Sales, whether you like it or not it’s an important part of your business. Many of us have spent years tolerating the need for selling in our business but would avoid it altogether if it was an option. And yet, success with corporate clients depends largely on how effectively and actively we engage in the sales process. Activities like prospecting, cold-emailing and cold-calling, are ones that we have to get comfortable with, and so today’s episode is about introducing you to a new way to sell. One that is in alignment with your values, one that can be enjoyable and one that your prospects will welcome. Hit play, and allow me to reintroduce you to sales.
🎯 Top Takeaway from Today's Episode
Sales can be based in integrity, characterized by conversations, steeped in mutual value and welcomed and appreciated by your prospects.
📌 Key Points from the Episode
Corporate Buyer’s Ecosystem
Redefining your relationship with sales will require you to be proactive, intentional and willing to lead the process.
The 3 New Approaches to Sales
📊 Statistics You Need to Know
💡 Take Action
Reach out to 3 prospects this week.
🔗 Links
✍🏾 Sign up for the Corporate Coins Training: How to Attract, Sell and Serve Corporate Clients training
💌 Be a part of our growing email list: Co(i)nversations and Community
👋🏽 Connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram!
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0:00:07 Salutations, friend! Welcome to The Profit Scale podcast, where we help independent Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs earn at their highest levels by learning how to secure corporate contracts.
I’m your host, Ruth-Joy Connell, your Corporate Consultant and Sales Enablement Expert. I’m on a mission to equip you with the systems and strategies you’ll need to build a business of generational impact and income.
Around here, we bring culture and coins together — providing all the learning, community and support you’ll need as you scale your business. If you’re ready to step into your next level of income and impact, then you, my friend, are in the right place!
Turn up the volume and lean in, 'cause we’re about to get started!
0:01:00 Salutation, friend! Welcome back to another week, another episode. There's a topic that's come up several times with my clients as well as in some of the membership groups that I'm in. When I saw it come up about four times in the same week, I thought to myself, usually if one person is asking, that means more people have the same questions.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been the person who asked the questions when I didn't understand a concept. So much so that when I was in university, people in my classes literally knew me as the girl who asked questions. Of course, the topic that has kept coming up, we're talking about it today. So what's the topic? It happens to be the dreaded topic of cold calling and cold emailing, or maybe another way to refer to this is prospecting.
0:01:48 Prospecting is a part of an Outbound Sales strategy where you are initiating contact with potential clients. This is something that many entrepreneurs don't enjoy doing, and I would actually go as far to say that most entrepreneurs don't do it at all. They're not actively engaged in this method of sales, especially if you're selling business-to-consumer. It's usually not as common in the B2C world.
A lot of the time, the beliefs that I've heard from clients around prospecting is that it feels sales-y. It feels pushy. You don't want to bother or annoy the other person. It's uncomfortable to do, and frankly you just don't like it — plain and simple. I totally get that.
You might feel this even more strongly if you've been on the receiving end of poorly conducted prospecting in the form of bad emails or borderline harassing phone calls, especially when it was clear that the person contacting you didn't know who you were, what you do, or cared to know anything about, whether or not you actually needed what they were selling. They were just trying to make a sale. It's that approach to prospecting that gives sales a bad name. It really does. Yet, an outbound sales strategy is an extremely important part of securing corporate clients. That's why I want to talk to you about it today.
My goal for today's conversation is to redeem the idea of outbound sales and prospecting for you. I want to show you that there's a way to approach cold outreach that makes it feel warm. There's a way to sell to others without selling your soul in the process. There's a way to actually enjoy the sales process and not simply endure it.
In today's conversation, I'm going to contrast three different approaches to sales to help you see sales in a new light. While there are undeniably people out there who only care about making money, they represent the loud minority and they're less common. Of course, that's not you.
I know you, and I know that it's important to you that your approach to sales is done with integrity and that it's aligned with your values and shows genuine care and interest for your prospects. I know how much you care. I know how much you believe in the potential of your services to improve the lives of your clients. Of course, you want that to come across in your sales.
