In this episode of CRM Radio, Glenn Mattson and Jim Obermayer discuss shortening the sales cycle as one of the most sought after goals of any B2B company. If the cycle can be shortened competitors are left out of the solution, the pipeline is more controllable and real. In this interview with sales expert (a real one), Glenn Mattson, he solves the evasive puzzle of shortening sales cycles.
Transcript
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Paul: Welcome everybody, it's time for another episode of CRM radio. Today, the voice of CRM today and tomorrow. One of the many shows on the funnel radio channel for at work listeners, like you. Let's get things rolling with our host today, Jim Obermayer. Hey Jim.
Jim Obermayer: Thank you Paul, this is Jim Obermayer, your host today for CRM Radio. Our subject today is how to solve the puzzle of shortening the sale cycle. Shortening the sale cycle is one of the most sought after gangs of any be to be company. They try to attack it very regularly and most companies are not very successful at it, they just get to a point where they can't seem to shorten it anymore. Sometimes they talk about training etc, but if the sale cycle can be shortened, very often competitors are left out of the solution, the pipeline is more controllable and very real. In this interview today, we're going to talk with sales expert Glen Mattson. He solves the evasive puzzle of shortening the sales cycle for his clients. Glen has many years of experience working directly with top producers and managers who recruit, train, motivate and develop the full potential of their producers, which translates into an actionable item.
His specialty is working with top producers in the financial services industries. He's spoken at the prestigious MDRT and a court of the table. He works with elite managers, the financial services who are counting on him to help them grow their producers revenues. I'm sure he's worked for many people aside from the financial industry. Glen, tell us a little bit about your company and who you're affiliated with, and why you've been so successful before we tackle this subject.
Glenn Mattson: Thanks Jim so much. We are affiliated with Sandler training and Sandler training is on a footprint of the world. We have 280 offices in the United States. We're in 20 different countries, we have about 17 different languages so from a footprint standpoint, Jim, we are the largest training company in the world, with aspects of focus and leadership management, and sales. Now, it has to be knock on wood that I started off my career as an associate for one of the franchises because how we go to market is a franchise based process. Inside of the United States, we have about 215 different franchises and I happen to work with the number 1 at the time. Unfortunately, Jim, I can't tell you I took off right off the get-go and was a stellar salesperson. I sold my business, came on board and had a lot of trials and tribulations, which makes me very dedicated and understanding of what people have to go through to become successful, but I also have very little tolerance who choose not to because I had a lot of growth I had to do, I chose to do it and I know it can be done. There's empathy there but there's also little understanding and excuse-making.
I went from being a producer at a franchisee. After about 9 years, I had the largest practice United States as a producer for a franchise and 3 years later, I had the largest in the world. The following year, I decided to open up my own shop, that was 8.5 years ago. Since then, knock on wood, we really battled for top 2 or top 3 in the world, in terms of a franchise. We're lucky that our clients anticipate and enjoy, and look forward to the results when they work with us.
Jim Obermayer: I've got my own consulting business, sales leakage consulting aside from the running the radio programs and the sales league management association, and I have recommended in you, Sandler Training, a dozen times in Chicago, in Arizona, in Southern California. In several places, both the northern part of Los Angeles and Orange County, Inland Empire and I've relied on Sandler and many of their people for the expertise of bringing my sales people that I hired aboard. I'm not a great trainer myself so I don't even try to go there. I solve issues and in-room sales management, but I go to Sandler whenever I can to help bring people on board.
Let's move on and get into our subject, how to solve the puzzle of shortening the sales cycle. Before we get into it, from your perspective, what are the benefits of shortening the sale cycle. We may think it's obvious but maybe not so obvious, give me your opinion.
Glenn Mattson: I think a couple things that start to become very evident, big picture, depending on how big the company is or the enterprise. Having the ability to shorten your sales cycle obviously has a massive amount of rippling effects. If you're in the manufacturing, we're talking about inventory terms which is pure profit. If we're more on the service side, having the ability to control your pipeline gives you the ability to understand when business is coming in, do you need to hire more consultants, what's your capacity to handle new deals coming in, when are they going to be ending? Pipeline management, on one side, is really making sure that you can understand how to run your business. On the other side, which is just a sales side, it's really having the understanding from a street person, which is your sales down to your managers, up to your executives and where are we within the market? Where are we within new business?
