Morning guys,
Got an amazing hangover/headache from drinking and lack of sleep.
Despite my attempts to stay in bed – it doesn’t really work well and I think I’ll just need to catch up tomorrow instead.
Anyway – I had a bit of a ‘proud’ moment yesterday when it came to the next step in the layers of Pearl Lemon capabilities.
The day before yesterday I decided I wanted to invite one of our clients to join us on a Zoom and watch me cold call for him.
This is something that is high pressure and high stakes.
We’re into the 2nd month of our campaign and not yet hitting then numbers needed for his account and so I wanted to make calls myself to get a sense of what’s really happening and where we’re at.
And at the same time to see if I could deal with the pressure of the client listening in to the call so he could course correct and potentially even tell us he’s really unhappy with the way it’s been sold.
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I decided I would share my screen so he could see our ‘system’ and ‘setup’ so there was total transparency of process.
I then also invited some of my team to watch and listen in as part of those calls so they could see how they went.
The sense I have (and in truth I don’t know enough about other sales teams to know whether it’s something that is common) is that it’s pretty unusual to invite a client on to watch you ‘work’ for them.
I guess as a point of personal pride it’s something that I want to see if I can do – something that I can push myself to do as a point of growth.
I’ve actually now (well a moment ago) invited multiple clients to join us on some sessions where we cold call in front of them.
I’ve done it now with 2 clients – I’d now like to start standardising this with all clients.
I think it’ll help me learn about their expectations, it’ll help inspire my team, help me improve as a sales rep…and of course help our clients get more appointments!
Which means they’ll keep working with us 🙂
So there’s a couple of things it’s important to understand as to why I’m doing this:
- It’s fun (and challenging to place yourself under pressure)
- I want to see if it accelerates my development in terms of my sales ability
- I’ll able to actually deliver solid appointments for my clients
- It’ll be a massive USP when it comes to selling our services
- It allows for appropriate benchmarking so you can then determine what ‘success’ looks like for your sales team when they get on the phone
I want to expand on #5 for a moment. Doing #5 allows you to really understand what success looks like for your team.
One of the challenges that come with hiring a sales team but NOT being a salesperson yourself is that you don’t necessarily know what the benchmark should look like.
I’ve had times with the team where I’ve been told ‘it’s not working for X client’ or ‘this can’t be done’ – and then I’ve got on the phone and proven it’s nothing like that at all.
Furthermore, this sets a reference point for others that follow.
If I spend 45 minutes on the phone and I can book for a client – then the team get to see a ‘template’ for how to book appointments. And if I’m able to do it several times in a row and you hear enough of my pitches – you get to understand the full extent of the humour and comedy that I employ when I call.
The weeks that are about to follow are going to be testing as I decide to invite all of our clients to listen in whilst we start making calls for them.
I’ll report back in a couple of weeks with the results I HOPE come from this new experiment 🙂
I’m excited as I enjoy the pressure of trying to make something like this work – wish me luck!
