Aaron Hoos

It all started because I was being blindsided by sales.

Before I started full-time freelance writing for financial and real estate businesses, I worked in financial sales. I’d get no sales for a while and then suddenly a flood of sales would come in. It was hard to predict the factors that led to my (occasional) success.

I wondered: What if I could actually predict my sales before I made them?

What if I could make a sale faster? And more effortless?

And, what if I could make these sales faster and more effortless over and over and over again with each new lead?

In this blog post, I’m going to show you the simple and surprising way to increase your sales. It’s simple because it only takes about 2 minutes before you make your sales presentation; and it’s surprising because it really is so easy (and almost obvious) to do.

THE 2 MINUTE SALES INCREASING EXERCISE

The best way I’ve found to increase sales is this: Just before I make a sales presentation, I try to guess the probability that I will actually be able to sell this product to this client.

Sounds weird, right? After all, what’s the advantage of guessing? And, why would you continue if you thought the probability of selling was low?

But it works. After just one month of estimating my probability of success before making the presentation, I found a huge increase in the number of sales I closed.

Here’s why it’s so effective:

1. At first, your guessing is just that — guessing. It’s almost arbitrary. But after a while, you start to become more accurate. You start to know when a sales presentation is going to end with a sale or without one. It’s like shooting a basketball from the foul line. You know the moment it leaves your fingers whether you’re going to sink the throw… you don’t actually have to wait for it to arc over into the hoop.
2. Soon, you start discover the underlying elements that make up the success of a sale. You discover that a sale is not an unquantifiable relationship but as a series of elements which, when put together, usually turn into a sale. These “success elements” help you to determine the probability that you will succeed. You’ll assign a percentage to these success elements so that you can estimate your probability of a closed sale before you even open your mouth to present.
3. Then, you begin to shape your sales efforts around optimizing those elements (either by better qualifying your leads more effectively or by making changes in your own marketing and selling efforts).

Result?

• You know ahead of time whether or not a sale is going to be successful.
• When a sale doesn’t seem to be the likely outcome of your sales presentation then you can change gears by changing the purpose of the presentation… from sales to additional fact-finding (for example).
• When a sale does seem to the likely outcome of your sales presentation, you can move forward confidently.
• Ultimately, the result is MORE SALES.

AN EXAMPLE OF PROBABILITY ESTIMATING IN MY OWN BUSINESS

When I first started estimating my success probability, I was just guessing. I listed 4 elements that I thought were important and I assigned them a 25% probability percentage each. I soon found that I was presenting to people and was expecting a 25%, 50%, or 75% likelihood of success (never the elusive 100%!).

I saw this and realized the futility of pitching to someone when I only had a 25% probability of success. So I immediately stopped presenting to them. That bumped up my closing rate dramatically because I was now only presenting to people who were either 50% or 75% likely to buy from me. (In other words, I started qualifying my leads much more effectively based on something quantifiable).

The next thing I observed is that even though I was presenting to people who were either 50% or 75% likely to buy from me, I only ever closed the deals on the 75%ers. Never the 50%ers…. However, upon further reflection, I realized that many of the 50% probability prospects could easily be turned into 75% probability prospects.

Here’s what I did next: I looked at my successes even further and found that there weren’t only 4 success elements. (That was just my initial unrefined foray into probability estimating).

After further research, I found that there were many more success elements. I eventually found 12 success elements that consistently proved out to be the biggest factors. Among them were:

• The amount of time between someone needing my services and me finding out about it and showing up to help them (the sooner the better).
• The quality of the client’s credit rating.
• Whether or not they initiated contact or I did.
• How specific they were in telling me their needs.
• (… and eight other elements).

Today, I only make sales presentations to prospects when the success elements are at least 60%.

And, as I review my successes, I see that I consistently only get clients who are at a 75% probability. (However, I continue presenting to the 60% people because it helps me to maintain a baseline for what my success elements are and it forces me to look at the 60%ers and see if there’s a way that I can increase their probability).

