On today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, we’ll hear from Sean Tierney, Director of Sales for managed WordPress hosting provider Pagely. Sean will share the 7-step approach Pagely used to systematize its sales that can help you and your team improve your sales.
Pagely helps some of the world’s largest brands — Disney, Virgin Atlantic, Comcast, Univision, and other companies that don’t want to worry about scaling and securing their websites.
“Shoot from the hip” sales
When Sean took over at Pagely three years ago, the sales process was non-existent. He was employee number eight, and he was running both sales and marketing.
The company had lost its main salesperson, and the team was basically shooting from the hip. That approach wasn’t working, so Sean was adamant about setting up a framework to systematize the sales process.
He built a 7-step approach for sales that allowed the company to more than 3x its revenue.
In that time, the employee headcount has grown to 38.
7-step approach to sales
- Map out the flow.
- Track metrics and KPIs.
- Implement a pipeline.
- Flintstone.
- Delegate
- Automate.
- Scale personal attention.
Flow refers to the buyer’s journey, and there are two different kinds of maps that Pagely uses to understand the current reality.
One is an imagined drawing on paper that shows how people are getting to the website. It shows the lead forms they are filling out and where that information goes. It shows newsletters and support systems so Pagely can understand where all the data is going.
The other flow map is a funnel map, which is usually a left-to-right diagram that helps you understand your funnel.
- How do people come to find out about you when they don’t know anything?
- How do they proceed down the continuum of increasing engagement on the way to sharing their contact information?
- What does the followup and nurturing process look like?
- How will you grow the relationship once they’re a customer?
Pagely considers it a lifecycle of sorts; it’s lifecycle marketing.
How the system affected sales
The first hire following the new system was a sales development representative because Sean recognized that sales development was where the bottleneck was happening.
Sean recognized that sales development was keeping him from being more strategic, a feeling that many entrepreneurs can likely relate to because they wear so many hats.
You have to be cognizant of what’s consuming your time.
Sean assigned his interns to import all his chats, his emails, and his phone calls into a spreadsheet. The team pulled more than 500 sales exchanges into the spreadsheet and turned that into a knowledge base.
That information became their training material for the first hire, who was one of the interns.
Flintstoning
Flintstoning refers to the presence of a pre-optimization problem. Very often people try to launch immediately into automating things, but entrepreneurs know that it’s important to automate the right things.
Pagely didn’t have a fancy CRM tool initially, so Sean used a simple tool called Boomerang that would notify him if a prospect hadn’t responded to his email within a predetermined amount of time.
Instead of using a fancy tool, he started with something simple. Then he figured out what the follow-up process should look like.
You don’t have to be perfect right away. You just have to start.
Scaling personal attention
Sean learned the concept from Jermaine Griggs, a well-known marketer some time back. The idea is that you provide a boutique experience at scale.
Why do people go to boutique stores? Because they like the personal touch.
Seek to deliver that experience at scale.
Pagely uses video to deliver a personalized sales pitch. They employ presales questions that the sales reps ask in every call, and that effort often engages prospects who wouldn’t have otherwise done so.
Because they get a chance to “see” the sales rep and hear some of their questions being answered, it pulls them in.
Video personalization
Personalized content allows you to give your prospects exactly what they want.
Imagine being able to craft a video to your prospect, and allowing the prospect halfway through to choose one of five problems that most plague his business. At that point, the video explains how your company solved that problem for other customers.
The conversation is immediately more relevant because it addresses his exact problem.
Beyond giving you a better experience, Sean is able to extract answers and follow up using the information and data points he gathered.
In the emails you get after the video, they’ll be very fine-tuned to the pain point you have. It can be highly calibrated to your situation.
It’s a win-win proposition because the prospect is getting exactly what he needs in an engaging format, and the sales rep doesn’t have to spend so much time answering the same repetitive questions. It lowers the overhead.
The process also allows for much higher-level conversation when the sales rep finally does get on the phone. Instead of dreading those initial phone calls, people tend to be excited to have the conversation.
Pagely
Pagely is at the high end of the market, and they actually launched the concept. For big brands, it’s not worth it to focus on running a website.
Disney is happy to pay to offload all the web concerns to someone else so they can focus on their core competency.
Don’t just parachute in and flail. Take your time and understand where you’re trying to get. Be intentional as you execute.
“Systematize Sales” episode resources
Pagely has a huge amount of resources available on its website. You can see the information about Pagely’s knowledge base here. To view the videos Sean referred to in the episode, visit Pagely.com/explore. See the video sample at Pagely.com/video.
Also, check out dot.vu to learn more about the interactive videos Pagely employs to lower its overhead and improve engagement.
Be intentional as you develop the seven steps:
- Map out the flow.
- Track metrics and KPIs.
- Implement a pipeline.
- Flintstone.
- Delegate
- Automate.
- Scale personal attention.
Maximizer CRM is a personalized CRM that gives you the confidence to improve your business and increase profits. Get rid of the boring CRMs and customize to your team’s selling abilities.
Click on the link to get a free demo of what Maximizer CRM can do for you. It integrates your marketing campaign as well as your CRM.
This episode is also brought to you in part by prospect.io, a powerful sales automation platform that allows you to build highly personalized, cold email campaigns. To learn more, go to prospect.io/tse. Your prospecting will never ever be the same.
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