Originally posted by Mike Wilner, Co-founder of Compass on Readthink.com
“Always be closing.”
“Be persistent.”
“Don’t take no for an answer.”
When I started selling for my startup, Compass, it was my first time doing sales. I channeled cliché sales advice that echoed in my brain from having Glengarry Glen Ross clips sent to me.
With this picture of sales in mind, I thought I was ready. After all, friends, family, and coworkers have often applauded or complained about my persistence.
I used this persistence to help get Compass off the ground, but in the long run, constantly trying to close led to a lot of wasted time, put a low ceiling on sales, and started to burn me out.
Once I stopped pushing people through the door and instead allowed them to walk through it, sales got easier, more efficient, and I regained my sanity.
But it wasn’t a Wall Street heavyweight or a sales consultant that taught us how to make changes in our sales process — it was our own customers.
The Scrappy Start
After six months of working on Compass on the side, we had acquired 20 customers. When we went full-time, our mentors and advisors pushed us to set a goal of acquiring 100 customers in the next three months.
Hustling was something I’d always embraced, so we set up our sales machine in a way that allowed us to put hustle in one end, and get customers out the other. After all, we’d yet to really hustle for sales, and that’s always a great place to start.
Our hustle top of mind, I made our sales funnel.
1. I cold emailed you
2. You responded and I tried to get you on the phone
3. We talked on the phone and I followed up until you became a customer
4. You became a customer
Our sales process was all about me, based on what I wanted from prospective customers. I was desperate for traction, so I prioritized my needs over the needs of our leads.
At the beginning, it worked! Using this process, I was able to get the initial pickup we needed to get Compass off the ground.
But even as sales were growing, something didn’t feel right. I was working long hours and getting exhausted.
I tried to put in even more hours trying to push people through a funnel that was building more and more leads. I was frustrated when more and more hustle wasn’t resulting in more sales. In fact, spending more time trying to close started to hurt sales.
Why was this happening?
We took a look at some of our leads that were in our funnel, like Jason.
Jason’s touchpoints:
43 emails
35 outgoing emails
8 received emails
52 total calls
45 outgoing calls
4 incoming calls
That’s 95 touchpoints over 10 months, for a combined 8 hours — and nothing to show for it. If you’re wondering what hard-but-not-smart work looks like, this is it.
Jason regularly told me he was a soon-to-be-client. I was persistent in trying to push him through the door (my communication outnumbered his by a ratio higher than 5:1), but he never became a customer.
And that’s just Jason. Relying on this brute-force sales process meant there were always dozens of leads I was trying to push through the next door. Last June through September, I spent roughly 4 hours a day manually following up (with a call or email) with leads regardless of where they were in the sales cycle. Some of these leads had told me that they were eager to get a new website; some had simply asked me what “mobile-friendly” meant. Yet I was treating all of these people the same.
So, my obsession with closing stunted our growth. Don’t get me wrong, that approach served its purpose. We’d validated our business model and gotten initial traction. It also helped me understand the different hesitations that leads have and the different degrees of readiness.
But, if we were going to continue to grow faster, I needed to spend more of my time on bigger challenges, like testing out new marketing channels — instead of spending a majority of my time following up with people.
Doubling Sales in Half The Time
Over the past 5 months, we’ve made changes to both our marketing funnel and our sales process.
Here’s that same graph, extended for three more months.
I spent half the time following up in February as I did the previous June, yet we acquired nearly twice as many customers.
We did this by waving goodbye to the “always be closing” mentality and stepping outside of the vacuum where our first sales process was created. Instead, we let our customers teach us how to sell to them and designed a new sales process to reflect that.
I took a hard look at some of the hesitations customers had before converting, and in some cases, asked them what was happening in the months before they converted. We determined that there were four basic stages of readiness.
1. Preliminary research:
This person doesn’t want me to try to schedule a call with them like I’d been doing — they just wanted to stay in touch so they could reach out when they were ready.
2. Consideration
This person doesn’t want to hop on the phone yet either — they wanted a way to learn more about our process, see our work, and get a ballpark estimate on price — none of which needs to happen on the phone.
3. Diligence:
“This all sounds great, but I have a few specific questions.”
Now this person wants to talk to the phone — it was time to answer questions and determine a mutual fit so that they could take the final step.
4. Purchase:
Note: this is the same person from 1) Preliminary research
Finally, this person is ready to become a customer.
If a potential customer was in stage the Preliminary Research stage, no amount of phone calls from me would tip them into stage two. So instead of me acting like a bounty hunter, we created doors that customers could walk through on their own. For every stage a customer might be in, we created a corresponding low-pressure way for them to take the next step.
- Enter Preliminary Research: For those casually researching getting a website, we created relevant content that they could download without needing to talk to anyone.
- Enter Consideration: For someone who has a more specific inquiry about how much their project would cost, we created a pricing estimator so that they could get a detailed breakdown — without talking to anyone.
- Enter Diligence: For someone who had more specific questions about working with us, they could schedule a call with me — whenever was convenient for them.
- Enter Purchase: After a sales call, for someone who wanted to get started, they could submit the deposit form we sent them — whenever they were ready.
As a result, leads were able to build a relationship with us on their own terms. We also allowed people to walk back through doors the way they came in. If a lead had a call with me during the Diligence stage, but then encountered a change that put her back in the Preliminary research stage, we didn’t keep badgering her to make a deposit — we instead started delivering content to her that was good for casual researchers. This distinction allowed us to give prospective customers the experience they needed based on where they were in the purchase cycle.
By allowing our customers to walk freely through these doors, they feel better about Compass as a whole. Leads have even referred new customers before converting themselves.
While we let our customers design our new marketing funnel and sales process, it turns out they designed in a way that’s pretty identical to how more mature marketing funnels should look.
- Marketing Qualified: leads who have identified themselves as interested in our services
- Sales Accepted: leads who identify that they’re ready to be sold.
- Sales Qualified: leads where a mutual fit is determined.
- Customer: PARTY
After letting our customers teach us how to sell to them, this is how our marketing funnel improved:
Now that I’m spending even less time pushing people through doors, I’m able to spend more of my time on higher-impact marketing tasks, like running new lead generation experiments, finding niche customer segments, and writing this article.
Final Thoughts
When you barely know anything about your customers, a hustle-centric sales process can be really effective in getting the initial traction you need. It can also teach you a lot about what the buying psychology is like for your prospective customers.
But one person can only hustle so much. If your sales process is based on your own hustle, you’re going to hit a ceiling pretty quickly.
A sustainable sales process can’t be designed in a vacuum. We were stuck, and letting our customers tell us how they wanted to be sold to allowed us to remove the ceiling on our growth.
So if you find yourself hustling as much as you can but wondering how you can increase sales, why don’t you just ask your customers?