunity at this point, or at least still in prospect. And your next action is two years from now.

Kathy (host):

Should you have different funnels for different personas? And I’ll tell you what I mean by that, because just as you said, it could be someone doing the demo that is just a researcher. And I can tell you an example from my own business. You know, I used to be in corporate finance, and we would look at software all the time, like, “What can we do to make this better?” And there are a lot of tools that we looked at, and I was one of the people that, you know, I’m very techie. So I actually enjoy doing demos with these companies. But I was just a researcher at that point, right? I would just be at the beginning stages, and people would send me all these emails and really bombard me with it. But once I gave the recommendations, it would be a whole process after that, compared to now when I have my own company, and I’m still looking at these different tools. It’s very different because I am the decision maker and I am the researcher. So at this point, there really is very simple. It’s a demo, do I like it or not? Does it fit the client need, my need at this point, and then it’s a yes or no decision. And it’s not going to be procurement and IT and all that stuff involved in it. But I could be using, I could be looking at the same software tool, but I am essentially two different personas. So should you have a funnel that accommodates these different personas of your buyers, or no?

Liz (guest):

You could do it that way. So instead of thinking about the persona, think about… we have a sales process for an individual who is buying for a small company, and then we have a sales process for a complex buying process. So it wouldn’t be a different funnel for the persona, but for the company type. And so you could do that. Or you could just say, okay, there are different buying personas, you could call them, right? And that is, you could have the CEO, or you could have the economic buyer, or you could have technical buyers, or you can have user buyers. Like, you could classify the buyer so that you recognize this is a researcher, they are a technical buying influence. If you use the Miller Heiman terminology, which is how I was trained, then there are technical buying influences, meaning they are looking at criteria and matching it off and then handing it off to somebody else, which means it doesn’t… you just don’t move it further down the funnel until you can actually talk to somebody who’s going to say, “Yes, we’re going to move forward with this project,” or “No, we’re not going to move forward with this project.” So you just leave it way up in “qualify,” because that person doesn’t have the authority to say, “Yes, this fits our needs, and we are going to move forward with it.” So you wouldn’t move it out of “qualify” until you got there. So you could do it as two different kinds of sales to different kinds of companies. So you could have a complex sale funnel and a simple sale funnel. There are lots of different ways, lots of different kinds of pipelines you can create depending upon the nature of your business. But sometimes you just skip stages, too. So I get you on the phone, we have a conversation. You want to do a demo right then and you say, “Yes, this is going to work for me.” We could jump in that phone call from prospect to solve or cultivate right then. I could send a proposal and you could jump right to close really quickly, because you said, “Yes, that’s what I want. Let’s do it.” So sometimes things move really slowly through the funnel, six months or a year. I have clients that have a five-year funnel. They’re doing big deal IoT projects, right? It takes years for those to happen. So you could just move things through the funnel more quickly, skip steps, or you could say, “I need two different funnels because these are two really different buying processes.”

Kathy (host):

And you know, that’s an important part because obviously I’m b2b and I buy other b2b products, b2b services. And one of the things that really grates on me is when I go to a company, and they have this very, very rigid sales funnel, because as a b2b buyer, I’m generally… if I am interested in something, I will pretty much stalk that company. Like I will know everything that I can about them, I would probably look at the demos if they have them on YouTube or whatever they might have them. At a certain point, like, I’m not even interested in a demo. I just want to know how much it is. When can we do it? And let’s do it. And if someone is trying to put me into these funnel steps and is very rigid and doesn’t want me to go from just a conversation into a contract, I get really annoyed by that, and I see some companies doing that.

