Tuesday Tip 13- A in B.E.A.R. Sales Sequences

If you're building the positive beliefs about sales, you're starting to look for ways to put those beliefs into practice by actually doing sales like a good human. What does that look like? In this episode, I share the actual steps I teach my clients. Not only do I teach these steps, I have been using them myself for over 25 years of selling. As you get busy, you'll see how important it is to keep your beliefs in focus every step of the way.

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Music composed and arranged by Luke Brown. Find him on TikTok @lukasaftermidnight

Transcript

Do you think sales is a bad word? When you hear the word sales, I wonder what images come to mind, whatever your relationship is with selling. I'm glad you're here. Let's have a conversation about how to sell like a good human. Hi, welcome to conversations with good humans. I'm your host, Catherine Brown and I'm author of the book called how good humans sell.

This week on our Tuesday tips, we're talking about some regular actions to take while selling, when you know the R that you want with our bear model, our sensor results, then it's time to zero in on what actions to take to meet the goals. What I'm about to share with you is my actual sales sequence.

These are the steps I personally take to get in touch with people without feeling pushy myself. So I'm giving you my exact formula of what I do to build membership programs, to find corporate clients. This is what I train my clients to do. It really works. Please feel free to use these steps or adapt them to your own needs.

I have seen them work across every industry. And if you're listening to this while you're multitasking, you might wanna listen through it the first time. And then you're gonna wanna come back with a way to take notes on your computer or your phone, or even a notebook. I really think you'll wanna have this information later because this is the stuff that people ask me to tell them all the time, literally step by step by step.

They will say, I know you teach principles about selling Catherine, but tell me exactly what you do. Well, here it is. This is exactly what I do to take action and to get sales appointments set with prospects who will become clients. Here are the five steps that I put together before I ever even send a message.

So first. I have to decide who I am pursuing. I make an actual list. Maybe there are people I've had contact with before. Maybe not. I recommend limiting your list to no more than 30 people or companies. Sometimes people have more than one possible contact inside a company. In that case, I would do like 15 or 20 companies because you might have two or three people per, and that's a lot of people to contact.

If you go much bigger than this, it gets the whole thing gets confusing. Even with the CRM. I think our brain can only hold so much at a time. So I'd rather work on a group of people that I wanna do business with and have them say yes or no, and then move on to the next, next chunk. This has worked for me for decades, even when I was a full-time professional cold collar.

This is the way I, my brain worked. I like to work on getting appointments with, you know, five to 10 people at a time. And these small chunks really helped me. I. Big long list. Okay. Second thing you have to know the goal of your outreach, your shorter term and your longer term goal. So this sounds kind of crazy.

Why do you wanna follow up with them? Are you inviting them to come to something that you're hosting? Are you wanting to meet, make an appointment to meet with them when you're both gonna be at a conference, are you inviting them to a discovery call or a virtual coffee on zoom? You need to think through what the call to action is and, and why that's the sequence.

So I will do a lot of research, do a very targeted message to someone and invite them for a call with me. Or to come to an event. If it's for something live in Houston, I might just have coming to the event as the first step, but it depends on which thing I'm selling for. So you gotta know the goal so that you can have a clear call to action.

Third, you need to track your work. I think that there are many free and inexpensive CRMs out there, and they're a great way to stay organized. I'm happy to have a conversation with anybody, make a list of suggestions about that. I have a few opinions about ones I think are a little too hard and many that are wonderful, but that's really a topic for another time.

At the bare minimum, you need a spreadsheet of the names that you're going to work on. Do not do this on your calendar. Do not use your Google calendar or your outlook calendar to be the main place you keep this data. It's just, it makes your calendar too junked up and it becomes overwhelming. So you need another place to keep track of what you're doing.

fourth. You wanna know your timing. So if your list is cold outreaches, then you're gonna wanna clump your, your touches, your outreaches closer together, because people who don't know love and trust us yet are barely reading. Right? They're super busy, super overwhelmed. They don't have a relationship with us.

