The power of deep sales

Here’s one for the sales professionals out there: the more prospective buyers you reach out to, the more eventually say yes. Right? If you were selling door-to-door, and one person in 20 buys from you, then logically, the more doors you knock on the more sales you’ll make. And why should the same not be true for email or phone calls?

 

This might work for a while, but eventually a salesperson will reach a tipping point, where win rates do not scale proportionally with the volume of outreach. Why then does it feel like most tools available to sales and marketing teams simply equip them to outreach at scale? What has changed that means buyers feel more remote now than ever?

 

Like every industry, technology is behind much of this change. First, the automobile meant salespeople could move around more easily to meet their clients, then the commercial jet-liner widened this potential to other countries. Then came the internet, email and the ability to reach customers en masse. Boundaries dissolved, and sales and marketing professionals had the ability to contact exponentially more prospective customers than ever before. Those technological advancements continue to take place online, where AI and machine learning look to change the game once more.

 

However, there has been a piece missing from this narrative all along. It seems that, while the sales and marketing profession equipped itself with the means to contact more and more people every day, the needs of buyers have seldom been taken into account. Customers’ tolerance for impersonal or spammy outreach is at an all-time-low. Professionals with buying power could not be clearer right now: more outreach does not equal more sales.

 

In fact, research shows that since the pandemic there’s been a 59 per cent rise in the amount of email outreach, but a 30 per cent decline in response rates. We can see this drag beginning to affect sales teams: just 34 per cent of UK sellers told us last year they were still making cold calls.

 

Relationship building to the rescue

 

So what is to be done? Regardless of exactly what the tools around you can do at any given time, the common ingredient to any successful sales deal lies in the art of relationship building. I’ll give you an example of a current personal experience. We are working on renewing a large enterprise-level client. It’s a healthy account, where we’re well multithreaded, meaning our team has connected to several members of the client’s buying committee, but things could always be better.

 

I, the Head of Enterprise business in EMEA & LATAM, then came across a LinkedIn post from an old friend and former colleague of mine who said he was taking a senior role in the commercial organisation of this same client account. I take this opportunity for some warm outreach, check in, congratulate him and let him know him that we will likely work closely together given our customer relationship.

 

On the back of this, we schedule a catch-up call where my connection provides me with actionable insight into the relationship, identifying areas of both strength and weakness in it and offering to help broker further introductions that can help us deliver more value and solidify the relationship.

 

For example, while we were feeling great about the way our client was using the service, and the resulting value, I learned that they had a different perspective. They were concerned about engagement and whether they were getting value for money. Somehow we had not surfaced this concern through the regular channels. Leveraging this new insight, we were able to address this gap, align on a shared definition of engagement and value, and even begin discussions about expanding to serve additional parts of the business.

 

Together with my old friend, and a now even broader group of stakeholders, we co-develop a plan for the account that allows us to retain and grow the engagement with the client, and also provide the value that matters to them.