Liz (guest):

There’s a reason to do that. So the first thing before I say that is that you have to understand how your buyers buy. And you need to ask questions really early on. How… what is the buying process? Who else needs to be involved? Who is going to sign off? Is there budget? When you’re qualifying, you need to ask a bunch of questions so you can understand what you need to do at the next stage when you’re solving or cultivating. But what we find with SaaS sales, with software as a service sales, is that if I talk to someone in a company, and they’ve been tasked with buying software to solve a problem, and I never get to talk to the user buyers to know what they really want, and how it’s going to work for them, what happens is I sell this, no one ever uses it, and then they don’t buy it again next year. So I failed in my process, because I didn’t make sure that the people who were going to use it were engaged in the buying process to say what they wanted and how they wanted it. Now it might mean I’m not going to get the sale, but at least I know that I’m not going to get the sale, rather than thinking I’ve got something, no one ever uses it, and then it goes away six months or a year or whatever that is. So that is one reason that someone might push you on the buying process, just to make sure that they’re not skipping steps that are going to cause a problem later, but then they should tell you that. They should say to you, “Hey, I understand you have the authority to buy this and you’re going to make the buying decision. Would it make sense to sit with your user buyers and just make sure they’re bought in and this is going to work the way they want it? Can we have that conversation with them? Because I really wouldn’t want you to buy something that they’re not going to use. So let’s figure out how to make sure that 1) they want to use it, 2) we’re going to get it set up so they can use it, and it’s going to work for them.” Now, if the buyer says no, I as a seller have to make a decision. Is this, you know, okay, I can sell it to you. But then what?

Kathy (host):

I definitely appreciate if I had a conversation like that with a seller. I would definitely appreciate it because it comes from a perspective of serving the customer versus serving the company. “No, these are our stages, you have to go through them.” That makes sense, obviously, but I get really grated when they try to push me into a funnel, because I have a feeling it’s just to follow their process and not be customer-centric.

Liz (guest):

Right. Well, somebody has figured out if they go through these steps, then whatever, they’re more likely to close or so they force their salespeople not to miss any steps, which, you know, can be really difficult for the buyer. And I’ve said, “Never mind. Right, never mind, I’ll buy it from somebody else.” So we have to be really thoughtful when we’re building the process. The process is a guide, there’s a reason we do certain things. Sometimes we don’t follow the process because it doesn’t match the buyer’s buying process.

Kathy (host):

And if you do have to do it, it’s good to communicate that to the customer. “Hey, this is the reason why we’re doing it. Not because we want to be difficult, but because of this, it’s basically to serve you.” And then if I have that conversation, I’d be like, “Yeah, that makes sense to me, you know, I’m fine with it.”

Liz (guest):

Well, and if you think about, like, for example, “I really would like to do a demo with you, because I want to make sure this part really does what you want it to do the way you want it to do. Or we can make it do it the way you want it to do it.” That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit down and do an hour-long demo. Like, when somebody says, “Will you do a demo?” I’m like, “Oh, just shoot me. Like, really, please don’t make me sit with you for an hour and go through your decision about what I need to see for that product, because I really don’t care. I only care about the part I care about.” So now, if there’s a concern, and they’re like, “I really would like to do a demo with you to show you this part to make sure that that’s going to work the way you want.” That makes sense. But don’t make me go through a nightmare of like, I’m not even listening, you know, I’m playing on my phone. They’re doing their demo. They are talking to me, they’re not asking me questions, they’re doing their thing. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t want to be there. 

Kathy (host):

A lot of this stuff can actually be done on YouTube. And I’m putting myself in the position because I buy a lot of these types of things for clients and for my own businesses. I will watch it, if I’m interested in the product, I will watch it, instead of you trying to give it to me on the call. Just put it there. And I will take a look at it. And I will come into the call much more educated. And I’ve actually had an incident with that with one vendor. And I said, “Listen,” because they wanted to give me a demo. And I said, “Listen, I’ve looked at all of that. I know how this looks like. These are the things that I have a question on. I want to know this, this and this, show me this, this and this.” And they said, “Yeah, sure, fine, we’ll do it.” And I appreciated that so much. But they didn’t make me sit there for 30 minutes of a demo of the stuff that I already knew when I had three, four questions and then it was a decision whether this is the right fit or not.