Today, let's shift your perspective. Allow me to propose an action that's based in integrity, characterized by conversations, steeped in mutual value, and one that is welcomed and appreciated by your prospects.
Allow me to reintroduce you to sales. Let's jump in.
Friend, I'm sorry to have to break it to you but when you became an entrepreneur, you inherited the responsibility of a salesperson. Now, sales may not be something you have typically liked or enjoyed, or maybe you don't even think you're good at it, but nonetheless it is necessary.
0:04:42 The first approach we're going to be contrasting is something called inbound versus outbound sales.
Nowadays, two of the most common ways they see entrepreneurs grow their business or attract new clients are:
1. Through social media
2. Through referrals.
This conveniently means that people are often coming to you. This is called inbound sales. You put out content. People find you. Then, they reach out or maybe they even purchase your service directly depending on what you're selling.
Of course, we all know what referrals are. When someone who's familiar with your work or who's been a client in the past refers your services to someone else. Both of these are fantastic methods for generating new leads and ultimately for bringing new revenue into your business but they both have the particularly misleading effect of making you believe that marketing and sales are synonymous when they're not.
This can portray sales as a result of simply educating your prospects on your expertise that will automatically translate into new sales for your business. While it is possible, that's not always the case. More importantly, while both social media and referrals are great mediums for new business, these mediums will help you sustain your business but they won't help you scale it.
Both social media and referrals are vastly out of your control in regards to things like the algorithms that control what percentage of your followers see your content, your engagement levels, and things like whether or not the platform is actually working that day. We have all experienced the shutdown of major platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and there are so many other factors that we simply can't control with social media.
Similarly, with referrals, volume is the one thing you have no control over as well as whether or not the people who are being referred to you are actually your target clients.
These factors make sales through platforms like social media and referrals, hard to predict and even more difficult to repeat, which is why it's hard to rely on these two methods alone to make up your entire sales strategy.
Inbound sales are extremely important and a valuable part of a sales process, but they are still just one part of it. The other component that complements your inbound efforts is an outbound sales strategy. This is when you are the one who is reaching out and initiating contact with potential clients. This is a strategy that you need to be engaging in if you want to secure corporate clients.
Prospecting is a way to put your business on your prospect's radar and to let them know you exist and you can help. It's not your prospect's responsibility to find you — it's your responsibility to find them. Let me repeat that again for the people in the back. It is not your prospect's responsibility to find you — it is your responsibility to find them.
To your prospects, you are one of many options. While to you, your prospects are one of one. This is your target client. This is the company that your services and product were specifically designed to serve. This is the organization that you are looking for. They are one of one to you. Taking this approach to sales helps you understand why prospecting is a necessary part of your B2B sales strategy, and the beautiful thing is it works.
Research conducted by the Pipeline shows that 75% of surveyed executives are willing to make an appointment or attend an event based on a cold call or email alone. This tells you that there are opportunities out there waiting on the other side of a simple email or a cold call, if only you'd be willing to try.
Outbound sales is one way to begin redefining your sales strategy. When you are the one initiating the conversation, you can do it in a way that feels good to you. This leads us to our next approach.
0:08:39 The second approach we're contrasting is permission-based sales. I'm curious to know if you've ever heard of permission-based sales before. This is an approach to sales that focuses on engaging with prospects who have made it clear that they want to hear from you — they've given you permission to sell to them.
Sometimes this is a result of relationship building over time. In other cases it's the result of doing good research beforehand to ensure that there's alignment between the problem and the solution. In other cases, it could simply be the result of a well-timed, well-crafted email to the right person.
What's important to understand is that the goal here is not to lead with your product or your service; it's to intentionally build rapport such that your prospect is open to and welcomes a deeper conversation surrounding the problems and challenges that they're facing.
When you approach your prospecting with this in mind, not only do you relieve yourself of the pressure to convince the other person to be interested in what you have to say, you also lead with human connection and curiosity that creates a space for genuine connection and conversation.
