Matt Heinz is a prolific author and award-winning blogger. He is President and Founder of Heinz Marketing with 20 years of marketing, business development and sales experience
On this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Matt is explaining how we can break out of a sales slump.
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Transcript
Matt Heinz:
The time when you need to prospect the most is when your pipeline is flush. When your pipeline is mature and you are working deals through, and you’re about to have one of your biggest months or biggest quarters in a long time. But it’s also extremely common for sales professionals to look at their pipeline to say, “I’ve got a bunch of deals, common. This is fantastic. This is what I worked hard for,” and to go focus on those deals and get complacent. Sales is not fair, and sales is not easy. It’s a lot of damn work, and there have been times when we haven’t hit our number. And I think if I look back, it was because I thought a couple deals that we’re going to close didn’t close.
Will Barron:
Hello, Sales Nation. I’m Will Barron, host of The Salesman Podcast, the world’s biggest B2B sales show where we help you, not just hit your target, but really thrive in sales. If you haven’t already, click subscribe and join Sales Nation. And with that said, let’s meet today’s guest.
Matt Heinz:
Hi, this is Matt Heinz, founder and president of Heinz Marketing, and we help companies build predictable sales pipeline.
Are Slumps a Normal Part of Being in Sales? · [01:11]
Will Barron:
In this episode, you’re going to learn why you’re in a sales slump right now and how to get out of it. Super practical. What you need to do right now to get out of the sales slump, get your manager off your back, to start crushing your numbers. And then when you’re at that point, what you can do to stop falling into them in the future. And with that said, let’s jump right in today. We’re going to dive into sales slumps. And I want to set up this question because hopefully we’ll get the answer of how to get through them, how to break past that later on in the show. But I want to set it up, set up a conversation with a question of: are sales slumps something that we should be seeing if the sales process, the complex B2B sales process, is going succinctly from top of the funnel to the bottom, or are they an indicator that something else is going wrong throughout our sales process and throughout our daily activities?
“The bigger, healthier your pipeline is, the less likely one or two deals that slip are going to dramatically impact whether or not you hit your number. So it’s easy to blame external factors for why you hit a slump, but it’s also easy to forget that you have an awful lot of control over what your pipeline looks like to mitigate those slumps that could happen.” – Matt Heinz · [02:15]
Matt Heinz:
Yeah, I don’t think it’s absolute. It’s a really good question. I don’t think it’s absolute. I think there are so many different factors that impact whether or not you can hit your number. I started my business about 10 years ago. It was late 2008. The global market had just started to tank a little bit. And so there were a lot of conditions outside of myself, outside of my client’s business that were going to impact whether or not they hit their number. I do think all that said, you do find an awful lot of people have slumps because they aren’t filling their pipeline. I mean, it’s that simple, but also that difficult. You have to always be prospecting. You have to always be building your pipeline. And the bigger, healthier your pipeline is, the less likely one or two deals that slip are going to dramatically impact whether or not you hit your number. So it’s easy to blame external factors for why you hit a slump, but it’s also easy to forget that you have an awful lot of control over what your pipeline looks like to mitigate those slumps that could happen.
Why Don’t Salespeople Focus on Continuously Filling Their Pipeline? · [03:16]
Will Barron:
Okay. So, this is a question. It’s been… From four years of doing the podcast now, it’s come up multiple, multiple, multiple times. And it’s something I’ve experienced of when I haven’t filled the pipeline in my sales roles. It’s not just sales slumps. It’s when sales becomes the horrible job of chasing that person at the end of the month because you need just one more deal. And you feel like you’ve got to go twisting arms or giving discounts, or your stress levels arising because you’re clearly just kind of struggling. You are back and forth. Why don’t we, and this is obvious question, but hopefully there’ll be a profound answer to it, why don’t we continuously fill our pipeline when we know inextricably it’s just so important?
Matt Heinz:
Well, I think that we focus on the urgent and not the important. Steven Covey’s Habits of Successful People tells us that we tend to chase the things that are fired drills in front of us. And when you’re mid to late in the month or mid to late in the quarter, you tend to focus on the things that are going to help you get paid in that time period, and those are the deals in front of you. And those take a lot of time and they’re stressful and they’re draining. And then when you focus on those first, you either run out time in the day to do your prospecting or you think, “You know what? Things are great. Our pipeline’s screwed. I’m going to hit my number this month. I can afford to relax.”