Disclaimer: Just in case it’s not clear; I don’t close every sale even when the probabilities are high. Many other factors (such as changes in the prospect’s life or personality conflict or my misreading of the probabilities) play a part in whether a sale is closed. These are only probabilities.

Enough about me…

HERE’S HOW TO ESTIMATE YOUR SALES SUCCESS

First, start guessing: The best thing you can do is just start guessing. Just guess about the outcome before every presentation. Write it down then go present. Your initial efforts will feel arbitrary and uninformed.

Then, after each presentation, review your written guess and ask yourself if your outcome was accurate or not.

Second, figure out what makes a successful sale: Think about all of the elements that go into successful sales. List as many as you can. A few examples might be:

• The length of time the prospect knew you
• The amount and type of interaction you had with the prospect
• Whether the prospect contacted you initially or whether you contacted them (i.e. cold call)
• The amount of money the prospect was willing to spend
• The types of objections the prospect had
• The speed in which you responded to questions and issues
• The alignment between your goals and your prospect’s goals
• etc.

The more you can list, the better.

List elements that you think could be success elements. List the elements that you know are true. List the elements that clients have told you were the reasons they hired you. List the objections that prospects have (because solving these are probably success elements). List the things you’ve said or done when you saw a change in a prospect’s face or demeanor and you knew that you had closed the sale. List the elements that your sales manager or agency says are important. Go ask a successful professional and list what they say, too.

Be aware that some of the items you list will seem to be completely in your control and some of them will be completely out of your control. List them all anyway.

Third, refine your list: Now look at your sales successes. Decide which elements were present in your successful sales and were not present in your unsuccessful sales. The success elements that were almost always present in your successful sales and almost never present in your unsuccessful ones should make the final cut.

But don’t forget to keep it reasonable. If you have 100 success elements, it might be a little much to deal with and this 2 minute exercise becomes an unwieldy 15 minute exercise. Cut it down if possible. Combine success elements if possible. Find the most important. I’m very happy with 12 success elements and I think I could comfortably handle up to 20 elements but I wouldn’t want to pay attention to many more than that.

Fourth, assign percentages: Now assign a percentage to those elements. For starters, just divide them equally so if you have 10 elements, assign each a 10% probability… but over time, you might refine this number because some elements will be worth more than others. I’ll talk more about this near the end of this post.

Fifth, build your sales funnel’s marketing and selling efforts around those success elements: Every time you build a relationship with a client, make sure those elements are all in place before you present. When they are in place, you are highly likely to close the sale. If they aren’t in place, decide whether or not they ever will be in place and work toward ensuring those elements are in place by spending more time with the prospects.

Sixth, keep guessing! Keep guessing. With every single sales presentation, guess the probability of your success based on the success elements you’ve listed. Write it down. Then check afterward.

REFINING YOUR ESTIMATION

• For successful sales of a high percentage, note where you were correct (which success elements were present and which ones weren’t). If you consistently find that a particular success element isn’t present then it is not as important as you initially thought.
• For successful sales of a low percentage, figure out why you closed the sale even though you didn’t think you would. Are there other success elements present that you have not accounted for?
• For unsuccessful sales of a high percentage, note which success elements were present and which ones weren’t. Revisit your probabilities if you consistently see a success element not present; chances are, it is having more of an impact on your selling efforts than you thought.
• For unsuccessful sales of a low percentage, revisit what you can do to improve the probabilities. Look at the success elements that you have some control over and consider how you could have improved them in this case. And even the success elements over which you have no control, figure out how you could have qualified the lead more effectively so that they wouldn’t come to you in the first place until more success elements are in place.

Now you have a useful tool that you can spend 2 minutes doing before every sales presentation to significantly increase your ability to turn prospects into clients!

By their very nature, people don’t like change.

Sure, life is a constant state of change — children turn into adults, they go away to college, they buy a house, they get a job, they meet someone, they have children, etc. Those are all big changes. But in general, people don’t like a lot of change in their lives. They drive the same kinds of cars, they hang out with the same kinds of people, they don’t take a lot of risks, they aspire to a life of status quo.