More times than not, most pipelines, unfortunately, are a sales person selling their manager on where they are and there's not a lot of truth typically into that. Statistics will tell you that only 27% of pipelines are actually accurate. You have executives some pretty big boy and big girl decisions on data that, unfortunately, is only 27% of the time accurate. It does have a big rippling effect on just putting stuff into a pipeline, but not having it accurate. Usually, that's for a couple of different reasons. One is, the sales person doesn't know the truth, so maybe they are being honest and putting it where they think it is, but it's not accurate. The other is, they don't have other pieces of business that can replace it. Therefore, the easiest way to play the game is keep it in the funnel, tell your manager that we're working on it when the world of reality is there's a very low percentage that's it's going to close, but it's easier to have them know that you're working on something than having nothing in the pipeline.
Jim Obermayer: Right.
Glenn Mattson: The other piece that I think is, we call it false pretense which is, you spend so much time trying to chase something in your pipeline that you're not actually out there getting business that would close, so we spend so much time trying to win something that's not winnable, versus finding something that we can actually win at.
Jim Obermayer: Okay. By shortening the sales cycle, are we talking about if it's an average 6 month sales cycle, would you deem it a success if you take it down by 30 days or 2 weeks, or 60 days?
Glenn Mattson: Yes to all of those, depending on the market that we're in. There are plenty of times where, not only shortening the sales cycle in time, but also shortening the sales cycle and number of meetings it takes. We typically can get 1 to 2 meetings off the entire process depending on, again, what it looks like. For closed business, we can typically cut the process almost in half for business that doesn't close. If we drop 10-20% on the number of meetings for closed business and we can almost cut the sales process in half on business that doesn't close, which means they need to learn how to qualify better and faster, that frees people up to actually go after the business that somebody really wants to utilize your services for.
Jim Obermayer: The lights are starting to go on now. You, as a I try to translate this a little bit before I put my own opinions in, is this a training issue, is this a sales process issue, sales steps issue, that you try to eliminate? How do you analyze this thing to figure out what you take out or how you push the ball forward?
Glenn Mattson: We typically look at it from a 4 step process. 1 is, what's the strategy that we're going after? What's the strategy of how they actually go to business? The second piece is the process, which is what is your selling system, what is your selling process? What's step 1, step 2, step 3 and within there, what are your must haves, your should haves and/or your next steps? It's interesting, I'll take to owners or C levels and they'll say, "No, we have that solid." I'll sit down with sales people and I'll go ahead and ask our managers, and it just happened, unfortunately, a couple days ago down in DC.
We went through the process and I had 45 people in the room, and I had 38 different sales processes. Not only were people in the room were on the same page, so how can you have true forecasting? The other piece is the actions, which are the tactics that people use. A lot of the tactics that they use aren't actually helping people make decisions, so therefore the cycle's longer than it needs to be. The last piece is what I call beliefs, which is the head and the gut. That comes into bravery, do we have the ability and the courage to ask the questions that we need to ask to get truth, to figure out if this is something that's viable to put into the pipeline or not, or move it forward? Those are typically the 4 areas.
Jim Obermayer: This is a pretty common subject for you to tackle, then, the 4 step process to reduce the sales cycle and you make it sound so simple, Glen.
Glenn Mattson: It's not hard, following it's the hard part because, again, most of us want stuff to put in there and want things to win so then we get gray in our expectations when, really, they're very black and white, and, unfortunately, that grey is assumptions and you know what that stands for.
Jim Obermayer: Do you want to break down these 4 pieces a little bit or do you want to tackle this in a little way for this?
Glenn Mattson: Sure, we'll break it down and what I'll do is, we have a handful and we'll go as far as 10 of some of the ones, and I'll start with the ones that are probably the easiest to address first. The first one I would take a look at is process and process is really what is your sales process? Companies will send me all the time here's what our selling system looks like, here's our must-haves and however they determine it. Unfortunately in their sales process, their must-haves are not actual tactical objectives, they are more benchmarks. Need to talk about, for instance. No, you have to finalize, not have a conversation about. More times than not, having 1 consistent process that everyone owns, which is the key word, and has the tactics that learn how to discover the must-haves, so you have accuracy inside your pipeline, is crucial.