“The time when you need to prospect the most is when your pipeline is flush. When your pipeline is mature, you are working deals through, and you’re about to have one of your biggest months or biggest quarters in a long time, that is when you need to prospect.” – Matt Heinz · [04:01]
Matt Heinz:
And, there’s nothing wrong with relaxing. I’ve seen this time and time again in our own business, as well as with our clients. The time when you need to prospect, the most is when your pipeline is flush. When your pipeline is mature and you are working deals through, and you’re about to have one of your biggest months or biggest quarters in a long time, that is when you need to prospect. Because if you don’t, by the time you get to the end of the quarter and some of those deals have closed, some of them have gone away. You’ve got nothing left.
Matt Heinz:
Over here in the states, we talk about this in terms of baseball teams. You may have a really great team in the major leagues, but most baseball teams have a minor league system where they’ll have several teams at different levels of players that are trying to get to the majors. And people talk about the strength of the minor league system. If you have traded away all your best prospects to get a couple big leaguers that can help you win this year, and you’ve got a really weak minor league system. You’ve got a couple really bad years coming up because you don’t have anybody that’s going to fill the major league roster when those older players retire or start to diminish in value or to diminish in results themselves. So you have to continue to feed that pipeline.
Why Salespeople Stop Prospecting When They Are About to Hit Their Revenue Targets · [05:00]
Will Barron:
The keyword that I took away there, Matt was “relax,” because I’ve done this. You’re having that fantastic month, or for me, I would be kind of paid bonuses year on year. Target would be anywhere, depending on the different companies I’ve worked for, from kind of 2 million to kind of 8, 9, 10 million, depending on the territory and all that kind of stuff. And I would always find, and now I kick myself when I look back at it, I’d find that I’d be up to 90, 85% of target. I’d have three or four months left, and I’d know one big deal I would solve all me problems. And I would literally start slacking off. Whereas, and tell me if this is kind of your experience, kind of more anecdotal than just my kind of single experience, but my commissions got real serious after I hit target.
Will Barron:
I can’t remember the numbers right now, but say around a number of, I got 5% commissions up to that point. And after target, it was like 15, 20% commissions. It wasn’t those numbers, but it was along along the lines of that scale. And I started relaxing because I thought, “Oh, damn. My boss is on my back anymore. This is nice and easy. I’ll just go and hang out with my best customers.” Whereas, I was in the role to make money. I enjoyed the products that we were selling, but I was there to make bank. I was letting go and I was taking my foot off the pedal right at the moment when I should have been doubling down, right? Is this experience common? Is this something that we can project across some of the audience here?
Matt Heinz:
It’s crazy common. Absolutely. I think, not only when you’re in the middle of a quarter or the month, and you’re trying to get your deals closed. I mean, it makes sense that you go and focus on getting those deals across the line. But it’s also extremely common for sales professionals to look at their pipeline to say, “I’ve got a bunch of deals coming. This is fantastic. This is what I worked hard for,” and to go focus on those deals and get complacent. And then to not say, “You know what? I don’t need to prospect as hard today. I can do more tomorrow,” or, “You know what? After I get through these deals, I’ll go prospect. It’s fine. And then what you forget is that it actually takes a lot of time and a lot of work to get to that pipeline.
Matt Heinz:
It’s not like, “Well, I’m going to make a couple phone calls and have pipeline again.” You may have a prospect that has the need, that’s the right person at the right company, but the timing might not be right. They may not be entering the pipeline at the time when you want them to. So, if you go back and remember how hard it is to prospect. How much work it takes to build that pipeline. I wonder if there’s some way to sort of create some visual or visceral reminder of that sort of says… I mean, maybe there’s something you post in your office somewhere that says like, “Here’s how many calls it took to get to this pipeline. How many of you made this month?” Right? And to show that unless you go and do that work again, you’re not going to have that pipeline. It’s a common, common problem to combat, complacency. But you have to fight it, or else you’re going to be on that rollercoaster again.
The Differentiate Between Important and Urgent in Sales · [07:50]
Will Barron:
Yeah. And as we say this, I’m smiling. And just for the audience to kind of keep us going here, because there’s two things I want to dive into. Acutely, what we do when there is a sales slump, we’re in the middle of it and we’re going, “Oh, shit.” And we’re not going to hit our target. And we’re getting pestered. We’ll cover that in a second. I feel like it’s also worth covering how we keep the funnel full. What habits we need to introduce so that if people listening to this and not in a sales right now, how we can avoid getting into one. But we’ll cover those two in a second. But this just literally just came to mind of, I sell the advertising space on the podcast. I’ve got kind of, say, four deals, kind of qualified conversations had, waiting on it. A yes or no.