People are skeptical (and even fearful) of change because change is risk… and people are risk-averse.

So, when you have a Prospect in your sales funnel and you are presenting them with an opportunity to buy, they may cognitively understand that the product or service will help them, but their risk-averse instinct tells them that an agreement to buy is risky… and risk is bad.

In my experience, people are fearful of the following four risks (in the context of a sales funnel), and these four risks will keep people from buying:

• Losing money (i.e. paying for a product that turns out to be worthless)
• Losing time (i.e. spending time purchasing the product and then not finding it helpful, or needing to work longer in order to “earn back” the money lost on a useless product)
• Losing effort (i.e. spending time and energy to use a product that is not valuable, or needing to work longer to “earn back” the money lost on a useless product)
• Losing face (i.e. being embarrassed in front of family or friends because of a purchase)

I think there are many other risks that keep people from buying — the risks of losing freedom, privacy, and assets, for example. But the four risks I’ve listed above are the four I’ve seen to be the most common and the biggest fears that keep people from buying.

When people feel these risks, they will give the seller all kinds of objections (some will be related to the real risk they are feeling but many will be totally unrelated, as a sort-of unconscious smoke-screen).

If you want to get people to buy from you, you need to overcome these risks by doing the following in your sales funnel:

1. Address objections head-on before they can even be asked by the customer. Read a previous blog post about 8 ways to destroy objections before they are asked, and read a Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge blog post where I gave an objection-handling example.
2. Overwhelm them with value. Read a previous blog post where I talk about the reason why people are afraid to buy, and blog post about something called the 9X problem, where people are afraid to move off of the status quo.
3. Use guarantees and measurable assurances (including testimonials).

I’m looking forward to two movies this summer — The Hangover Part II and Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions about me based on that confession). Although I PVR everything and tend to fast forward through the commercials, I’ll usually stop fast forwarding and play previews for these movies.

These two movies (and movies like them), my wife and I call them “theater movies” because we’ll happily go and pay to watch them in the theater (as opposed to “renters” that we’ll watch on Netflix).

Hollywood, of course, wants lots of theater-goers and so, as summer approaches, we are all being drawn in to Hollywood’s sales funnels.

Yes, Hollywood has sales funnels. Every business has a sales funnel and the studios that make movies each have their own sales funnels.

This “Hollywood sales funnel” works well (hey, many of them make a ton of money) and it can teach business owners a thing or two about how to create a successful sales funnel.

THE HOLLYWOOD SALES FUNNEL

The Hollywood sales funnel goes something like this:

The Audience stage: You and I are sitting there, on the couch, eating Doritos and watching the latest episode of The Chicago Code or Grey’s Anatomy. We’re drawn into the story. Clearly, we want to be entertained (or, at the very least, we have nothing better to do), which makes us the perfect candidate for… commercials! Including a movie trailer.

A movie trailer is a teaser. A movie trailer tends to follow a classic format and its ultimate purpose is to capture our attention and make us want more! It’s meant to win over audiences that aren’t paying attention or even thinking about the summer right now. It’s meant to force us to ask questions and wonder how the hero/heroine got themselves into this predicament and how they’ll get out of it.

What’s noticeable is that it isn’t meant to tell the whole story. Only just enough to capture our interest. For people who don’t like movies about hangovers or pirates, then trailers for The Hangover Part II and Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides aren’t going to capture their attention. But for people who can relate (because they’ve had hangovers) or for people who aspire (to be pirates or at least to a life of vicarious adventure), these trailers will capture their attention. (Note: Just in case it’s not obvious, this is the case for every trailer. People might relate to an underdog and want to watch a movie where an unlikely hero is drawn into threatening circumstances; or people might aspire to true love and want to watch a movie where a boy meets a girl then loses the girl then woos her and they live happily ever after).

Movie trailers act as a “sorting mechanism”, enticing Audience members who are likely to become customers while being ignored by those who won’t likely become customers.

