Sales ROI | Stop Wasting Your Time | All Leads Are Not Equal!

Sales ROI is your biggest safety net as a sales professional

Sales is one of the fastest evolving industries….and it’s not likely to slow down anytime soon

And with that realisation, add in that

• Buyers are getting more demanding
• Competition is increasing
• Budgets are getting smaller AND
• No-one wants to make a decision for fear of getting it wrong

So maybe NOW is the time to wake up and recognise that you can easily waste a MOUNTAIN of time selling to prospects who you will never, ever be able to convert!

That’s the truth

So Sales ROI, for me, in about:

• Quickly understanding who I am selling to
• Working out quickly what I’ll need to do to make the sale
• Looking at the prospect’s propensity to buy
• And to buy from me
• At the price I need

So I use a series of simple check lists that saves me wasting time, money, focus, attention and effort on what will essentially will be ‘zombie’ prospects in my sales pipeline

This is important to me.

And should be important to you.

Because the quality of your sales pipeline dictates the accuracy of your sales forecast, dictates what you will close…

And if you’re in sales….all that matters is what you close!

That’s your gateway to the next level!

p.s. If you’re sales forecast is a mess – check out this Simple Sales Forecasts

What is Sales ROI?

Sales ROI stands for three things:

Return on Investment – Is it going to cost me (not just money) more to secure this business than it is ultimately worth?

Return on Interest – Is this buyer sufficiently interested in fixing their problem or are they simply curious about fixing it?

Return on Intent – Is this buyer in a position where they have budget, authority, a defined need and a timescale to proceed?

Three gateway frameworks for you to make a clear go/no-go decision based on insights you gain when you first engage with the prospect.

Insights that are relevant, valid and designed to stop you wasting precious selling time, and/or engaging in sales activities that:

• Don’t result in confirmed orders
• Mean you’re chasing round after prospects who ghost you
• Giving away margin you don’t need to

Sales ROI Checklist

This section gives you a list of some of the questions you might ask yourself as your proceed through the buyer interaction to check you are investing your time and resources wisely.

When you are looking at these questions just beware that they are not questions you’d ask yourself just once.

Ideally, and to remain alert, you’d do a light re-check of these at every stage of the sales process.

I say this because a buyers interest can change as the sales process evolves.

After all, how many sales prospects have you had that have been all guns blazing then disappeared from view two weeks later, never to be seen again?

So – regular review please!

Return on Investment Check List – Is it going to cost me (not just money) more to secure this business than it is ultimately worth?

• Is this a credible buyer with a credible problem?
• A problem that we can solve easily?
• Does this prospect fit our Perfect Prospect Profile?
• Do we have case studies that will impress him?
• Is he a good fit for our organisation?
• Can we provide him with demonstrable value in terms of what he’s looking for?
• Are we a best fit?
• Are they in the right sector?
• The right size?
• The right internal infrastructure to benefit?

Return on Interest – Is this buyer sufficiently interested in fixing their problem or are they simply curious about fixing it?

• Where is this prospect in terms of understanding the scope of their problem?
• Where are they in terms of understanding what this problem has cost then in the past?
• And how much it will cost then in the future if they don’t fix it?
• Are they on a Burning platform that’s creating urgency for them?
• Who else on their decision making/spending committee is also on that burning platform?
• Where are they in their decision making process?
• Do they have a good handle on reality and realistic expectations for this fix?

Return on Intent – Is this buyer in a position where they have budget, authority, a defined need and a timescale to proceed?

• Budget – have they got this approved or at least ring-fenced
• Authority – are the right people prepared to come to the table to make a decision
• Need – is the Burning Platform their most important issue or it it lower down the list of other Burning Platforms?
• Timing – do they have a realistic time frame for dign off and delivery and is this already agreed / fixed?

We go into this section in much more detail on this page – check it out – How to Qualify Every Sales Prospect Using BANT

Using Sales BANT as part of your sales qualification is the minimum requirement for the most basic of sales interactions.

Not least because it indicates what kind of ‘treatment’ and information you need to give you prospect, and so you can assess where the prospect is in their journey, understand more about their problem, and the context in which they need a solution.

Using the 3 ROI Models Saves Your Time!

Time is your most precious commodity as a sales person.

High performance sales functions know this.

Under-performing sales teams, not so much!

When Sales ROI is such a powerful sales tool then it would make sense to sue it.

After all, not all:

• Buyers are good buyers,
• Leads are worth chasing.
• Sales process stay on-plan

And the more people who get involved in the sales process, then the more important it becomes to keep your Sales ROI antenna alert and scanning.

These techniques will help you AND your prospect to stay on track.