Will Barron:
Three of them are probably going to come in. One of them is a kind of a maybe. And I dropped everything this morning because I got an email last night, and I know the people who I’m going back and forth with. I won’t name them just yet in case it doesn’t come in, but they listen to the show. They want to sponsor to the show for the next two years. They want to just take all the advert inventory for the next two years. Clearly, the show is growing. So they’re going to get a bargain out of it kind of 18 months, two years from now, because they’ll be saving costs on the fact that I’m keeping the price set for them. But the urgent versus important is an interesting one here because it’s subjective, right? Of I dropped all the other conversations, I was having in the emails I wanted to get sent.
Will Barron:
I’m recording this on a recording this on a Monday morning, I dropped all that to put a really, to put my time into a proposal that went out today for this two year deal. And the context here, and the conundrum here, is now I’m behind on the smaller deals. But they might be irrelevant based on the fact that this one deal might come in. But if I don’t close this one deal, I might have lost all my business, right? So how do we, in the grand scheme of sales, as it gets more and more complex, the bigger the deal sizes that we’re doing, Matt. How do we prioritise whether something is important or urgent?
Matt Heinz:
Well, let me preface this by saying sales is not fair and sales and sales is not easy. It’s a lot of damn work. And so I can tell you from personal experience for myself, used to be managing the pipeline of our business. We’re growing, and so our pipeline has to be bigger and bigger to sort of literally feed the mouths of the people we have here and keep the business growing. And there have been times when we haven’t hit our number. And I think if I look back, it was because I thought a couple deals that were going to close didn’t close and that will happen. There will always be…so the company you’re talking about, that sounds fantastic. And I hope that closes. And that sounds like that’ll be awesome.
Matt Heinz:
But sometimes things don’t close, sometimes things happen. I mean, literally the day I was waiting for a signature for a CMO one day, they had a reorg and he was out of the company. If it had been done the day before, the deal would’ve been signed. The company would’ve had to sort of manage still working with us apparently.
Will Barron:
Wow.
“When you need certain deals to close, it’s usually because you don’t have enough quality pipeline behind them.” – Matt Heinz · [10:58]
Matt Heinz:
But, so that deal just went away, and I just kind of thought it was coming in. So, yeah. You’re just like, “Well,” and especially as a services business, you’re like, “Well, if all the deals in my pipeline close, I’m screwed because I don’t have the capacity for all that.” So I assume a certain conversion rate, but I think a lot of times when you need certain deals to close. It’s usually because you don’t have enough quality pipeline behind them.
Matt Heinz:
You don’t have enough other deals in the pipeline that accurately reflects the economics of your pipeline. and by economics of your pipeline, I mean, if you expect 20% of your qualified opportunities to close and you’ve got one deal on the hook that you think is going to close. Do you really have four others that feel like that as well? Like, legitimately, do you have the numbers knowing that one of those is going to close? And if two closes, that’s a nice problem to have to go deal with that. But if you’ve been in sales long enough, you know that things that are a sure deal fall through. If you don’t have the backup, and I think that’s another… We talked about having that complacency of “Everything’s fine, I’m going to close these deals.” I want people to want to run around as Nervous Nancy’s thinking the world’s going to fall apart. But you have to do something to continue to motivate yourself to keep that pipeline flush.
The First Thing To Do When You Find Yourself in a Sales Slump · [12:32]
Will Barron:
I think the takeaway from this so far is: have a post-it note on your table of how many deals, perhaps at the bottom of the funnel, that you need to get that conversion rates, and just to know your conversion rates. In medical device sales, when I look back, I have no idea what my conversion rates were. And we were doing deal sizes from five grand to kind of a million, 2 million pounds plus for a full theatre refurbishment. I genuinely have no idea what the conversion rate was. And yeah, maybe we should have. Saying this was a billion dollar company. It was privately owned, that I worked for. We had no CRM system. So we weren’t helping ourselves in that perspective. So Matt, with that said, and I think that’s really useful practical advice for Sales Nation there. Let’s move on to some more practical advice because there’s going to be people who have clicked, downloaded, are watching, streaming, viewing this video or audio because they saw the title.
