How to Sell Podcast: Make How You Sell, Why You Win

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:00:00]:
This episode, you're gonna learn how to shorten the sales cycle by creating a buyer's journey that's based on educating and nurturing through insight. Welcome back to another episode of the How to Sell podcast. I'm your host, Luigi Prestonenzi. As always, We are pumped and honored that you have joined us for what will be this is a very special episode because it's the 1st week of a new month. And if you're a long time listener, I just wanna say thank you for showing up each and every week to support our growing community. And if you're a first time listener, thank you for joining. We hope you take away some actionable insights, and we hope you come back each and every week. So if you do like this episode, don't forget to subscribe to whichever platform you're listening to.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:00:46]:
But why is this a special episode? Because, David, I finally got in the mail. I ordered an extra extra large. No. Extra and therefore Forum for you listening, I'm pulling out a picture or not a picture. It's it's it's the top of the best football team in the world, AC Milan, and David and I have a running competition. And if you wanna know who David is, David's your cohost. I know you don't join to listen to David, but he is the cohost of this podcast. And, Dave, the competition do you wanna let folks know what our competition's about.

David Fastuca [00:01:21]:
Yeah. Alright. Alright. 1st and foremost first and foremost, since I've been cohosting this show, Ratings have gone through the roof. People have been calling saying, thank god someone else is on the on the podcast because we're sick of, Louis' voice jokes. We have a running, game not a game. It's a challenge on who can sell the most each month. Right? So, obviously yeah.

David Fastuca [00:01:48]:
Alright. Well done, Louie. You won for the month of of Jan only because you sandbagged some deals, from last year because they didn't

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:01:55]:
Sandbag. We love a good sandbag. All I'm hearing, Dave, is your pipeline doesn't grow with excuses. Excuses. But your pipeline grows

David Fastuca [00:02:04]:
with action. No. Hang on a second. Hang on a second. No more excuses, but this is a good thing, Rob, because you nurtured a few of those deals that were taking, you know, quite a bit time to to close, and they just all happen to close in the 1 month. So that's how you won, which is great, but that's the topic for today's episode, Nurturing.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:02:21]:
Yes. So this topic, a very valuable topic, Dave, and I I I don't think it's a topic that's often discussed enough. Right? We talk about prospecting. We talk about closing, all the tactics around discovery, but not enough focus is put on the nurturing that and why the nurturing aspect is important. And you did bring something up which, for me, is critical. When you think about it, we we often divert a lot of our attention on deals that we think will give us a result in a short period of time. Right? Because we are in a performance based role. But that nurturing component is so, so important.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:03:05]:
And, you know, the first thing, I want you to do if you're listening to this thinking, you know what? I'm not nurturing enough, is really start to map out that buying journey your buyers' need to go through. And start asking yourself some questions around what information or education or insight, can I share with them that'll help them think differently? And and that's the first key question when it comes to building your buyer's journey. Right? You've gotta be asking, what can I give them that'll help them? It'll stop them to think, I didn't consider that, or that's interesting, or I was thinking about that, but you've brought it back and it's helping me think a bit differently about it. That's the the sort of the key first outcome from designing your buyer's journey.

David Fastuca [00:03:58]:
And the key thing there as well is to when you're planning this out, Not to be so rigid with it. Right? Because not everyone is gonna fall into that buyer's journey and It's gonna map it a 100%. Right? And what I mean by that is you might map it out where you're gonna send a piece of content that's relevant to them every 3 or 4 days And it's Prestinenzi. But understand, review your notes that you had with that prospect. If they mention x, Feel free to break out of that customer journey and send something that's truly relative to them. Right? Because we can fall into this process of, I've got a customer journey. I put them into a cadence, and they get all these great emails, and they're still not moving Yeah. Which then can cause that that issue, Luigi, of People stressing out.

David Fastuca [00:04:46]:
Right? Okay. I've sent them a few bits and pieces. They're still not responding. I'm now getting the anxiety, and then I'm just following up For following up's sales. What do you do there?

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:04:56]:
Look. This is this is a common issue, that we see is we follow-up. And if if If you are sending an email and the email starts with just following up on my previous note, I want you to stop doing that right away because We need to think about the value that we're creating in the buying process. And if we are only sending a message that says I'm following up, it means we're trying to serve our own needs. Right? So that's an opportunity to sales, this is not a follow-up on the previous note. It's, here's some information. You might be thinking a, b, c. Here's some information around a, b, c that will help you in this process.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:05:41]:
That's why it's important to really understand what are the potential objections or concerns or queries that the buying committee might be having and you address it. You sales, often, when people get to this step of this process or the buying journey, sometimes they've got questions about a, b, c. Mhmm. Here's a bit of insight about how you can tackle a, b, c. Right? Well, here's a bit of insight about how company x tackled a, b, c. Yeah?

David Fastuca [00:06:10]:
What what do you do in the case where, You know, you've got a deal there who, when you had the 1st call or 2, seemed absolutely amazing. Perfect. They love that. You love that. You know that you can help them. Then all of a sudden, you know, it goes cold for a couple of months. Right? So we're talking a bit lengthy here When your typical buyer cycle, it might be 3 weeks, 2 weeks. Yep.

