“I’m passionate about this thing…so why isn’t anyone buying it?”
Everyone has seen the famous Glen Gary Glen Ross scene featuring a young Alec Baldwin.
“Coffee is for closers only,” he tells the salesmen he’s been brought in to consult for. “You can’t close shit, you are shit,” he yells. It’s a profanity-laden, slightly ridiculous scene, but his point is clear: if you’re not closing, you’re losing.
Many new small business owners don’t realize how vital a strong sales background is to their success. There is this feeling like, “I have a ton of great experience in my field, so of course I’ll get hired as a consultant!”
Unfortunately, that is far from the truth. Hot leads probably aren’t showing up on your doorstep. (If they are, please let me know where you live so I can also receive these deliveries.)
Our sales cycle at Dementia By Day is often pretty long.
What do I mean by “sales cycle”? When you are looking at converting a prospect into a client, you will typically take them through a sales process that begins during your first contact with them:
- Perhaps you’ve met on LinkedIn. They’ve responded affirmatively after you send them a cold message and indicate they’re interested in scheduling a call with you. In our case, we send them a link to our Calendly calendar, where they then schedule a call.
- As soon as they schedule with us, I put them into HubSpot, our client management system. After our call, I send them an email. We’ll typically exchange multiple emails—sometimes for months—before they book our initial paid program.
- After we go through that first paid step, we then offer them our six or twelve-month consulting program. Most of our clients stay on with us beyond that first engagement, but the process of converting them from prospect to client has, at times, taken up to two years.
A few years ago, in an attempt to save myself from having to be the only person “selling” for Dementia By Day, I hired an outside sales team.
I was paired with a wonderful salesperson, but despite her background and hard work, she never made a sale. As it turns out, my potential clients wanted to talk to me. All I’d done was manage to shell out $2,500 a month (for a year and a half!) as a sort of social experiment.
I’ve made thousands of cold calls. I’ve sent out thousands of cold emails and LinkedIn DMs. I’ve experimented with just about every way to get business online (and off.)
Already feeling sweaty and exhausted thinking about going back to prospecting? Learn from my mistakes (and successes) in my private podcast, Crush The Close.
What you’ll get in Crush The Close:
- 8 episodes of my secret podcast (this means you can listen to these eight episodes on your favorite podcast player, but you won’t find them floating around the podcast sphere for just anyone to find!)
- My ghost-busting follow-up email templates that have a wildly-high response rate (lost a prospect into the void? Try these.)
- My objection list (what I wrote down to remind myself of how to respond to prospects before I knew what to say off-the-cuff!)