Will Barron:
They saw that they’re in a sales slump. They put two and two together and they’re hoping this is the holy grail of content that is going to save their asses. What do we do if real acutely now, we’re in a sales slump. There’s people on our backs. We’re not sure about the pipeline. We’re not sure about the numbers. Where should we start? We’ve got to breakthrough this sales slump. Perhaps we’ve got a quarter to do it, to give ourselves a context and a timeframe. We’re in a sales slump. We’ve got a quarter to break through it. What are the first steps? What do we need to do?
Matt Heinz:
Well, there’s a number of things you could do. I think that the two places I would focus. First is, as much as possible, do not start from scratch. Find the prospect you’ve talked to in the past. The people that you’ve talked to that weren’t ready. The people that were in your pipeline that just sort of fell through. Start with the prospects that were already somewhere in your pipeline before that didn’t close and find out where they’re at, right? And I mean, we talk a lot in sales about just the power of follow up. Well, where are all those prospects? And the majority of them probably still aren’t going to be ready to buy. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found deals and we’ve had clients find deals just by following up with people that were marked as close lost or close nurture in CRM, and that you just never go back to, right?
Matt Heinz:
But if they didn’t buy, and if they didn’t buy from someone else, they’re still out there. So find the prospects that are not at square one, but two, I think just get going. I mean, just start building some activity. Start making some phone calls. You talked earlier about doing the math. I would do the work back to say, “Okay, to get a deal. I need to have this many opportunities. To get to an opportunity, I need this many leads. To get to qualified leads, I need this many activities.” And unless you can have a guarantee from your marketing team that they’re going to give you some of those leads, you have to go do that yourself. So figure out how many of those calls you need to make. I mean, if you’re really an anxious person, you can sit and say, “Well, I can, how many calls should I make today?”`
Matt Heinz:
All of them. Well, that’s not realistic either, but to say, “Hey, listen, I actually know I need to talk to 40 prospects a day.” And by talk to, I can mean I’m going to make a phone call, or I’m going to send a LinkedIn email, or I’m going to cut a few personalised emails. But if 40 a day translates into conversion rate outward leads, conversion rate opportunity, conversion rate deals to hit your number, then go make your 40 calls today. And that also gives you a much more specific thing to do. When you’re busy with your current deals, when you’re having a “kill it” month, and it’s a Tuesday and you’re feeling kind of lazy. Well, I’m not going to go have a pint until I make those 40 calls. I still have to do 40 calls every day to make sure that next month, I get to that 15, 20% commission rate as well.
How to Reach Out To a Qualified Prospect That Went Cold on You · [15:30]
Will Barron:
So I think in marketing, we’d be calling the process of going from a closed or a non-closed or nurtured individual as reactivating them in sales. I know I’ve never really done this. I never really contemplated it. So this is good news for me as well. And I need to point to my kind of pipeline management. What do we need to do to go back to someone who said, perhaps not a no, but they said, “No, not right now.” What should that outlook, or outreach, look like? Should this be an email? If we’re in a slump, if we’re screwed, if we need to close these three or four more deals for the end of the month, should we forget email? It’s too slow. Should we just be ringing them, and how do we engage in a conversation, Matt, of “Hi, you weren’t interested. Are you interested now?” How do we have a better conversation than just opening with that?
Matt Heinz:
Well, from a channel standpoint, I think you go back to what worked in the past, right? I mean, some prospects are better on the phone, better in email. I’ve got some that you never hear from them unless you text them and they’re fine. That’s just their communication. Look, if it’s the middle of the month and your pipeline sucks and you’re trying to get new deals in your pipeline, you might just be kind of screwed, right? I mean, seriously. You’re not going to call people you haven’t talked to in four months and all of a sudden in 24 hours, they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. Let’s do this.” Especially if it’s a complex considered purchase. When I think about going back to those deals that were closed-nurture or closed for no reason, or they didn’t choose someone else. They just chose not to do anything.
Matt Heinz:
Your follow up is building future pipeline. That’s probably not a short-term deal, but that’s part of your prospecting. I, for myself and our business, I have a habit set up where I’m taking some of those deals that just closed to nothing. Like they just didn’t make a decision or they said, “Oh, you know what? We’ve got these other priorities. We got to deal with first,” or, “You know what? We’re going to try to do this internally ourselves.” When they decide to do something else, and they say, “Well, I think we’re covered.” It’s a great sign to follow up and say, “Well, were you? Were you covered? Have you actually made progress on that?” Almost every one of those deals that closes to nothing, I make a calendar reminder to myself, a month or two later, to follow up with them. But I also have a checklist that periodically reminds me to go back to those closed-nurture deals and follow up to see where they’re at.