Liz (guest):

And I think that’s a really important part of selling. How does my buyer want to buy? And if we haven’t figured that out, talk to them about that, then we’re undermining ourselves in the selling process.

Kathy (host):

So this has been an absolutely delightful conversation. And you know, every single podcast episode I do, I try to come up with something actual, something tangible for someone who’s listening to this. And if the business owner who is listening to this says, “Well, I understand these sales funnels, you know, the top, the bottom, the middle and all that stuff. But it seems it’s very chaotic for me.” Like, what is something that they can do that is actionable in the next week or two to make this a little bit of a less painful experience?

Liz (guest):

So there are two things. One is set the rules. So sit down with a spreadsheet or a piece of paper and say, “Okay, so these are the stages, I’m going to call them these things.” Make sure that they’re stages, not activities, like we said, unless you have a really simple sale. And then figure out, what are the rules to move them from stage to stage? They have to do this, or they have to have a budget or whatever it is. These are the rules to move from stage to stage, and we normally wouldn’t move it unless that’s true. So we agree on what the rules are. And then we begin to use the CRM and the funnel in a way that when whoever’s looking at it, they understand what that means. It’s in this stage, that means this is going on, right? The second is making sure you put your notes in there. And I think the third is, if you have sellers, you have to do funnel reviews. You have to understand that they’ve got to fill all stages of the funnel, things have to be making momentum. And your job is to communicate with them about what’s going on in their funnel, and figure out how you can best support them in closing deals. So what happens is, nobody ever wants to do a funnel review, because it’s “my boss beats me up for an hour” period, which is, if that’s what you’re doing as a boss, stop it. Just stop it. Just don’t ever do that again. Right? So what do you need to do? You need to have a conversation. You need to understand what’s going on. If there’s not enough in the top of the funnel, you need to work with them to figure out how they’re doing it, what they need to do, how they’re going to fill it. If stuff’s not closing, why isn’t it closing? Let’s figure out what the problem is. What do we need to do differently? And it’s a “we” thing. It’s not a “you.” If you have one seller that’s not doing a good job and 10 that are doing a great job, well, maybe they don’t fit in your organization. But I talk to organizations, I have 10 sellers that aren’t doing a good job. Guess where the problem sits? Not with the sellers. So just thinking about those things, but communicating, getting a common language so you can actually communicate about what’s going on. And then I would say there’s one more thing, which is everything that’s in the funnel needs a next action. If it’s just sitting there and there’s nothing, there’s no task, “This is what I’m doing next.” And don’t say “follow up,” like “I’m going to talk to Joe about this.” If that doesn’t exist, stuff will just sit in the funnel and not move.

Kathy (host):

Liz, thank you so much. Please tell us, where can people find you?

Liz (guest):

Easiest place to find me is on LinkedIn. Liz Heimann, H-E-I-M-A-N-N. Or you can go to my website, Liz at… regarding sales.com. Oh, no, sorry. That’s my email. My website is regardingsales.com. And if you connect with me, wherever you connect with me, just tell me where you met me. Because lots of people connect with me. And it’s nice to know that you actually want to talk to me, not just sell me something.

Kathy (host):

Especially on LinkedIn. 

Liz (guest):

Oh… Sellers, right? On LinkedIn. We’ve got a lot of people who know nothing about me trying to sell me something that has nothing to do with me. Right. So tell me who you are. Tell me how you met me, what you want to talk about. And I would love to have a conversation even if you do want to sell me something. Just tell me, what’s up? What do you do? And…

Kathy (host):

Liz, thank you so much. And we’re going to put all of these in the show notes. So it’s going to be Liz’s LinkedIn, her website, her email address, whatever. We’re going to put it in there so that you have access to it. Thanks so much, Liz.

Liz (guest): 

Thanks. Have a great day.