Follow up on your sales

0:03 Welcome to business purpose and clarity with petri I'm your host we talk about startup life insights practical tips mistakes failures and everything between you know there's the other way you don't always need to ask from investors you could actually do sales that's kind of old-fashioned way of doing business you provide something with value and no it's not for the business deck it's actually for the end customers and they give you money cash hopefully in return of the things what you give them if you do sales and if you don't please try that thing it's it's good in the long term especially if if the funding situation is getting a bit harder in the near well nevertheless if you're doing sales do you follow up on your sales because this is something I was talking dr paul villo who is leading expert in.

1:07 B2b value-based selling and sales management and he was saying that most of the companies if I remember correctly you can take it from my talks with better broadcast and be on the safe side but I think it's three quarters of companies who are not following update sales you know that's crazy you are poking and trying to get a lot of prospects and then you have kind of a process hopefully proactive process but nevertheless anything which is kind of selling I guess there's a process even if it's not really thought out through if you're doing sales what type of a follow-up process do you have do you qualify your sales okay first meeting what's the of closing it how many stages you have there and how do you how do you qualify because it's easy and fun to talk to people it's.

2:11 Great to have meetings but sometimes to cut feeling you have or you just have fun with the people you're talking doesn't exactly mean that you can convert them to sales to the actual cash in hand what might help in the beginning and this is really basics one-on-ones but it's easy to forget these things so bear with me early on when you were excited about someone and and you're really wiping that this could be a good customer for you could pop the question really early how can I help you what's your budget what's the timeline for your decision who are the people who are involved in the decision making and what kind of a purchase process do you have well I know it was more than one question but just bluntly but nicely asking these questions can really help you to qualify whether there's something into this sales process and whether it's.

3:15 Worth pursuing further also it might be worthwhile if you're sending proposal if you're already in that states just simply follow up by calling if the email has been sent already some time ago and you don't get a response or you send some chat messages in linkedin or whatnot people aren't responding there's a pretty high probability they did not read it they did not receive it it's in the spam or a similar folder which is never checked and you may miss a deadline somebody else might have been calling them you know the traditional good old-fashioned way cold calling the phone app in your phone not the whatsapp phone app and calling just out of the blue without warning.

4:18 Just the regular people you know you can do that try it's fun but don't pick random numbers try to make more qualified sales process why I'm talking about these things I've seen it too many times I'm talking about these things too many times with the startups because the basics are the hardest it's not glamorous it's not so exciting it's a process it's grinding it's but if you're not measuring if you're not tracking it's harder to get the results it's harder to improve this is low hanging fruit you put it in place and you are already in the top 25 of the companies.