Jim Obermayer: Is this also known as sales stages or sales steps?
Glenn Mattson: Yes.
Jim Obermayer: Okay.
Glenn Mattson: Very much so, yes. You may have some people that have sales steps, for instance, right Jim? Sales steps may be 5 steps, you could do all 5 steps in 1 meeting. It may take you 6 meeting to get step 1 taken care so usually that process is why pipeline is so important, that if you actually track and once you have your sales process down, you can actually track the origination of the leads through that process to come out with different quoted and different numbers, and percentages, of close. If you are reselling a current client and you're going through the process, obviously your close ratios, if they're on step 3, should be dramatically different if it's a cold situation that doesn't know you. You don't have any proof of concept or trust, it may be different. The next phase once you have the actual in place is start to actually put some percentages of close, which means you have to track your sourcing and you have to track the results of each of your meetings through the process so you have an idea of if we have 5 of these meetings from this type of source, we know over the course of the next 90 days 1 will become a client. It's just pipeline management, but ratios and understanding the ratios between cycles. That diagnostic is huge for companies.
Jim Obermayer: I certainly like your approach, the must-haves, which separates some of these steps out. I've been with companies that at 18 or 20 steps, because they sold over a 2 year period and it just took a long time because they're very technical products and engineering, and all these steps. Then, there's others that have 5 or 6, or 7 steps in the process, but I have found, as you say, the companies without an understanding of the process don't have an understanding of their sales people or their market. We're coming up right now on a break, why don't we tackle the other 3 or 4 when we come back. Paul, let's hear a word from our sponsors.
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Jim Obermayer: Thank you Paul, we've been speaking with Glen Mattson and Glen is the number 1 franchise, I think that's the correct term for his sales consulting business and for Sandler, and he's been an independent sales rep, had his own business and then went in to Sandler. I mentioned that I had used Sandler many times through the years to help us. He's got the trades practice number 1 slot almost every year worldwide, right Glen?
Glenn Mattson: Yes.
Jim Obermayer: We've been tackling how to solve the puzzle of shortening the sales cycle and, boy, you really got into it very quickly here, talking about the benefits of getting into it, how it shortens things. Obviously, how it helps the pipeline, how it helps the management team plan, how it affects inventory all the way down. You mentioned 27% of the pipelines out there are not ... Or, 27% are accurate. Almost had that one backwards. Boy, I didn't realize it was that bad. You came up with 4 steps a little while ago, which was the strategy, the process and the tactics that help make decisions I think, and the benefits. I was writing like a mad fool over here.
Glenn Mattson: Beliefs, yeah. Beliefs.
Jim Obermayer: Belief systems, that's what it is. You tackled the process because you wanted to tackle the easy things first. What are the ones that we should look at?
Glenn Mattson: One of the ones I would suggest is that most of us grew up in a world where we've never been taught to sell the way someone buys. We've been taught to go and have discussions with regards to features and benefits. We've been told to tell people how we can help them fix issues, without actually understanding if they have the issue or if they want to fix it. We've been taught that why don't we go explain what their problem is and how we can help them solve it, yet, we don't even know if they have a problem yet. We assume, so it's interesting that people buy emotionally, yet they justify it intellectually. Most of us sell to the intellect. If we look at it from a psychological standpoint, we have 3 different psyches, not to go too deep into it. We have an adult, a child and a parent.
A child ego state is someone's pure emotion inside of us. The child must say I want this or I don't want that to continue anymore. Then, your adult and your parent takes over, and the parent is the one that says to your psyche, is this a good decision? Is this prudent? Should we make the move? The adult is the one that sits back and says, "All right, have you done your due diligence? Have you looked at other options? Are you making sure this what you want to do?" Unfortunately, most of us sell to the part that justifies it, very few of us have learned how to sell the person that actually makes the buying decision. We actually sell the way that people don't buy, so one of the easiest ways to shorten your sales cycle is learning that instead of justifying why they should do it, you should understand if they want to do it first and why? If we uncover the emotional drivers, it will speed everything up dramatically. If they don't have emotional drivers then what you're going to be doing is putting a proposal together to deal with problems or concerns, not emotional drivers that they want to fix either individually or as a company, so that's one big piece, is that they've learned to unfortunately sell on how people justify a decision, they have never learned how to sell on the way people actually buy at the front.