Will Barron:
That’s super smart. I like that. So we need to segment the kind of lost… We need to take our ego out of it. Because I know occasionally someone will tell me “We’ll do this better ourselves.” I had someone say to me, not too long ago, “Hey, we’re going to launch our own podcast because it’d be cheaper to do that than it would be to go with you,” and I never followed up with them. I know the guy kind of off the record of business as well. So I could very, very easily give him a call and say, “Hey, how did that go for you? Because I know damn well no one can launch a podcast with our kind of size within kind of a year, two years, and it cost cheaper than just sponsoring our show.” So that I’m jotting this down as we go through it, because I’m going to take away some of these and use them myself, Matt. Okay-
Matt Heinz:
Yeah. I actually, I love it if a prospect says, “Hey, you know what? We’re going to go this other direction. Do it ourselves.” Or, if they choose a path that I’m like “Look, I’ve seen this movie before. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to work. You’re looking for a quick fix. There is no such thing. You think there is.” And so I actually love it because A, it stops me from wasting my time right now. If that prospect really does believe that a better way is worthwhile, then I don’t want to waste any more time with them right now because I’m just going to be rolling a rock up hill. But also it sets up a really fun follow up in two to three months. Because one of two things is going to happen at that point either they haven’t made progress. And they’ve learned and become a little more humble through that process, and they’re going to be willing to talk. Or, it did work. And I want to learn from that because if they chose something that I was pretty sure was not going to work and it did work. I want to know why.
The Anatomy of a Genuinely Interested Follow-Up · [19:12]
Will Barron:
And that conversation then elevates you, right? As an expert within the space, as an expert within the industry, someone who isn’t just trying to shove a pitch down people’s throat. Maybe the second time around, if you asked some intelligent questions that you were portraying there, it immediately flips the table and it shows that you followed up and you somewhat care about the individual. Perhaps, then the sale comes even easier than it would’ve done the first time round.
Matt Heinz:
Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if the sale becomes easier because you still may start run into the same things around price and people have other things that now all of a sudden become urgent at that period of time. So I think you still have some of those same kind of issues. But I do think that, I don’t know. I think it allows both sides to approach something without the immediate urgency to get something closed. I mean, if I’m just following up to see how something’s going, the pretence of that call is not, I’m trying to close you. It is a genuinely interested follow up that the recipient typically appreciates the fact that we’re still thinking about them.
How to Break Through a Sales Dry Patch the Right Way · [20:40]
Will Barron:
I’m glad you framed it up like that because there’s opportunity there for people, to the audience to ring up. And it’s almost like an Aha moment of, “Hey, what you did sucked. And you should have come with us.” So framing it up in a more mature way like you just described, is clearly the smart way to do it. Right. One last thing on acute sales slumps, and we’re going to discuss how we can potentially avoid them. Is it ever worth… and as someone running a company, you’ll have better context on this than me, the lowly sales professional who’s never been in management. I manage people in my team now, but I certainly don’t have a big team. And I certainly don’t have the experience of kind of managing anyone who has a quota or anything like that. So hopefully you’ll have more context on this than me. Say, we are targeted each quarter. This might not work on a year.
Will Barron:
Is there ever a reason that if our pipeline just sucks? We’ve screwed up. We’ve made a mistake. We’ve realised it, and we’ve got two options. We’ve got, one, keep ignoring the pipeline and try and close the low-hanging fruit. And perhaps we’re not going to hit target, but we can get up to that 80, 70, 80, 90% where we don’t get sacked, but we get a telling off versus we just ignore this quarter. It’s been a wash. We’ve messed up and we carry on prospecting, so the next two, three quarters are going to be incredible. I know there’s not a one answer fits all solution here, Matt, but is that a viable option to just go, “Right. This quarter’s been a mess. I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’m not just going to go chasing people down. I’m going to spend this quarter now to get my pipeline for next quarter sorted. So that then we’ve got sustainability moving forward and less of these ups and downs.”
