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Ep 303: Selling Smarter, Not Harder: A Strategic Approach for Entrepreneurs with Liz Heiman
Are you an entrepreneur struggling to grow your startup or established company? This episode is for you. Elzie talks to Liz Heiman, a sales consultant and expert in startup growth. Liz shares her knowledge of building a successful sales team, establishing a culture of sales within your company, and managing your sales funnel effectively. She emphasizes the importance of creating a mission, vision, and values-driven plan, conducting strategic planning sessions, and hiring people who fit those values.
Liz explains the significance of having a Sales Operating System that includes strategy, lead generation, sales process, key account management, and team management. She offers valuable advice on managing a sales funnel and building relationships with customers based on trust. She also suggests that salespeople start with a simple CRM and advises looking into tools that can help put the sales process together, simplify it, and move sales forward.
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from Liz's expertise and take your sales game to the next level. Tune in now and discover how you can achieve sustainable growth through effective sales strategies.
Episode Highlights
05:37 - Your sales team is the heart of your business. And everybody says, "Oh, no, no, my product is the heart of my business." Well, it may be the soul of your business, but it is not the heart, because it is the sales team that pumps the lifeblood through your organization and keeps it going. Because without that heart pumping, there's no company. And if you think about it, your heart isn't in your pinky. Because if it were in your pinky, it couldn't pump life blood through your body. It's in the center of your body for a reason, because it needs to be there. And your sales team is the center of your business, because it's all about the customer. And your sales team is the first team that really touches your customer directly. Marketing may influence them, but the sales team touches them.
16:19 - In sales, there are a whole bunch of companies that have created methodologies, and you may have heard of some of them. Sandler is one of them. The Challenger Sale is one of them. There's a new one called MEDDIC. I don't know how new it is, but that's kind of a methodology. I come out of the world of Miller Heiman. So, Miller Heiman created programs called Strategic Selling, Conceptual Selling, and Large Account Management. And that was really the early days of creating methodology or process around sales. So, Solution Selling was also happening at the same time and SPIN Selling was also created about the same time. These are also methodologies. And these are the very beginning of "Hey, there's a process that you follow to do this."
20:43 - This is going to be really shocking to everyone, I know, but leads do not come out of thin air. They are not like combustion from nothing. They actually have to come from somewhere. So, either your marketing team has to generate them or your sales team has to go out to events, or you have to call people. Somewhere, these leads–and you need a plan. You need a strategy. What activities are we going to do, and what results do we need in order to pay for those activities? So, there's a strategy.
28:14 - Yes, it has to be a good fit. Yes, it has to be the right solution. But people matter. People always matter. And I have customers that they have a two or three year sales cycle, that relationship matters over that time. And if you let that relationship go and don't pay attention to it, somebody else is going to go make a relationship and when it's time to make the decision, somebody else is going to be in there. So yes, it matters. You matter as an owner, as a salesperson, anybody, you matter. How people feel about you matters. You need to be kind and curious and compassionate and all of those things. It matters.
31:55 - If you don't put stuff in the top of the funnel, there's not going to be anything to come out in six months. So if I am tracking my leads, my opportunities, or my deals, either in a spreadsheet or in my CRM, then I ought to be able to look at it and go, yep, I need 20 things to come out the bottom. I got 200 things in the top of the funnel and I'm moving them through slowly. And I know this one's going to close in six months and this one's going to close in nine months and that one's going to close in twelve months. Right. So that we're actually mapping their journey through our sales process or through our funnel as they're making buying decisions. So that's what I would teach you, and I would teach you to set process up based on stages, not activities.
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