The Cost of Failing Sales ROI?

All those new leads…

Those warm prospects.

The incoming calls and the warm word of mouth referrals will, unless you flex your Sales ROI muscle, tie you up in knots as you try to fit square pegs into round holes.

The truth is, that unless you’re selling something so commoditised that its a lowest price wins sale, you won’t be able to close a sales with everyone, and neither should you try.

You focus should be on spending time with those prospects you can reasonably close at the right price.

AND, in a decent time frame (I add time frame because the longer a sales cycle goes on then the greater the chance of the sale failing or you being under-cut by a greedy and cheap competitor)

Failure means a sales CRM full of poorly qualified zombie leads that are half-cooked – and in chasing those you miss out of the deals you should be nurturing!

Cut out the hard work.

Use sales ROI templates.

Then send these time waster leads across to your competitors.

Let them try and get revenue out of the timewasters!

Ignore this at your peril!

Forget about reaching sales targets early, if at all.

Get used to the month end humiliation of shredding your sales pipeline just to get a zero margin deal in before month end!

Stress? Settle in, embrace it, make it your friend and learn to live with it….or not.

You could use the Sales ROI checklist after all

Selling £1 Coins For 10 Pence

Looking for a no-brainer sales pitch?

Want to blow your prospects mind with the value you can deliver for them?

Join us on the Sales Improvement Workshop where you can build just that very proposition!

Demonstrating ROI for your buyers is one of the fastest ways to get to a sales close, preserve sales margins and exclude competitors

Sales ROI and Beyond!

When I first started in sales, I quickly found out that some people just don’t want what you’re selling.

On that day, in that way, in that colour.

With those terms blah, blah, blah.

You know that type of buyer.

Those prospects who wouldn’t know a great solution even if you were to guild it in gold and send it to him for free!

So, I decided.

I wanted to avoid those sales prospects as often as I could.

I wanted to find serious prospects ASAP because those guys I could convert

• Fast
• With a high margin and
• With a total win-win solution.
• And they would become my raving fans
• They would be ace reference accounts
• They would come back time and time again….
• Those buyers respected the value I bought to the table and I understood what they needed.

Happy days.

Sales ROI and Risk

All I needed to do was to realistically prove that by buying my service/product they would GAIN GREATER RETURNS than whatever money they would ever spend with me.

You can find out more about how I made this work in Demonstrating ROI

The faster I got that PROOF out the way, the faster the close came because in many instances…

…prospects aren’t as worried about the cost of the purchase as they are about the risks involved in the purchase.

And guess what?

As an added bonus, hardly anyone queried my prices.

They didn’t need to any more, because they knew they were going to win by buying.

Because I’d proved that to them before I asked for their business.

Sales ROI can do that because that’s what it’s designed to do for you and the buyer.

Sales ROI is designed for you to spend your selling time with people who see value and benefits in what you offer

56% of buyers claim that one of their key requirements for buying is that they enjoy the sales process.

Sales ROI ticks that box too…

It’s the easiest and fastest way to engage the buyer in the process,

The simplest way to make then feel listened to, engaged with, understood and valued!

All the while you’re delivering everything that their emotional brain needs, sales ROI ticks the logical box, it gives evidence to support their emotional decisions.

Why wouldn’t the buy?

You know, that is EXACTLY what my buyers used to say too!

Why Doesn’t Every Sales Person Use Sales ROI?

I’ve seen lots of sales people simply not be able to get their head around doing it…

I think this primarily happens because they:

• Don’t like setting hard and fast rules around who they would/should engage with
• Think their sales skills are so great that they don’t need to set guidelines around who they should spend their time with – after all they can convert everyone can’t they?
• Don’t want to risk missing 1 great lead because it doesn’t fit the profile. This means the are happy to talk to 99 rubbish leads to find the one they would have missed had they chucked 100 no-hopers out the sales process – now just think about that for one minute

Other sales people, well, they’ve told me they like selling how they are selling and that’s good enough for them.

Good enough is such an interesting turn of phrase don’t you think?

I guess their salary is good enough too.

And their life

And their car

And their house.

All just good enough…

But let me tell you this.

The sales professionals that get it, try it, adopt the Sales ROI sales structure as their own…wow.

Those guys that have some fun with it.

They use it to reduce buyer defences and so get rid of objections and boring and long sales processes.

Those guys just never look back.

AND their customers love them.

Let Your Sales Prospects Enjoy Your Sales Process

Come along to the Sales Improvement Workshop where we cover all of this and much more…you’ll enjoy selling, you’ll sell more and your prospects will love you for it!

Happy Selling