So they're not seeing everything we're sending. They're not listening to everything we're sending. I think three business days between attempts at reaching people is good. Um, if you know them better and you've worked with them before, but not for a long time, you could maybe go four days or even a week apart, but that's, if they recognize your name, you know, you're a safe sender in their email box.

And, you know, they, they are more likely to pay attention to you. If you. Feel nervous as I'm sharing this, you want to work on your mindset around this idea. People are very busy, they don't get all of our messages. You're not being too pushy. I find that people typically see or hear about half of what.

What I do.  even people who follow my email marketing, you know, don't always read them all and, and, you know, they, they lie and trust me. So I know it sounds crazy, but it it's really true. You're going to have to do two times the number that you think you will in terms of the number of outreaches, if you really want them to notice you.

So for example, if you want them to feel like.  they heard from you three times. You're probably gonna have to actually reach out six times. And that leads to this next point, which is that you need to write a couple versions of your value proposition so that you feel less like a robot and you can experiment with what messaging lands best with your prospects.

You'll use this value proposition in your communications. You might literally list it verbatim, but you certainly will use it as a reminder of your talking points. Now, if you don't know what I'm saying about the value proposition, I really wanna encourage you to read chapter seven of my book. How good humans sell?

I give the step by step process of writing an effective two to three sentence value proposition. I also share the formula for an effective sales email of how to ask for a meeting with someone. The book is on Amazon, around the whole world. It really is the easiest way and the most effective way for you to learn, to write good sales copy.

I promise it's proven it gets my clients into the target accounts that they prospect cold from scratch. And it's, it will help you have a construction to follow, to write very compelling customer focused. Copy. So that you don't talk about yourself the whole time and you write like a good human last step is you get to work on the calls and the emails.

So my personal sequence is alternating voicemail, email, LinkedIn, LinkedIn memo, voice memo. Sometimes I write a handwritten note. I do these things. I, I will try someone about six times. I really love using voice memos, LinkedIn and direct messages. And if I know. A little bit already. I might even text. So you have choices about how you do the outreach, but if you write that copy and you have that clear value proposition, To put in your messages over and over and over again, you are going to be clear and you're not gonna be winging it.

Now, the purpose for my outreach is usually to invite them to a short discovery call. I really just want 20 minutes to start with someone because these typically are not super warm leads and. I don't know for sure that I'm the best person to help them. So on a short call, we're qualifying each other.

We're getting to know each other. We're deciding if we're gonna talk again and I might end up giving a referral to someone else. So we wanna make it easy for them to say, yes, I go for these 15, 20 minute calls. After you get started and you email and ask for a meeting, then you wait your chosen amount of time, maybe, you know, 2, 3, 4 days, and then leave a voicemail with a similar message again.

And then you, and then you wait and then you notice that they get back to you or they don't. And then you try something else, maybe LinkedIn email or a call or, or a voice memo, just depending on what you've done. I literally alternate and map. Don't forget, you can also share a marketing asset that you think they'll find beneficial.

It could be a blog post. It could be a podcast that you were a guest on. It could be a podcast that you heard that was in your industry that you just thought was really wonderful. And you're saying, Hey, I really like this. You might like it too. So. There's ways we can even work in these assets. That's a whole other topic.

We can talk about another time, but what I want you to hear me say is you plan that sequence. You write your copy ahead of time. You've planned, who you're gonna pursue, and you're doing it in small chunks of people. This is how I do it for more information like this. Follow my email marketing at extraboldsales.com.

What you do is you scroll all the way to the bottom of the homepage and you can sign up for my Friday emails. I give away tons of tips, just like this. And I really wanna see you enjoy selling, have great success. Sales is the path to what we want with our businesses to enable us to be the person we wanna be with our families to give us choices and options.

It's really a glorious profession and I love to help people enjoy it more. So please sign up for that email marketing, get a copy of how good humans sell, if you would like to see those templates for those sales emails and happy selling. Thanks.