“Your biggest opportunity is always in your future pipeline.” – Matt Heinz · [22:14]
Matt Heinz:
It’s a really good question. And I think that there isn’t sort of a perfect answer for everybody. I would say if you’ve got bills to pay, and you still need to make money this quarter, you probably got to go try to find some deals you’re going to get closed. I think the bigger opportunity is always your future pipeline. The bigger opportunity for you to not only hit your number next quarter and the quarter after that, but have a chance to go from that 5% commission rate to the 15, 20% commission rate. Obviously, the earning yield opportunity is greater in future quarters than current quarters if your pipeline really sucks. And you run the risk in the current quarter of pushing prospects towards a decision that they’re not ready for. I mean, no matter how healthy your pipeline is, no matter how good your prospecting is, you’re still not going to control when prospects are ready to close.
“The more aggressive you are at trying to hit a current number unnaturally creates collateral damage for future quarters.” – Matt Heinz · [23:22]
Matt Heinz:
That’s why you have to have a bigger pipeline because things happen. So if all of a sudden you start getting pushy, if all of a sudden you start getting aggressive to try to hit your number this quarter, you may get a couple people to say. “Yes.” But it’s a highly likely higher likelihood they weren’t ready and aren’t going to be happy and then that’s going to impact your brand as well as impact your company’s brand. It’s also likely that other people that didn’t close now have a bad taste in their mouth, because they didn’t like the fact that you came and got pushy. And so now the relationship you have with that prospect, the likelihood of them wanting to do business with you moving forward, actually just went down as well. So I think that the more aggressive you are to try to hit a current number unnaturally creates collateral damage for future quarters.
Matt Heinz:
And I think if you spend time chasing that, it also takes away from time you could be using to get to your next number. Because if you spend the next couple weeks trying to hit that number, your pipeline’s still going to suck come day one of the new quarter, and then you’re still you’re behind as well. So sometimes I think to your point, it is… Look, if you’re having a bad quarter, if it’s toward the end, just say, “Hey, listen, this was a miss. Let’s just make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
How to Build a Consistent and Reliable Sales Funnel · [24:24]
Will Barron:
Sure. And if you explain that to your sales manager, as succinctly as you did then, and you tie it into the relationship you’ve got with your account, and especially if it’s more complex, B2B deals are going to take longer to close in the first place. You’re not just calling people and doing business on the phone. It’s the smart move, right? And it’s the intelligent thing. And hopefully, a sales manager would perhaps give you a slap around the side of the head, but then accept it a few seconds later. So on top of all this then, Matt, perhaps there’s people listening now who go, “Well, I’m sick of being up and down these sales slumps. Right at the moment, I’m up in the air. We’re doing well. We’ve got buoyancy,” for want of a better way to describe it. What do these individuals need to do every day, once a week, once a month to continue a consistent path, rather than having these huge fluctuations and ups and downs, which perhaps they’ve had in the past?
Matt Heinz:
I think you got to kind of unpack why you’re having such a great month or great quarter and figure out how much of it is because of factors and tactics that you can repeat, and how much of it was random. If you’re having a great quarter like, “This is fantastic. I’m going to do this again next quarter.” But if you realise that 40% of your deals fell in your lap, that just were the right place at the right time that. Or you had a trade show this quarter where you met a couple your prospects, but that’s a trade show that happens once a year. So I think, and put another way, what can you do to increase your confidence, that you’re going to be able to repeat this performance next month, through your own hard work you don’t have another trade show coming up.
Matt Heinz:
Let’s not assume that your next big deal is just going to randomly call in. That may happen. We may get done with this, and somewhere in my inbox may be a customer that I’ve been trying to hunt down. They’re like, “Okay, we’re finally ready to go. Let’s go.” That may happen, but hope is not a strategy. So if you know that every day, if you make 40 phone calls, you make 40 phone calls today, 40 phone calls tomorrow, then you’re going to hit your number. Just go make your 40 phone calls. Now, if prospect number 41 lands in your lap from the trade show or from an email, great. But make 40 more phone calls tomorrow because that’s what you can control. That’s what you can create some confidence around that you’re going to not fit into those same kind of slumps the next month or the next quarter.
Why Hope is Not a Strategy in Sales · [26:14]
Will Barron:
I don’t know if you’ve come up with this because you said it kind of flippantly there, or it’s a well-known kind of phrase or a turn of phrase. “Hope is not a strategy.” That sums up most of the problems that I see in the sales space and with individuals, right?
