Lead Volume vs. Closing More Deals: The Latter Pays The Bills

I love leads, MQLs/SQLs, email and ABM tools, social “selling” and predictable revenue. Love all of that.

However, what I really love more than finding efficient ways to get meetings are actual deals. Closed-won, booked contracts, sweet, sweet deals!

As I comb the latest blog posts, talk with others, attend or speak at conferences like Saastr, Sales Machine, Traction, and Dreamforce, I see a major gap: Why is almost 0% of the conversation actually around closing deals? The majority of presentations and thought leadership are about filling the top of the funnel or more abstract talks on changes in buyer behavior. Whether it’s social selling/ABM/sales stack – name the topic – and in most cases it’s about getting meetings.

I understand that we’ve had to talk about this topic because it was harder for companies to set meetings as buyers became more distracted and inundated with emails. Buyers now have more responsibilities and meetings than ever, more technological distractions during your demo, and more of your competitors reaching out to them with the same methods as you. So yes, it’s important to know the right strategy to cut through the clutter. But, what has this done to the process of actually closing deals?

As we work with 100s of companies from seed stage to IPO, here is what we’ve seen:

The future of sales and closing deals in 2016-17 is about knowing that there are many decision-makers/users/vetters involved in the process, and how to get multiple people bought in and moving towards the same decision to buy

To be clear, I am not talking about coming up with a complex cadence between marketing and sales to send gifts, tweets, snaps and emails to people. I care about getting those stakeholders to do shit once we have them. Enough people care about the other problem which is great. Here is a great article by Salesloft, if interested.

Nobody is making autonomous decisions anymore and then shoving it down people’s throats.  Sales today is about is driving the end-user and decision maker down their own parallel paths that meet at the end, at the decision to buy.

On average, there are now 7 people involved in most buying decisions. That number is much larger in enterprise sales than SMB, but you still have to know how to get those 7 people moving through the funnel — even though they care about different things.

Modern “closing” is really a series of small closes to get people to agree to next steps, loop in others and then drive decisions. Who is driving this action and managing this process is key.  It’s your sales team, not their champions in most cases, but salespeople today are not equipped with the skills to be successful in this environment. This is because many grew up in a world when sales was simpler, and there was a linear path of engaging decision makers, demo-ing, creating champions, and then hoping that things work out.  Now that sales has become much more complex, it’s actually faster to close deals if you accept that there are extra steps involved, plan for them and drive action in a systematic way.

So, I want to start the conversation on how we close more partnerships and customers in today’s complex buying environment. As buyers become more and more educated, the traditional ways of closing will not suffice and sales will need to become more about project management

Meetings are great…..but if we can’t convert leads into clients at an appropriate level, then are we focusing on the right problem? Think of the funnel as a bucket. If you have holes in the bucket, but keep filling more leads at the top, per the Predictable Revenue philosophy, you’ll close more by sheer volume. But what if we actually fix the holes? This is my goal when we work with friends and clients — figuring out ways to patch the holes in the actual sales process that will lead to more satisfying sales!