Tom Searcy - How to Sell In Place: Closing Deals in the New Normal

How to Sell In Place

Closing Deals in the New Normal

Carajane Moore

Tom Searcy

Copyright 2020 Carajane Moore and Tom Searcy

All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Produced in the United States of America
First Publishing, 2020
ASIN: B0873CC5RZ
Blue Water Publishing
10150 Lantern Road, Suite 175
Fishers, IN 46037

Contents

Chapter One: A Note from Carajane

B efore all this shelter in place happened, I had been selling and closing business from my office without face-to-face meetings. I was coaching company executives and sales leaders on how to land large deals using our process and system from the offices. So, working in place when the pandemic hit was my normal. In fact, CEOs were buying our services from me because (their words not mine) if I could get my people to run a sales process, hell even a sales call like you do, I would be millions ahead of the game.

Selling and closing deals, whether transactional or six or seven-figure deals, without travel has been my life for the last 13 years. See, there is a myth that connection or relationship can truly only happen in a face-to-face environment, and that sales happen because of relationships. Maybe the word myth is too strong a word; a past truth is better. It used to be that way. But that has changed. And deep down inside where its dark and you dont want to look, you know I am right. Why? Because everyone of us have had a great relationship buy from someone else at some time in our career. Thats the hard, cold truth.

But we ignore this inconvenient truth because we like creating relationships and found it overall to yield success. In the new normal of today with people working from home, video conferencing, and restrictions on corporate travel, the truth has been burned into our retinas like staring into the hot, bright summer sun in mid-July.

Now, lets face the truth, you need to learn how to make connections, build relationships and sell effectively without ever leaving the comfort or convenience of your place.

I am co-writing this book because so many of the CEOs and salespeople I work with everyday asked me what they needed to do to become comfortable in this new normal.

This book is designed to help you use your natural, successful style of creating relationships in person and translate that with key tools, tips and tactics to create connections fast, disqualify earl,y and focus your efforts on closing real deals.

Because of the sudden change in business and the need for this content to be timely, please be patient and forgive me for any grammatical and spelling errors you see in throughout. Remember, I am not the book writer in the family. ;-)

Chapter Two: Introduction

T he pandemic dramatically accelerated a business trend already under way, the practice of staff working from home. Distributed workforces, willingness of talented people to move, amazing technology that facilitated visual connections, emailing of documents and text connections had already started the momentum of a greater portion of executives and management to work from home at least one or more days per week. Shelter-in-place caused all companies to embrace the idea of their staff working from home much of the time, if not all of it. New policies, technologies, connectivity and operating practices have been put together quickly to facilitate this huge sea-change of business practices. The traditional approaches for companies to sell to each other and buy from each other on larger purchases has been irrevocably changed.

We have been selling and closing $100,000 to $1,000,000 contracts at distance, by phone and email for over 12 years now. It wasnt because we were clever. It wasnt because the products or services were simple to understand and buy like a commodity. The services we sell are complex and tailored to each client. Over $16 million in business has been sold by us this way without seeing our customer for a sales call or presentation. We have not really talked about how we have done it up until now because for our customers it was not the way in which their markets bought from them. We taught companies how to develop and execute a new process for landing big sales, sales 2-10 times the size of their average sale.

Because the buying processes are changing to a new shift to work at home by decision-makers, we want to share the processes and tools we have used to become so successful at selling without traveling or meeting face-to-face with new customers in new companies.

We have a lot to say about sales: four books, 250 videos, 750 published articles and blogs. its A LOT. Those thoughts are woven into this book, but this book is not about sales processes or sales skills per se. This book was written at a pivot point in the world, a global pandemic. This pandemic has truly changed the way companies do business and businesses will not be able to return one hundred percent to whatever was considered normal. Usually we would consider such a strong statement excessive, but not this time.

Your good sales skills and processes will be valuable in the processes of selling in place. Your deep product and service understandings of what you sell now will be critical in being effective. This book, the tools and associated coaching we offer is about leveraging what you have and integrating with a new approach for a new business environment.

One last thought: the lens through which buyers will see the timeframe of their needs and solutions has changed. The unpredictability of the world is now a vivid reality rather than a punchline. For this reason, decisions will be made that favor shorter timeframes as a way to allow companies to be nimble during a future potential national and global crisis. Ninety days is the new lens. The window of ninety days to solve a problem, create an edge in the market, take advantage of a companys own unique capability is now considered with the predictability of ninety days. Soft cost improvements are irrelevant for now. Payback cycles of 12 to 24 months are very difficult to sell when a decision-maker is under pressure to operate quickly to handle the issues of NOW.

Ninety days is the new clock.

Chapter Three: Here's a Real Example

W e think the best way to jump into the process of selling in place is to walk through a real sales process that we used recently to close a $188,000 contract without ever having met the prospect. Each of the core principles of this process is represented here and then deeply explained throughout the book so that you can build a process as clearly followed as this one.

This real-life example is using a $20 million medical devices company selling to hospitals directly and through medical specialists and clinics.

st Contact

We were found on the internet and the prospect came to our website. He completed a form on our website that asked questions that helped us to understand his company, its size and issues, and why he was contacting us. This website form told us:

He found us online through searching for the key words Key Account Selling.

He was the Senior Vice-President of Sales.

His company was near $20 million in annual revenues of medical devices.

The company was growing much slower than the owners believed it could be.

The company had identified that they were selling many customers small sales, but that they had several large sales and that was what they wanted more of.

Contact information.

Pre-Work for 2 nd Contact

Digital dig: website review, LinkedIn review of the Sr. VP of Sales, CEO and CFO, Facebook search on all three, Google search of the company.

nd Contact Discovery Call