Matt Heinz:
Yeah. I mean, I definitely did not come up with that. I heard it somewhere. I wish I knew who came up with it or who I heard it from, so I got to give them credit for it. But I do think that, I mean, and this happens a lot. A past prospect happens to all of a sudden be ready, or “Hey, marketing usually gives me crappy leads, but this lead actually worked out,” right? So, I mean, as a rep whose grocery bill is tied to whether or not you’re going to hit your number, I don’t want the marketing team to determine whether I’m going to pay my bills. I don’t want the trade show and the whether or not I happen to talk to the right prospect at the right booth at the right time is going to pay my bills. I have to go do that myself. I have to have a system that can increase my confidence that I’m going to hit that number. Everything else, serendipity, trade shows, marketing, that’s gravy. It’s fantastic, right? And that may be the difference between your 5% commission and your 15, 20% bar. But you have to be in control and you have to have a system in place that you can repeat every week, repeat every quarter to hit your number.
Will Barron:
So this makes total sense, like obvious sense. Anyone listening to this now that was a revelation to shouldn’t be working in sales or the extremely-
Matt Heinz:
This isn’t rocket science, man. I mean, if someone was looking for some complicated system, it’s not going to come from me and I don’t think it’s what’s needed. Honestly, I mean some of the best sales consultants I know in the industry who do a lot of speaking and writing, I mean, their advice just comes down to like, “Pick up the damn phone, man.” I mean, do the hard work. Have a good message. Have something of value to share with your prospects. Don’t just call them 20 times a month and say like, “Where’s my contract?” But you know, you do have to put in the work and that work is what you can control. So knowing what that is and setting a discipline for doing that on a daily basis is important.
How To Create a Daily To-do List and Follow it Religiously · [28:21]
Will Barron:
Having said that, Matt, I want to touch on this a little bit deeper. I want to get practical with it because the answer might be CRM and kind of software, some kind of way of documenting this, but say like, we’re in this high at the moment. We can suss out the one, two deals, like what dropped into my lap. I think it was last night it came in. Saw it this morning. This brand that wants to sponsor the show for two years and do other things on the back of it. I didn’t prospect that. They just came in. They clicked a link at the bottom of our website, and hurrah. Awesome. It’s going to be amazing.
Will Barron:
So putting those to one side, how do we start to suss out… How to phrase this? How do we suss out then, the people that we have got control on and to work backwards so then we can suss out, we need to make 20 calls a day to make that number? If we take marketing out the equation, if we’re only looking at the opportunities that we’ve got control of, how do we document this? How do we set this out in a spreadsheet? Is this a piece of paper? Is this you have to do this six months kind of through your CRM and then run a report at the back end of it? How do we suss out what our top customers are and the ways we can kind of bring them in and have control of all that?
Matt Heinz:
So that’s a whole nother, probably a whole nother show to walk through all of that. I will, for those of you that are watching the video, I’m going to put up here. This is it’s laminated because I travel a lot and I want to have a copy of it. This is, as you can probably see at the top, this is my, I call it my daily do list. So it’s Matt’s Daily Do List, and I update this a couple times a year. And this is a list of the things I need to be doing on a daily basis to build my network and to build my pipeline. And some of it are lead follow up. Some of them are content related, content sharing. I’ve got some systems that give me some trigger events and buying signals, and here’s prospects that were in the news or were quoted somewhere.
Matt Heinz:
And then I’ve got a set around sort of a set of named accounts. So, some triggers and some reminders to follow up with them. But if I didn’t have this, I wouldn’t do this, right? And that sounds kind of simple too. But if I didn’t have a checklist and if it was just like come in the morning and my job is to prospect. What the hell does that mean? That is not specific enough. I need to know, “Okay. I’m going to take that list from the trade show, and I’m going to make 10 more phone calls. And then I’ll do the next 10 people tomorrow. The next 10 people the next day,” right? Or I’m going to say, “Okay, every day I’m going to run a report in CRM that says, ‘show me anybody where I haven’t seen activity in 30 days or more that’s in my territory or on my target account list.'”
