Craig Lowder: The Role of Technology in Modern Sales Prospecting

Conversational Selling

About Craig Lowder: Craig Lowder is a Founder and President of the Main Spring Sales Group, a specialized client acquisition consultancy focused on creating significant, predictable, and sustainable sales growth for successful Financial Advisors, Consultants, and Business Leaders, making a 6-7 Figure Income seeking a strategic senior-level sales executive on a part-time, contract basis to develop and execute sales strategy, including sales process development, performance management systems, and ensure sales execution. With a unique blend of foundational sales science & real-world experience, Craig partners with businesses and advisors to transform their sales trajectory, ensuring consistent, measurable growth in every endeavor. Craig has worked with over 50 companies in various industries, from retail to manufacturing, financial services to business services. He has increased first-year annual sales by 22 to 142 percent for every client. Craig is the author of two highly-rated books, Smooth Selling Forever and Trusted Advisor Confidential℠. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Craig.

In this episode, Nancy and Craig discuss the following:

• The secret of growing a company to 142%
• Shift to virtual Selling and digital self-serve
• Challenges in virtual Selling: Adapting to new technology, maximizing efficiency, and reducing the cost of sales
• From cold calls to warm introductions: Increasing touchpoints with prospects
• Overcoming challenges such as wrong people in wrong seats, lack of clearly defined sales metrics, and absence of sales processes
• Keys to building an effective sales team
• Importance of ongoing learning, open communication, mentoring, and recognition and reward systems

Key Takeaways:

• We are in a virtual selling and a digital self-serve world; the old days of in-person meetings have gone.
• The virtual meetings that are being held are shorter and more on point.
• The definition of cold calling nowadays is getting a list of names and numbers and just banging the phone and calling people.
• Too many salespeople give up after two or three times, and studies show it may take six or seven outreaches.
  

"There are a lot of opportunities for enhancement or growth in the company. A lot of it gets down to having a detailed sales growth plan that everyone is following, making sure that there are defined sales processes that everyone follows, which shorten sales cycles, improve conversion rates, making sure that there are sales success standards present, that are activity as well as results-based, and that there are targets which generally increases the level of activity that's taking place, making sure that organizations have an ideal client profile, understanding the difference between a crow and a pheasant. So, they invest their time in marketing, lead generation, and lead conversion on those opportunities that are the best fit for them. And then finally, and most importantly, ensuring that they have the right people in their sales organization in the right seats." – CRAIG

"The reality is, and I believe I said it in the article, there is absolutely no justification for a cold call. With all the technology available today, whether it's LinkedIn, the focus of prospecting should be on getting introduced to the individual in the organization we're targeting to warm up the call. So, there's a likelihood that an individual will either return your call or respond to an email. I would say it continues because of the amount of, and I hate to say it, noise that's out there digitally. If you remember back when you and I were doing this several decades ago, the studies were showing it took, you know, six to seven interactions for you to begin to develop a level of trust. Today, because of all that noise out there, it's taking twice that number of touches before somebody's willing to trust you. So, I think that the trend is that we need to be in more frequent touch with our prospects. The conversations, the emails need to be shorter with a very defined agenda and take a waypoint for the listener, the reader." – CRAIG

"In my book, Smooth Selling Forever, I outline 12 reasons why significant predictable and sustainable sales growth will not happen unless you overcome 12 challenges. The top four include the wrong people in the wrong seats. We know that in a virtual selling environment, the role definitions, the makeup of the sales team's skill sets, and experience have changed. Third was not having clearly defined sales metrics, activities, and results. The focus is typically on the results, but we must understand that results are lagging success indicators. We really need to determine the leading indicators of success, which are activities, their calls, their opportunities discovered, proposals or quotes that go out the door, and how healthy our sales funnel is, just at a very basic level. The second of the top four are no defined sales processes. I'm a firm advocate that you need to have clearly defined sales processes, which are technically the documentation of best practices of those responsible for the Selling. And there are at least three, if not more. One, new customer, new project. Two, existing customers, new project. And it could be upsold, cross-sell. The third is renewals or, re-business or reorder business. And they all have different paths that require different steps and may involve different people. But the bottom line in building sales processes is that the sales process needs to be congruent with your target audience's buying process." – CRAIG

Connect with Craig Lowder:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craiglowder/
• Smooth Selling Forever: https://www.smoothsellingforever.com/
• Personal: https://www.craiglowder.com/

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