How To Gain Trust In Seconds And Win At Every Negotiation – Week In Sales, No 7

Holidays are over. It’s time to fasten your seat belt and rush into the final quarters of the year in order to reach or surpass your annual quota.

Our favorite blogs did save the best pieces for your holiday return so dive in!

Clean Up Your Dirty Lead Data!

We will never stop talking about how much damage bad lead data can cause and MarketingProfs are giving you seven reasons to clean up your dirty lead data.

According to Biznology, data decays at the rate of 70,3% per year, meaning that out of your 10 emails, 7 of them will not reach the desired recipient. Writing a prospect’s old job title or company in an email outreach will give you a label of an unprofessional mess and too many email bounces put you on the blacklist.

This is such a simple task that will save you a lot of money and time if you do it as soon as possible and especially if you outsource your data cleansing to a company specializing in data enrichment.

Gain Trust In Seconds

Yesware delights us once more with their blog topics and this one is about winning anyone’s trust in a few seconds. Because, when it comes to sales, trust is about the most important thing you get from a client and everything else just follows. The best thing – all these tips can be used for email as well.

First, you should find a shared interest with your contact or prospect. It can be anything – boxing, running, cycling, literature or action movies. Break the ice with the topics everyone feels easy talking about and then mention your offer.

Same goes for mutual friends or acquaintances. Maybe your colleague is their classmate or used to work with them before. You can use the help of LinkedIn by first searching who it is that you and your prospect might know.

Then you can warm up the conversation by asking some questions about your prospects. Ask them whether they’ve used similar products or services? How did they like those they’ve used? What is the best service in their opinion and why? People love talking about themselves and expressing their points of view, so why not give them the opportunity to do so.

Also, doing favors makes people obliged to return the favors. So help your contacts in some way. You can offer a useful piece of content that relates to their business or maybe a free trial of your product or service and the prospects will feel that they need to do the same.

Lastly, flattery as a means of gaining trust. Even though it is a double edged sward, but when done in modesty and honesty it can be a very powerful tool. You can congratulate your prospect on the award they won or promotion they received.

Never Use These Sales Phrases

Sales intelligence platform Gong.io used machine-learning and their data science team analyzed over 519,000 B2B sales calls, intended to sell cloud software products. They found 13 words that lowered the chances of closing a deal and Business Insider shares them with us.

Some of those words and phrases are:

• “We provide” – This is one of the phrases used so often that they repel the potential buyer
• “Million” – The number is so big that brain struggles to imagine anything in that quantity
• “Discount” – This word shows that your product is actually not so great
• “Perfect” – The word that seems like you’re exaggerating, because nothing really is perfect

Follow-Up Emails That Kill Competition

Your initial email may get the prospect to find out more about you, but follow-up emails are the ones that close the deal. That is why ContactMonkey researched mistakes in follow up emails that should be avoided at all cost.

Firstly, make sure all your emails are customized and personalized, because nobody will read an email that looks like a spam sent to thousands of recipients. Up to 86,7% of top sellers always research their decision makers before clicking that “Send” button, so make sure you’re always sending your email to the right person.

While you’re at it – regularly clean your lead data so that your emails always reach the right people. Bad data costs US businesses more than $600 billion annually.

Don’t write emails that are too long, because stats show that emails with 75-100 words get the best response. Don’t hide your CTAs or forget to include them in an email.

Mention social proof such as customer referrals, expert opinions, influencer endorsements or number of users/customers.

Get More In Every Negotiation

We don’t need to tell you how important negotiation is, especially in the business of sales. Some might say it all comes down to negotiation. However, often we find ourselves not feeling like we got the better end of the deal. To make that feeling as rare as possible, HubSpot gives you 6 golden advices on how to get more every time you negotiate.

Remember to always ask for the best possible terms and conditions at the very beginning. If you’re selling go for the highest reasonable price, if you’re buying go for the lowest one. Normally, the opposing side will try their best to negotiate in their advantage, but whatever you gain in the end will be satisfactory.

Then try to get them to reveal their offer first, so that you don’t undersell your product or service. Speaking of which – never offer the lower price yourself. Because that means your setting the new lower border that a negotiating opponent can use to leverage. And never lower your price by small amount first then big amount second, giving the impression that you can sell for even less money if they ask once more.

It may be preaching to the choir and a beginner’s mistake, but make sure to never accept the first offer and never to ask questions that have „Yes“ or „No“ as answers, giving the opponent easy way out.

Best Content For Every Buyer’s Stage

Not all content is created equal and it shouldn’t be, especially if you’re Account Based Selling. Uhurunetwork recommends best type of content for each buyer’s stage.

For example, for Awereness stage you should create content that focuses on pain points and problems. For Interest stage navigate towards educating, solutions and evaluations. During Consideration stage provide demos, case studies and data sheets to explain how it is working with you. Purchase phase content should validate their decision and make the contract proscess easy. Post-purchase phase means continous learning, communities and loyalty programs, while Re-Purchase stage demands that you keep in touch and look for opportunities to upsell.

Similraly, InCo claims you can drive sales with content. This is something that people doing the Account Based Selling know very well – in order to help sales close the deal, marketing creates content tailor made for targeted accounts. Start by analyzing your content (published and unpublished) and determine which ones need more work, which ones are outdated and which ones need update in order to perform better. Ask your sales team about the questions your prospects ask most frequently and use them as a topic of your content.

Week In Sales No 7 – Wrap Up

This is what we found to be most interesting in sales during our second week of sales knowledge sharing.

Did you read or write anything that could help us learn something new?

If so, feel free to contact us and send us interesting links, we’d be happy to share the article with the world.