The Lead stage: We’ve just seen a trailer for a movie that seemed interesting. We pause to think about it. We ask the questions (“how did the hero get in that situation?”). We think ahead to the summer. That’s all that Hollywood wants us to do at this stage in the sales funnel. Just think a little further about the movie. Not much, just a bit. We turn to the person sitting on the couch and we say something like “that might be interesting to watch” or “I’d love to see Ian McShane as Blackbeard”.

From time to time, we see branded messages that triggers the same feelings of relation or aspiration: Maybe it’s a billboard of the movie or a newspaper ad that says “in theaters soon” or we see the trailer again or we visit the website or we hear a review or we spot the movie poster. Whatever.

Although the message is very similar to the message presented in the Audience stage, it allows us to go deeper. We see new trailers or we think about the old trailers a little more. We catch nuances we missed the first time. We ask new questions. We’re presented with the message over and over. That message is: “I want to see this movie because [whatever].”

Then…

The Prospect stage:It’s a summer weekend. It’s humid. We’ve worked all week and deserve a break. We’re wondering what to do on a Friday night. One person says “how about dinner and a movie?”

Dinner’s the easy part. Someone suggests a favorite restaurant and no one disagrees. But a movie — you check the listings and, what do you know, YOUR movie is playing! The one you’ve been thinking about. The one that looked really good. It’s settled then.

The Customer stage: You drive to the theater. You buy tickets and popcorn and soda and licorice… and you love the movie.

The Evangelist stage: The movie is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that you want to immediately tell your friends. After all, they love hangovers and pirates just as much as you do, so the thinking is: If you liked it, they will love it. You call, text, blog, tweet, or somehow share your excitement about the movie to your friends and they go to the theater the next week and watch.

And THAT is the Hollywood sales funnel.

WHAT THE HOLLYWOOD SALES FUNNEL CAN TEACH YOU

This sales funnel works. Studios and actors make billions of dollars a year because of this sales funnel. Here’s what your business can learn from the Hollywood sales funnel.

The Audience stage is about finding the right audience — a target market who is in a receptive state — and tease them. Give them something to think about/talk about/question. It could be a headline or a compelling AdWords ad. It could be a strange graphic or a controversial tweet. Something that captures your Audience’s attention and makes them want more.

The Lead stage is about presenting a consistent branded message again and again that helps your Lead go deeper. It’s still enticing them (like the Audience stage did), but it gives some answers and raises more questions. Ultimately, the Lead should be left wondering “this sounds interesting… I want to know more.”

The Prospect stage is about finding the intersection between the contact’s need (“I want to watch that movie” or “I want to warm my food” or “I need a reliable car”) and the opportunity to buy (“It’s Friday and the movie is in the theater!” or “here’s a microwave and it happens to be on sale!” or “with financing, I can buy a red one!”).

That’s when they become a Customer.

The Customer stage is fulfilling on the promise. Some businesses stop there but smart businesses fulfill on the promise made in such a way that the Customer feels they received value and it compels them to move on to…

The Evangelist stage. This is where the Evangelist is so excited about your product or service that they call, text, blog, tweet, or somehow share their excitement about your product or service with their friends… and then those friends buy the same thing.

Hollywood’s movies are great moments of excitement and entertainment and escape. But their sales funnels are based on years of successful strategy and measurement and they work. As you develop your sales funnel, ask yourself this: “If my business were a movie, would this part of my sales funnel entice the sales funnel contact to want to come to the theater and pay to watch?“

Researching a company before accepting them as clients is an important lesson I wish I knew earlier in my business. Only the past 5 years or so have I really started to investigate a potential Customer first to make sure that they’re the right fit.

Researching businesses for this kind of information isn’t always easy — they’re busy promoting themselves to their Prospects, which means you have to dig deeper to find what your potential Customer is all about.

Mike Michalowicz offers a clever way to do some preliminary research for Prospects. The answer is in the title but you should really read the whole article.

How to Hook a Prospect? Check Its Job Ads – WSJ.com.

After you’ve read the article, take a look at your list of Prospects then go hunting for their job ads. Check out sites like Monster.com and don’t forget about freelance sites, too.