If you've never heard me say it before, I'll say it here again. Success with prospecting is not measured by securing a sale; it's measured by securing a conversation. This is where we've gone wrong in the past with sales. Often we've led with the mindset that a successful cold email or cold call means a sale has been made at that moment when in reality, a successful cold call or email means that a conversation has been set. It's during that conversation that both of you can then determine if working together is a good fit and mutually beneficial.
This approach runs in complete contrast to pressure-based sales, which focuses on securing a sale as quickly as possible with little attempt to understand your prospect's needs. Pressure-based sales is probably the worst approach you can take with B2B prospects because remember I said earlier that to your prospects, you are one of many options.
Corporations have both time, money and abundance. Trust me when I say they will move on to the next vendor the moment they catch a whiff of pressure tactics. No one wants their humanity to be undermined, belittled or undervalued simply in an effort to make a sale. And at the end of the day, we are all people selling to people.
Corporations are going to spend the money either way. Give them a reason to spend it with you.
This actually reminds me of Aesop's Fable of the North Wind and the Sun. It's actually one of my favorites. The story simply illustrates that if you want to get someone to take their jacket off, you don't send the wind because the harder the wind blows, the more tightly that person is going to hold onto their jacket and pull it in tighter. Instead, you send the sun to shine and create enough warmth that the person takes off their jacket themselves. I think this story is a perfect depiction of the difference between permission-based sales and pressure-based sales.
0:11:51 Hey friend, so you know when you were younger and you found out that the popular kid in school was having a party, but then you realized that you weren't invited to the party. Everyone you knew was going to be there. Then, you're like, "Who cares? I don't want to go anyways," but secretly you wanted to go. This is kind of like that, except you're invited.
I want to personally invite you to join me for our exclusive Corporate Coins Training. If you're an avid listener to the podcast, then you already know that here we cover all things serving corporate clients, but this workshop takes everything you're already learning to a whole new level.
During this free training, I'll be walking you through the framework, of course, for how to attract, sell to, and serve corporate clients while also diving into the coins and culture to address the challenges that we specifically face in these environments as Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs.
This training is interactive. It's high-energy, industry-leading content, jokes and laughter, and of course, it's a safe space for us to come together, have real conversation, and for you to be supported on your journey.
Here's the catch: there is no replay.
You either come live or you miss it. This, my friend, is why you're going to want to make sure you register for this training and mark it on your calendar. The training, of course, is free, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an investment required. The investment is your time — that's it. You bring you, and I'll meet you there with everything else you'll need.
To get all the details and to register for the free training, just click the link in the show notes to save your spot. Trust me! You'll be glad that you did.
All right, friend. Back to the episode.
0:13:42 Lastly, the final approach that we're talking about today is relational selling, which is also known as consultative selling in some circles. I think it goes without saying that people want to feel understood, including you and me. This is true of corporate buyers as well. Remember, we're people selling to other people.
Research actually shows that 84% of corporate buyers are more likely to buy from a sales rep that understands their goals. Yet, 57% of those same buyers feel that sales reps lack adequate knowledge of their business. This means that standing out and setting yourself up for success with prospecting in sales simply requires you to lead with a genuine desire to know and understand your prospect, their business and their challenges. That alone is already going to set you apart from others. This is where relational selling comes into play. This is an approach to sales in which you take the time to build trust with your prospect and understand their needs before offering them a solution.
Its counterpart is transactional selling, and that leads with a focus on the features and benefits of the product and service without first identifying the individual need of the prospect. Now, keep in mind that I'm saying prospect, but that doesn't always mean the person per se that you're speaking with.
In B2B, although your conversations are happening with individuals, they are representatives of your potential client, which is the company or organization as a whole. This means that when I'm talking about taking the time to understand the individual needs of your prospect, I'm referring to the company and not necessarily the individual person that you may be speaking with. Even if your point of contact is the CEO themselves, you are still being hired by the company and not that person to provide a service or product that's in the best interest of the business. It's important to keep that in mind.
