The best sales strategy is to break your buyer’s journey down into its fundamental steps and then help prospects move across them.

I recently explained this to a student inside Salesman.com Academy who owns a business that sells physical goods into the fortune 100 and it blew her mind.

Before the consulting call where I ran through fundamental steps of her buyer’s journey, she was using a bunch of sales software tools, trying to implement fancy sales methodologies that she’d read online, and was constantly reinventing her sales process.

It was a mess, she was burnt out and she wasn’t closing deals.

After our consulting call, she got rid of everything and started from scratch. Within a week she’d build out her fundamental sales steps and instantly had clarity on what she needed to do each day to get deals over the line.

Now when she put energy into her selling system, she got equal reward out of it.

So, if you feel overwhelmed, have 6 sales cadences that don’t book meetings, and you’ve watched lots of sales videos, but nothing has changed for you…

Then you need to take a step back and realise that your buyers only have to pass through 4 steps before they pay you:

Step one – Find a person with a problem that you can solve.

So, getting practical here, is feasible to find a couple of people today who have an issue that your problem solves?

Yep, of course it is.

Step two – Help that person see that your product is going to solve their problem.

Now, outside of sales, have you ever helped someone change their mind about something?

Yep, of course you have.

That means that you can help your prospects agree with your perspective that your product can solve their problem.

Step three – Help them calculate whether the cost of their problem is more than the cost of your solution.

If you asked your prospects how much their problem was costing them each quarter, could you do then the math and see if they’d get a strong return on investment if they bought from you?

Yep, of course you can. The maths is simple.

Step four – Close the deal.

If it looks like your prospects will get a positive ROI if they work with you, are you capable of asking the question “does it make sense to get started?”

Yep, asking questions is easy.

And that is it.

You can run prospects through this sales process if you’re selling to one person. You can run the same process across multiple people and then bring everyone together at the end to ask the “does it make sense to get started” question in complex, multi stakeholder, B2B deals too.

When you really remove all the AI generated emails, the weird manipulative selling tactics and the emotional baggage that you have about sales being gross and slimy…

Selling really does become simple.

Find someone with a problem, help them see that you can solve the problem, calculate the ROI, and ask if it makes sense to get started.

That is it.

Thinking about sales this way instantly eliminates the most common issues that sellers have:

Struggling to book meetings?

It’s because you’re either speaking to the wrong people or you don’t know who your buyers are and the pains they are have.

Spending lots of time “nurturing” prospects?

It’s because you are bad at influencing them to see your point of view.

Your prospects jumping on the initial call and then ghosting you?

It’s because you’re unable to demonstrate the return on investment of your product and so there’s no logical reason for them to stay in touch.

Getting prospects right to the end of their buyer’s journey and then they never commit to getting started?

It’s because you’re not asking for the business as you have baggage in your subconscious about being a slimy salesperson.

Having trained thousands of salespeople and business owners over the past 10 years, the quickest way to make more sales is to always to simplify their sales process.

The way I simplify the sales process when student’s join Salesman.com Academy is to create a new dashboard within their CRM that becomes their main focus throughout the day.

I build out a “kanban” sales pipeline dashboard and I get them to put their leads in one of these categories:

Prospect qualified > Meeting booked > Sales qualified > Agreed value > Agreed ROI > Closed won > Closed lost

Then we turn sales into a game.

The rules of the game are that they must:

This turns an all over the place seller who never really has a clear grasp on what’s going on into a highly focused, elite sales operator overnight.

Now, you’re probably thinking:

Well, you’re not all that special and the main problem with having a complex sales pipeline is that people get paralysed when they look at it. They’re never really sure who should be where, what the next steps are or how to implement those next steps.

Complex sales pipelines become an overwhelming, emotionally frustrating, soul-destroying tool for instant demotivation.

Now, do you want to be special but ineffective, constantly demotivated and broke?

Probably not.

The power of this simplified sales process is that all you have to do each day when you sit at your desk is move a couple of people over to the next step in the process.

And because you’re now thinking about how to help individual people make that leap from one step of the process to the next, your efforts to move them become humanised.

You stop spamming hundreds of people hoping to get lucky.

You stop running the same boring discovery call process over and over again.

You stop getting ghosted by potential customers who are starving for some human attention to their needs.

So, lets take a look at why each of these steps exist and what needs to happen for a prospect to move from one step to the next.

Fill up Prospect qualified

To get started, you must create a qualification checklist that a potential prospect must meet.

Then we find these people through LinkedIn and another secret process that we use in the Academy and add them into the system.

It shouldn’t be possible to add more than a handful of prospects to this column each day.

If you’re able to add 500 people in one go it’s because they’re not qualified and you’re planning on just spamming the shit out of them which isn’t going to work.

Prospect qualified > Meeting booked

Now it’s time to connect with each of these qualified prospects and attempt to book a meeting with them.

Because the prospects in the “prospect qualified” column fit a very specific qualification checklist, once you crack the messaging to book these meetings you can repeat the same message over and over again.

Meeting booked > Sales qualified

In your meeting you’re going to further qualify the prospect.

Do they have the budget, urgency and authority to get a deal done? Then they get moved to “sales qualified”.

If not, then they’re moved to “closed lost” and you ghost them.

Sales qualified > Agreed value

If during your meeting the prospect agrees at a high level that your product could solve a painful problem they’re currently facing, then you move them to the “agreed value” column.

If they don’t agree the value at a high level, then they stay in “sales qualified” and you create an action plan of how you plan to move them to “agreed value” column.

This action plan must include a time to complete the action and a bulleted, step-by-step plan on how you’re going to influence their perspective.

Agreed value > Agreed ROI

Once the value is agreed either on the first call or after the action plan has been carried out, we must get verbal agreement that the prospect believes that there is a strong return on investment in working with us.

Often this comes down to building a business case and then getting the prospect to agree that the ROI in the business case makes sense.

Only when the prospect agrees that there is enough ROI to potentially work with us do we then move to nudging them into the final column.

Agreed ROI > Closed won

The final column is “closed won”.

It’s not “quote sent” or “proposal delivered”. Quotes and proposals mean absolutely nothing and preparing them probably already takes up too much of your time.

The goal is invoices paid; not how many e-signature documents can we have sat in our inbox uncompleted.

And so, our daily routine becomes:

I promise that if you commit to this simple system for just a couple of months, your sales performance will be unrecognisable.

Do this for 12-months and you’ll have closed more deals than your even forecasted were possible.

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