Jim Obermayer: Does this mean that the company should not only create the sales process and the sales steps, but they should also take a look and come up with a series of steps that the average customer uses to purchase, and see how well those 2 match?
Glenn Mattson: Yeah, what we're looking for is whomever we're talking to, you have company, we just call it emotional drivers. You have company emotional drivers and you have personal emotional drivers. When you get into, which is going to lead me into another piece on how to shorten your sales cycle is, once we've uncovered what their emotional drivers, then we have to uncover budget issues, which are who's involved in it, what's the willingness, what's the abilities, what's the sign-off power, what have they done in the past and most people will turn around, and say, "Well, they hold that really close to their chest." Get what they do, unless you've uncovered their emotional drivers. If you've uncovered their emotional drivers, they will share the rest of it with you. Number 2, besides the sales process being documented, is learning how to sell the way people buy, which is uncovering their emotional drivers. The third one I would throw at you is, you need to discover 2 critical things. What's their budget? Which is the budget to solve their issues. Just because they have a budget doesn't mean they're willing to spend it, so we have to make sure they have one and the willingness to invest in it, and spend that money. Who has to sign off on it, what's the process look like, what's the dollar amounts. In addition to that, Jim, they also need to shorten their sales cycle by understanding the decision making process.
Sometimes, it's just as easy as the Ws, right? Who's involved in it, what does it look like, when do you want to do it, how are you going to make the decisions? Then, you get into large enterprise selling and it's the cast of character, who has power, who has influence. People don't realize, sometimes when you provide a solution to a company, that solution creates problems for somebody else, maybe, in a different division. All of a sudden, even though it's the best for the company, now you have internal politic-ing happen and you're not even aware of it. Those 3 things together are very, very important. The first I would throw at you is expectations. When people are out there selling, they don't set up what I would consider mutually agreed upon expectations. What does the buyer want to accomplish during your meeting? It still shocks me today that a sales person will show up with an agenda, the sales person will show up and run the meeting. What's shocking to me is the person you're talking to is the one with the issues, the person you're talking to is the judge and the jury. The one you're talking is the one that holds some money in the decision, so why are you doing all the talking? Why aren't they talking?
Having the ability to create mutual agreements, having the ability to ... By having mutual agreements, things like no is okay. At the end of this meeting, if it doesn't make sense to continue, I'm okay with that. I may decide that it doesn't make sense to continue as a sales person and I want to give you the freedom to do the same thing. That reduces lying or misguiding statements from prospects, like this is great, why don't you give me 2 weeks to digest and get back to us, then you start following up and there's nothing there. There was nothing there to begin with, they didn't have the courage to tell you no because you never gave them permission to say no, right? If we want truth, we have to allow the prospect the be honest. Having good agendas, having the ability with great agendas is creating clarity on what the next steps are, who's involved in it. The other thing, Jim, with creating clarity is having people understand [inaudible 00:21:19] creates decision. One of the biggest issues with pipelines is, sales people don't have the skillset to have prospects learn and get decisions at the end of each meeting on does it make sense to continue, if so, what do we have to do? What are you going to do, what do I have to do? ETC.
More times than not, the sales person's pushing the sale versus looking at it from a mutual benefit standpoint of is it good for you, is it good for me? If it's not, we'll part friends, if it is, let's move forward.
Jim Obermayer: That's really tackling.
Glenn Mattson: Yeah, anxiety.
Jim Obermayer: It's really tacking the emotional side of it, being very honest and straight forward with someone. They respond to honesty much more so than I think a lot of sales people give customers credit for.
Glenn Mattson: It's amazing.
Jim Obermayer: How do you train on this, though? When you go into a company, you got to pull the sales process together, you've got to look at the buying process on the part of the customer, those are off-line, with management, with some of the sales people cooperating. How do you actually tackle the sales people to train on this? I guess so the sales process is properly set up and the understanding of the buying process is set up, then the rest of it comes a little bit easier.
