Keys to Better Sell Your B2B Services as an Agency
Last update: 28 March 2023 at 09:35 am
3.00/5Today, regardless of the industry, knowing how to sell is a crucial skill. An agency may have the best talent, the best service, and the best digital presence, but if it can’t sell, it won’t last long.
To talk about this, we organized a private call with Philippe Gillotin, Sales Coach at iconoClass.
The goal of this call was to get concrete advice on how to improve your sales skills and how to become a better sales person as an agency director.
All these tips are in the notes that follow 👇
Making a great first impression
When starting a sales process, the first impression is key. As soon as we meet a new person, he or she will immediately form an opinion about us.
This first impression is crucial, because it will influence the direction the relationship will take.
Therefore, to start a business process on the right foot, you need to know how to make a good first impression with each of your prospects.
In the call, Philippe shares several best practices.
Having the right attitude
It may seem obvious, but :
- A strong hello,
- A good intonation,
- A smile,
- A firm handshake,
- A straight posture with shoulders back,
- A confident look in the eyes of your interlocutor,
All these “basic” elements are necessary to make a good first impression. Of course, it must be natural, otherwise the result may be a little awkward.
Preparing your meeting
Do your homework. When you have a meeting with a prospect, it is necessary to prepare well so that it goes well.
When we talk about preparation, we are not talking about just preparing your presentation, your material, and your questions. We are also talking about getting to know the person you are talking to.
This is for two reasons:
- You can tailor your speech to be more impactful.
- You can find a good ice breaker to start the discussion.
Having an ice breaker will allow you to start the meeting calmly and to get to know the person better before entering the real sales process.
To find this ice breaker, you have several options:
- Study your contact’s LinkedIn profile, and choose something you can bounce off of.
- Share a news item, a piece of content that you saw and that made you react.
To sum up
To put it more simply, making an excellent first impression involves two main elements:
- Having a good attitude (posture, handshake, intonation, etc.)
- Prepare well in advance to adapt your speech and find an ice breaker.
Now, all the elements Philippe shares work in a physical meeting. But what about a video meeting?
Covid’s impact on sales
We cannot deny the fact that since 2020, professional relationships have evolved and video meetings have become the norm.
So how do you build a relationship of trust and sell without seeing the person in person? This is a very legitimate question.
The only solution is to be transparent and honest with your prospect. The best way is to clearly express the fact that you’re not necessarily comfortable with video, and that you would prefer to meet in person.
Entering into this level of transparency, with a person you don’t know well, allows you to start creating a relationship. Opening up and being transparent about your feelings is the best way to create a relationship through a screen.
With this in mind, once you start a meeting, how do you go about moving the discussion towards a sale?
The importance of taking the lead on a meeting
One thing to do when you are received by a prospect is to show that you master your subject so well that you will take the lead in the interview.
Taking the lead does not mean taking over the conversation. It rather means that we will guide the interview and that we will be the ones to lead the dance.
How do we do this, concretely? There is a specific tool to use, just after the hello and the ice breaker: the OPA.
This refers to three steps that must be followed:
- Objective
- Plan
- Agreement
Objective: We start by explaining the objective of the meeting. We explain that we are going to try to identify our contact’s needs and see how we can work together.
Plan: We go on to explain how the meeting is going to take place and say that we are going to ask some questions.
Agreement: We finish by asking our interlocutor if it is convenient for him. Normally, it should give its agreement by answering “yes”, which makes it possible to condition the beginning of our interview by the positive one.
It is this agreement that really launches the sales meeting. And it is at this point that asking the right questions becomes very important.
Asking the right questions
In the call, Philippe shares a specific method for asking the right questions at the right times, and moving the discussion in the right direction.
We talk about the SPIN method:
- Situation
- Problems
- Implication
- Need Pay-Off
Let’s look at each of these steps.
Situation
The first step is to ask very broad questions to understand the situation of our prospect. Before starting to talk about problems, we must take an interest in the person in front of us and clearly identify the situation in which he or she finds himself or herself.
Then, we move on to the SPIN P, at which point the person will begin to expose their problems and needs.
Problems
At this stage, the idea is to ask questions that will expose the problems our prospect is facing. The objective is to see how well we can calibrate our offer to help them solve their problems.
Implication
Once the problems have been identified, it’s time to get into the value proposition and create interest in our prospect by talking about their involvement.
This is the I of SPIN: we will push our contact to project himself into a future where his problems have been solved thanks to our collaboration. We project them into a positive situation, where they are already using our solution.
This is when we move on to the fourth step.
Need Pay-Off
We’re talking about fulfilled needs, the ultimate projection. What would happen after 1 year of using our solution? If the client achieves his objectives following our collaboration, what would happen next?
We go further in the projection to imagine what our long-term relationship with the prospect would look like.