Once you’ve found some info, integrate it into your sales presentations. (Michalowicz tells you how to do that). And you can even go beyond your Prospect list and do the same task for all of the stages in your sales funnel.

The same information in job ads can help you move sales funnel contacts at each stage: Your Audience member job ads can help you refine your message to capture their attention more effectively and turn them into Leads. Your Leads’ job ads can help you position yourself as the solution to their problem or need so you can turn them into Prospects. Your Prospects’ job ads can help you overcome objections and drive home key sales-making points to convert them into Customers. Your Customers’ job ads can help you identify new opportunities to provide service so they can become Evangelists.

When business owners create their own sales funnel, the temptation is to think of each stage as a single event. But this can actually repel people from buying.

Here’s what happens:

Entrepreneurs see the 5 stages of the sales funnel (Audience, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Evangelists) as 5 separate, distinct events. They create one action-step for each stage, expecting contacts at each stage to take just one action to “leap” from one stage to the next.

EXAMPLE #1: DON’T CREATE A SALES FUNNEL LIKE THIS
Let’s say you have a contact at the Audience stage.

You decide that following you on Twitter is the “trigger” that will transition them from an Audience contact into a Lead contact. And you decide that clicking on your sales page is the “trigger” that will turn them from a Lead contact into a Prospect contact.

Most entrepreneurs would make the following action-steps in their sales funnel:

1. Get your Audience contact to become a Lead by following you on Twitter.
2. Get your Lead contact to become a Prospect by clicking a link to the sales page (via Twitter).

It seems nice and clean and simple. But this can be too big of a leap for a lot of contacts. They simply won’t take that next action because it’s not an easy, obvious step.

This is a problem. This “one-action-step-per-stage” sales funnel might work some of the time, but more often than not, contacts resist this kind of sales funnel because the steps from one stage to the next stage seem too big and scary for them to take.

It can be too much of a leap for someone to follow you on Twitter and then click on your sales funnel.

HERE’S THE SOLUTION FOR A BETTER SALES FUNNEL
Business owners need to see their sales funnels as having 5 stages, but with each stage consisting of several steps or customer actions. Just because there are 5 stages, doesn’t mean there are only going to be 5 steps or actions the contact will take. Each stage can have several steps..

Contacts might be reluctant to take a big leap to the next sales funnel stage but they might be willing to take several very small steps.

EXAMPLE #2: CREATE A SALES FUNNEL LIKE THIS
Create a series of smaller “baby steps” in each stage of your sales funnel. Let’s use the example above but build it out with baby steps through the Lead stage so the contact doesn’t have to make such a big leap from one stage to the next.

1. Get your Audience contact to become a Lead by following you on Twitter.
2. Encourage your Lead contact to retweet you by sharing something relevant specifically to them.
3. Encourage your Lead contact to reply to you by interacting with them. (Maybe do this more than once!).
4. Share a link to a relevant blog post or article you’ve written and solicit feedback.
5. Engage your Lead contact in a Twitter-based conversation.
6. Share a link to a relevant blog post and invite them to comment on it.
7. Engage your Lead contact in a Twitter-based conversation.
8. Share a link to your sales page via Twitter.

See what we did here? We started our new Lead contact with a little engagement. Nothing that required a lot of commitment or even trust. Then we slowly built a relationship. We didn’t ask too much of the contact (although we did ask for a bit of participation — just a little more with each interaction). In a sense, we raised the temperature until the next obvious step was for the contact to click the sales page.

Yes, there are more steps in this example than in the previous one, and yes, this method does require some additional work on your part. But here’s why its an advantage: You’re not asking your contact to leap from one stage to the next. Rather, you are helping them take baby steps by engaging them, and building credibility and trust. By the time they get to the sales page link step, it’s just a small step for them to take.

Now, I’ve just used the Lead stage contact as an example, but this is true of any stage in your sales funnel: Rather than requiring your contacts to make the leap from one stage to another, break that stage up into smaller steps to help your contact through your sales funnel. If your steps are well-planned and intuitive, you’ll find that more contacts will move through your sales funnel faster even though it looks like there is more for them to do at each stage.