Glenn Mattson: The sales people are usually the easiest to have them see the light. The reason being is that they will go build it, ask some questions, do some due diligence. They will typically go back to their offices, meet with other people and put together some great proposals or presentations, some spec sheets, whatever they may be. Sit down with the client, do their presentation and then they get all the stuff, which is great. Let me think about it, I have to go talk to somebody else, let's take a look at the probability, move them forward and Q1 of next year. Hey, we have to figure out if the budgetary will allow us to do this. They get all the stuff after they've given their solution to somebody. They get all the things that they didn't uncover during the qualification phase after they actually have nothing left to do. They've given them all the ideas, they've given them the proposal. Then, they find out truth.
The sales people will say, "If you can help me figure out all that stuff that I get after the proposal, if you can help me figure out how to figure that out before we do the proposal", that is what shortens your sales cycle dramatically.
Jim Obermayer: The customer is certainly, there's all kinds of things published, especially by the marketing people today. How much the customer doesn't get the sales person involved until very late in the process, which I have somewhat have some doubts on, because I consistently see it in real life. They keep saying 75% of the decisions by the time a sales person comes in because they've looked at the internet, they've looked at what other people have had to say. They've done all this reviewing and yet, they just don't rely on sales people anymore, but I'm just not quite seeing it. I think that's a hope-for thing on the part of marketing people and the digital content creators. We've only got about a minute and a half left here to 2 minutes, how can someone reach you and then how can someone really tackle this? If this is a subject they really want to tackle, what do you recommend that they do?
Glenn Mattson: I think 2 things. One is, from a reaching standpoint, that's easy. I'll give you our website, it's Mattson.sandler.com, or you can always give us a direct call and our prefix is 631 and it's Sandler, which numerically comes out to 6317263537, or obviously you can get me via email, which is GlennM@Sandler.com. When people will give us a call, they will typically tell us about their outcomes because of lack of a true pipeline. What we have to determine is are those outcomes impacting them emotionally, impacting their business, impacting their finances, impacting their forecasting enough that they're willing to change what they've been currently doing. Change, sometimes, is a simple enhancement. As you know, Jim, running a business, right? Sometimes it's a small enhancement, sometimes it's an overhaul and that leads to the other piece which is when you're looking at a sales process and all of the things we just talked about, there's a scenario that you have to call a selling rule, which is you always want to be in a position of wanting a piece of business, never be in a position of needing a piece of business. Unfortunately, more times than not, people are in the need of it, not the want of it and they don't want to hear the truth.
For the head-trash part, there's a fair amount of stuff that goes on, on do you want to uncover the truth? One of the things that we drive into our sales people is stop trying to sell stuff, just go uncover the truth. If you uncover the truth, the person you're talking to can hear it, see it and sense it, which creates trust. If they trust that you're not going to try to push something down their throat, they'll be more honest with you. Together, you can figure out if this partnership makes sense to take forward. If it doesn't, that's okay and that's an enormously different way of going to market, especially for the buyers that you're talking to.
Jim Obermayer: It really is.
Glenn Mattson: Yeah.
Jim Obermayer: I love your approach, really uncover the truth and greet the truth. The truth will set you free on pipelines, on so many things. The customers trust you because of truth. They can see it in your voice and they understand you're thinking about their best interests, not your own. Glen, we've got to reach the end of our program today, I certainly invite you to come back on SLMA Radio, we produce several programs on the funnel radio channel, sales pipeline radio certainly, with Matt [Hines 00:27:16] and customer marketing radio, with Steve [Gurshick 00:27:18], MSP Now Radio. We've got 6 programs we produce or have producers for them and I'm sure we can get you on any one that you'd like to come back and talk about sales.
Glenn Mattson: Anything to help, I'd be more than happy to.
Jim Obermayer: We've been speaking with Glenn Mattson from Sandler, number 1 franchise in the world. Number 1, I believe, I hope this year for you. You've been very generous with your time Glenn, thank you very much.
Glenn Mattson: Thank you very much Jim and for everyone out there, as always, good selling. Stay focused on the truth and if you stay focused on the truth, it'll shorten your sales.
Paul: You've been listening to CRM Radio, today. The voice of the entire CRM ever-changing space, today and tomorrow. One of the many shows on the funnel radio channel.