So that’s the 4 steps of the SPIN method. After that, Philippe also shares three other best practices.
3 advices to ask the right questions
First, it is necessary to start very broad, and then get more and more specific. Take a funnel approach: ask broad questions, and refine as the discussion progresses.
Then ask open-ended questions. Give the person in front of you the opportunity to express themselves and open up.
Finally, when you get into the sales pitch, make sure you take back everything your prospect has given to calibrate and adapt your pitch. This will allow you to prove that you have really listened to them and that you want to provide them with a personalized solution.
However, to do this, you need to know your offer by heart.
Knowing your offer perfectly
This is something Philippe shares in the call. You need to know your offer inside and out:
- Benefits,
- Technical aspects,
- Pricing,
- Concrete case studies,
- Etc.
The idea is to be able to adapt your speech to the information that your prospect shares with you.
Indeed, profile A and profile B will not tell you the same things and will not have the same needs.
Faced with this, it is necessary to be able to present your offer in the most relevant way possible, to adapt to the information you have. You have to be surgical in the answers and offers you present.
To achieve this, you must know your service by heart. Now, what if you don’t? What to do if our prospect asks us a question we don’t know?
Handling a topic you don’t know
What do you do when a prospect asks you a question that you don’t know how to answer to because you don’t know the underlying subject?
The solution lies in one word: honesty. In the case where we do not master a subject, and a prospect asks us about it, the only solution is to be transparent and to openly say that we are not the reference person to answer it. On the other hand, we can put our prospect in touch with a member of our team who will be able to give him a detailed answer.
So if this situation arises, don’t be afraid to be honest and say that you don’t have the answer, but that you can put your prospect in touch with the person on your team who does.
The power of this approach is that your prospect will realize that no matter what question they ask, they will always be put in touch with the most relevant person to answer them. And that helps build trust.
It’s the only way to handle this situation.
Now, what about negotiation?
Becoming a sales master
Often, negotiation is perceived as a battle, as something that must be won. But in reality, negotiation is more of a dance.
A game where both parties have to come to an agreement to arrive at a win-win situation. In the call, Philippe talks about the ZIC: the Zone of Common Interest.
This is the first step to improving your negotiation skills: change the way you perceive it and approach it in a zen way.
Knowing that from the moment a person negotiates and shares objections, it is because he has a minimum of interest in the solution that can be proposed. A prospect who is not interested does not negotiate.
This is therefore a positive element if you enter into negotiations. That said, you still need to be able to handle objections.
Philippe shared his method for doing so:
- First of all, you welcome the objection. The goal is not to get into a conflict, but to welcome the objection to lighten the conversation.
- Then, rephrase the objection to make sure you understand it. You must be sure that the way you perceived the objection corresponds to the way the person opposite wanted you to understand it. The watchword: avoid misunderstandings.
- Thirdly, check if there are other objections to be dealt with. Is there one objection or several, and what is their relative weight? What is the main objection that needs to be addressed?
- Fourth, understand why the prospect shares this objection. We try to dig deeper and show that we care about understanding why this objection is surfacing, in order to find a solution for it.
- Finally, find common ground to start working together. The idea is to find out what concessions can be made to get past the prospect’s objection. Knowing that you never make a concession without a counterpart.
For example, you can make a reduction on your price, provided that you sign directly.
In the end, you have to keep in mind that negotiation is a dance in which you try to find an agreement that suits both parties.
It is with this mindset that you must approach it.
That said, in some cases, it is not possible to find a Zone of Common Interest. Should we then kill the sale?
Should you kill the sale, if necessary?
If there’s no match, you’re looking at a no-sale. And it’s important to accept this, because you don’t have time to waste. There’s no point in wasting time trying to sell at all costs, because you could be investing that effort on other, more promising opportunities for your agency.
Also, you can do this very early in the process, even before your first appointment. Try to ask 2, 3 very targeted questions to make sure that a potential collaboration can indeed take place with your prospect.
If you realize that it is not possible, do not make an appointment. Otherwise, you risk wasting time and energy on a prospect that will not convert.
That said, in the case of a no sale, don’t hesitate to follow up with the prospect from time to time. Check in, send content to your prospect. Sure, you’re not working together today, but there’s no reason why this can’t change in the future.
Talking to the right persons
Finally, the last element that is addressed during the call is the fact of addressing the right interlocutors.
In order for the sale to happen, it is indeed necessary to talk to the person who can make that decision.
This is something to do during your pre-qualification: does the person you make the appointment with have decision-making power and will be able to validate the sale?
Here, Philippe shares a model for doing this qualification.
The BANT model:
- Budget
- Authority
- Need
- Timing
This model allows us to know what motivates the prospect to buy and therefore to determine the level of urgency with which we should treat his request.