David Fastuca [00:06:36]:
And now they've got an issue with Their let let's use our our business. They've got an issue with growing their pipeline. They're getting more sales, but they're they're just they're too busy. Right? How do you how would you nurture that deal there knowing that they wanna the prices per everything's lines up. Right? It's just that there's this busyness in the background that's occurring there.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:06:58]:
Yeah. Why look, there could be another issue there, Dave, where if if there's a need, they're saying the right things, but busy, they could be stalling because there could be a lack of trust. Right? That's why if if if everything makes sense, but they're saying we're just too busy right now

David Fastuca [00:07:15]:
Yep. It

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:07:16]:
it it's potentially a stall. They are lacking a bit of confidence. They might be questioning, can we do this or can you do this? So that's when it's important to stop the sales. And I love the did you know. Right? Did you know when you do x, this can be achieved. Did you know this is what's happening in the market? Did you know, just dropping did you knows? And I've got one right now. And I'll give you an example, Dave. We had a discovery call probably a week and a half ago, did the discovery brief, put my video together, sent the David, the discovery brief with my video, and I heard nothing for a week.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:07:57]:
Right? The actual action the agreed action plan, we'd missed one of our key milestones. And I'm thinking, oh, Is that a red flag? What did I do? I nurtured. Sent a note on LinkedIn. It wasn't a note. Did you receive my discovery brief? It was, I I I I I put a link to an article about training retention. Because when I met with them, the discussion that we had was previous project retention on the content wasn't so good.

David Fastuca [00:08:37]:
And this wasn't any of our written content. This was a third party piece. Yeah? Careers. It was

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:08:42]:
the third party piece of content that I shared, and I said, I think you might find this valuable. They talk about how how to address the retaining the content once it's been delivered, and there was no call to action. What do you think they did within 24 hours?

David Fastuca [00:09:00]:
Responded?

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:09:01]:
They responded to my email.

David Fastuca [00:09:03]:
Ah, so they didn't they didn't acknowledge or respond to your LinkedIn. They respond, okay. Alright.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:09:07]:
No. And they responded to my email, said, thanks for this. We're reviewing. We'll get back to you in the next couple of days. So the reason why I wanna bring this up is because you you also can leverage different channels to nurture. And Nurturing isn't I'm gonna nurture you with a call to action. Not everything needs a call to action. In fact, I think 9 times out of 10, you can strip out the call to action because it's putting pressure on somebody to make a decision, to to take action on.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:09:42]:
That's why it's called a call to action. When you're just dripping, drip feeding and saying, here's some info. This is some insight. You might find this valuable. Have a look at this link. Tag them on a post on LinkedIn. What you're doing is your your becoming a source of value to the other person. Right? Now, I wanna reel off some interesting stats here that I was reading this morning.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:10:07]:
75% of buyers prefer virtual interactions with salespeople and a more self-service approach. 40% of buyers named having to contact sales for a demo, or free trial among the 3 things vendors do to make them less likely to buy. 81% of buyers want to find pricing information on their own, and 55% of buyers Say, reviews are one of the most important factors when evaluating solution providers. So Mhmm. What do those stats actually mean? It means There's certain information that we don't have to tell them over a call that we should be making readily available. But then you've got all the other aspects that are impacting the buying journey, the committee, different members. So that's why we've got to be thinking about the human, nonhuman touch. Yeah?

David Fastuca [00:11:11]:
That makes a a great point there. Yeah. It's it's huge. What I you know what I've noticed and that I've been in the buying cycle of of other peoples And something that I'm trying, with us at Forum is this asynchronous chat. Right? And what that means is is having that WhatsApp the chats with a prospect, and you're going back and forth. They might send you some text. They might send you an audio note. I had this recently on when I was enrolling into someone else's, you know, learning program, and and it worked amazingly well.

David Fastuca [00:11:42]:
And it wasn't a low ticket. It was Quite a high ticket, price that I sign up for, but we're able to go back and forth, and I didn't have to invest in locking time in my calendar. It was a nice, smooth process. Right? I can get back to them at my time. I wasn't pressured. I think there might be a shift towards this in in time. Again, when you're ready, you will then engage and say, okay. I wanna see this in more detail.

David Fastuca [00:12:08]:
If you're selling a piece of technology, you wanna see how it works and ask a bunch of questions, but you wanna get the pricing and and bits and pieces out the way because you don't want that to be that barrier that hangs head over you. Right?