The perspective of relational selling is that of a long-term investment with your prospect. If they don't end up becoming a client, you will continue to nurture the relationship, so that down the line when there's an opportunity, they've already built an established trust with you.
Transactional sales, on the other hand, are usually one-and-done with the relationship ending as soon as the prospect turns down the offer or as quickly as the sale is complete. This is the onto-the-next type of mentality, and it's certainly fine in some cases when you're selling a $5 product in which you don't really need to invest in a long-term relationship with your customer, but it's not a good approach when you're charging $50,000 for your services.
Establishing a relationship with your prospect and eventually your client creates a foundation for a long-term working relationship and opens up the door to future opportunities that you would never have been able to upsell them into.
0:16:40 Relationships increase the lifetime value for both parties. These three approaches form the framework for sales with integrity, alignment, and I suspect an approach to sales that is better aligned with who you are and how you want to impact others.
A common thread between all three approaches is that:
As an expert, it is not enough to be a master of your expertise. Success in B2B sales requires you to also become a master of the sales process as well. The good news is that, now, there's a way you can do both. These approaches form the foundation of a sales framework that's in alignment with who you are and what you value.
0:17:30 All right, friend. Let's recap our conversation today and talk about how we can convert this conversation to coins.
I started off today's conversation discussing that our beliefs around prospecting and our own experiences on the receiving end of it can become a barrier to actively pursuing new clients in our business. This opened up the door to an opportunity for you to reinvent your relationship with sales and to shift your perspective to see it in a new light.
We discussed three different approaches that were active in nature and that led with integrity.
As you know, our conversation is never complete without talking about how you can take action on our conversation. Today is no different.
Your action item for today is to reach out to three prospects this week. That means you're going to be engaging in outbound sales. Listening to today's conversation is one thing, but putting it into action is where you'll begin to build up the skills, the confidence, and begin to see the difference in your bottom line. Now that you have the framework, it's time to apply it, and share with me how it goes. Send me a message on LinkedIn, I'd love to get a follow up from you.
0:18:50 If you found today's conversation helpful and you want to learn more about how we can help you secure corporate clients, I want to invite you to our free training, Corporate Coins: How to Attract, Sell and Serve Corporate Clients.
This free training is designed to walk you through both the mindset and the mechanics of attracting and successfully closing corporate deals. I've designed this training, so that whether you're brand new to this or you're looking to land your biggest contract yet, you'll be leaving this training with the path forward to your next level of income and impact.
We are holding our final Corporate Coins workshop of the year this month, so this is your last opportunity to register for it. We held one last month in November and have brought it back by popular demand to help you end your year off strong.
Friend, if you enjoyed today's episode, you definitely need to be at the workshop because we dive even deeper. You can find the link to register for the training in the show notes in the description of the episode.
If you're not subscribed already, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast while you're at it because in the next episode it is our season finale. We are going to be talking about how to position your business for B2B success in 2023.
I know a lot of our clients have recently decided to focus exclusively on serving B2B, and that might be a shift that you recently made in your business as well. With that, comes a lot of different changes in perspective as well as the approach and the tactics that you're taking to both your sales and even in some cases, your services.
If that's you, I want to end off this season by making sure you use the remainder of this year and the beginning of next to focus on the things that are going to move the needle forward for you in your business and position you for financial success with corporate clients.
As always, I am grateful for this time with you. I truly, truly, truly look forward to our time together and to the conversations that we get to have here on The Profit Scale.
Before you go, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast, so you don't miss our next episode in two weeks. While you're at it, please do me a favor and leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast.
As small as that action is, it really does go a long way to help us reach more consultants and firms just like you. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes to leave that rating and review. Myself and my team, thank you in advance for your support. We genuinely do. It means a lot to us.
I'll be here, at the same time and in the same place next week. Until then, I wish you coins, confidence, and all the bags! Bye for now, friend.