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:12:20]:
And I know you know this, Dave, because I talk about it a lot, but I love and and some gurus and experts will say the funnel is no longer valid anymore, and it's changing. But I still believe strongly in the funnel, and I think depending on where your buyer's at. This is why it's important to be asking some early stage questions. If you're in sales and you're thinking about nurturing, They're either gonna be at that awareness. Right? Even some tie sometimes if you're running outreach, they're at that that precontemplation stage. They're then they move into that awareness, the contemplation, and then they've gotta move into the consideration and then the action. So as they're progressing down that journey, your content pieces that you share and nurture should change as well. If they're at awareness and problem identification, it's about helping them understand or helping them think about the problem.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:13:16]:
But if they've gone through that point, they've they've identified the problem, and then they're thinking about now what are the different options, then your content needs to shift to, you know, what are those options and what are the pros and cons, right, in choosing a or b. And then as they're getting to that point of decision, it's validating their decision they're about to make. That's what they're seeking. They're seeking confidence. And our good friend, Jen Ellen, talks about 40 to 60% of deals get stuck at no decision, status quo. And sometimes at that point, you've gotta be giving them some insight and nurturing them around the cost of inaction, bringing that to the forefront. Right? So it's really important to think about this from a sales perspective. You're listening to this episode.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:14:04]:
You're trying to get deals to progress through your funnel. That's the goal of what we do in sales. Right? We have a conversation. We have a meeting. We wanna progress them through to a point of decision. So you cannot just be following up for the sake of following up. You've got to think about what content pieces can I share across various platforms? Get those articles ahead of time. If you wanna save time doing this, Think about all the all the questions that your prospects and your the people in the buying journey are having.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:14:36]:
They become themes of content you can share with them. Find those links. Get those articles. Get some posts that you could share with them, a post from other people, pop them in a spreadsheet. Yeah. And allocate. Is it a top of funnel? Is it a middle? Is it a bottom? And that way, you can start to be more programmatic. You can start to share more consistently, and it's gonna be it's gonna take you less time to nurture and educate your buyers through that journey.

David Fastuca [00:15:11]:
Have you ever wondered how fast growing companies 2, 3, and even 10 x their annual revenue? They have something more than just a sales plan. They have a sales operating system that is the engine that drives the revenue function for their business. If you need more qualified leads, if you're struggling to nurture deals, if you need to close more deals faster, Or even if you need to hire a plus salespeople, click the link in this podcast episode or visit growth Forum to have a chat with Luigi and myself

David Fastuca [00:15:46]:
to see how we can help you. Now back to the show. You just, stole my, topic. I was just gonna riff off there and and sound smart, but then you you stole that from me. So thanks, Louie. So, like, I know what you're probably thinking, right, this sounds crazy investment of time. I've got 50 to a 100 deals that I'm managing. Like what we said, create, like, a simple Google Sheet spreadsheet, few columns of the stages of the funnel.

David Fastuca [00:16:17]:
You could even create different versions of the text itself. Right? So you might have a version that is for email that you're just copying and pasting and adjusting a little bit. You might have a LinkedIn version that's a lot shorter that you can copy and paste. If you've got a team of sellers, work with your team to come up with these yourself. If you got a marketing team, get their report. Work together To create this this document. Don't think it's someone else's job. It's your job.

David Fastuca [00:16:43]:
This is what's gonna help you close more sales, so take responsibility, Lead this project if you if it doesn't exist in the business or create it yourself. Mhmm. Right? Because it will help. Look. I'm using a a little tool called TextExpander where on my on my keyboard, I can do shortcuts, it puts copy in just to save me time, and it even works on my iPhone. Right? So Yeah. There's an app there. So it doesn't matter where I am, where I'm responding.

David Fastuca [00:17:10]:
I've got these bits and pieces. You can start RuleFi with a spreadsheet, but the key action is to actually do it and start to actually put these notes down.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:17:19]:
And I I wanna give a real life example for something else, Dave, with p three. This is a real life. Average time to close a deal in that business is around 65 days. Okay? This particular deal closed in 28 days. So pretty much it shaved half the amount of time.

David Fastuca [00:17:43]:
The context. Yeah. Look. P 3, just give it a quick one line on what it is and how

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:17:47]:
to use it

David Fastuca [00:17:48]:
to sell.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:17:50]:
It's a recovery product where people go I mean, think of a gym, but for recovery, they pay a membership based. And we are selling a franchise system, and it's not a cheap franchise system, you're looking at 7 to $750,000. So the decision criteria is quite a serious criteria because it's not just a it's not a business buying it. It's an in the in most cases, it's an individual making a decision. So, actually, the weight of the decision is far more significant because they're spending their own money, in some cases, getting finance. Now this particular example, what was great about it, when it came point to signing the contract, the feedback from the buyer was I enjoyed this experience. The process was broken down into microsteps, and I was being educated through each step to make the process easier to go through. That, my friends is that's the nurturing process that we've developed.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:18:55]:
Yeah? And we've developed it in in full transparency through HubSpot, and we've got pieces of content specifically designed Forum different stages of that journey. That as, as per Dave's comment, working with marketing, we've built them out ahead of time so we're not doing that reactive. And remember, sales first principle team. Sales first principle is about being proactive versus reactive. Like anything, like prospecting, like anything that you do. If you're in a reactive mode, it's really difficult to sustain. You'll have pockets of success, but you get tired and worn out because you're constantly being reacting to that process. But when you're proactive, you build that journey out, You think about the content pieces to share and then you put it in a in a system, your sales operating system, to drive that, you are being proactive, and it's a lot easier to facilitate.