“Ambiguity breeds complacency, and if we don’t have something specific to do, we’re less likely to do it.” – Matt Heinz · [31:42]
Matt Heinz:
And every day there’s going to be people on that list. And every day there’s people you can now go and follow up with, right? And so, some days there may be five people on list. Some days there may be one, and maybe 20. But that’s a specific report you can run every day, and you know what your follow up is, what your strategy is. So you have to get to that level of specificity. Because if I tell any salesperson, “You need to be prospecting today,” or even if I tell them, “You need to make 40 phone calls today.” Who do I call and what do I say? That ambiguity breeds complacency. And if we don’t have something specific to do, we’re less likely to do it. And that sounds obvious as well. But you have to have, like “here are the things you should be doing today,” so you actually get them done.
How to Analyze Past Success and Try to Replicate What Worked · [31:32]
Will Barron:
So let me get this straight, because I think I’ve asked one question and you’ve answered my next question here of the simplest way to avoid overwhelm with deciding the tasks that we should be doing each day. And, we’re all relatively stupid when it comes to stuff like this. As soon as we get to the office, if there’s a list we can sit down, we can do it, makes total sense. We can time block, which we’ve covered on the show before. All these kind of things. The way to suss out how to win is to hypothesise, “I need to do 20 calls a day, see where that gets me in four or five weeks time. And how many deals are closed,” versus the way I was going to attack it. But this seems a lot more simple and easy to implement than the way I was going to attack. It was to reverse engineer what’s worked in the past and then try and funnel down to the numbers and then work from that. Does that make sense? I think I’m overcomplicating things here.
Matt Heinz:
Yeah. I think those are complimentary. Those are very complimentary, right? I mean, if you look at the last month in the last quarter and you say, “What, what led me to that great quarter?” And I think if you can identify the things that are repeatable and as predictable as possible, those become the foundation of your plan moving forward. I mean, if part of it was… I actually went and did my own prospecting. I did my own cold-calling. I did my own follow up and that became 80% of my number, or 40% of my number. Great. That’s a great starting point. If 25% of your pipeline or your deals came from marketing leads, well, that’s great. And hopefully marketing will continue to generate leads, but what if the next set of leads are crappy?
Matt Heinz:
What if they lose their budget? What if they don’t? What if the next campaign they do doesn’t work as well as last month’s campaign, right? And so, I mean, and this is coming from a marketing guy. We run a marketing agency. But I think if you’re in sales, you need to have control and you need to have a plan that you have confidence that you’re going to hit. And so I think if you can unpack, what’s worked in the past and translate that into specific steps of what to do moving forward. That’s at least a starting point.
The Things You Should Be Focusing On If You Want to Consistently Hit Your Number · [33:34]
Will Barron:
That makes total sense. And I feel like there’s a follow up episode to this, Matt, of what we do once we know the gist of things and how we can refine it. And perhaps how you can put a marketing hat on some of this, how you can make it, because you keep using the word repeatable, predictable. And they’re not words that I associate with complex B2B sales. So I feel there’s an opportunity for a future episode to dive into how we can extract the and measure and use data to get the repeatable elements of this. And then we can double down on them, right? So perhaps we can cover that in the future.
Matt Heinz:
Well, I don’t care how complex your sale is. I don’t care how complex your product is. I mean, it may be something that people don’t buy in days or weeks. Maybe the sales cycle or in quarters, or, if you’re selling into the public sector, selling into government, your sales cycle may be measured in Olympics, right? I mean, it may be long and complicated. But what you do next is by definition, not. The next step is a phone call. The next step is an email. The next step is something on a social channel. The next step is finding some content that someone needed or someone’s going to want to see, or that’s going to help reframe a problem that they have. The next step by definition is very tactical and very simple.
Matt Heinz:
So it can be overwhelming if you think, “Wow, I need to go find deals, and these deals take months to close. And there’s eight members of the buying committee, and I have to get them all building consensus.” Okay, fine. Where do you start? What did you right now? If you know that your entry point tends to be a director of IT. Great. Who is the director of IT? What is her phone number? What is her email address? Where did she go to school? What’s interesting about her? What’s something that you now know about her by doing three minutes of research that you can use in the context to follow up and send an email? Okay. Sit down and write the email. I mean, these are all the tactics. You have to start by doing specifically those very tactical, specific things. And, and if our math is right, you do that 40 times a day. You’re going to hit your number.
Will Barron:
Matt, we’ll wrap up with that, mate, because that is the most succinct, practical, non-bullshit advice that we’ve had on the show in a long time. And I really appreciate that just going next step. And there’s someone. I can’t remember who it is now. I’ll butcher it. I’ll put it in the show notes, if I can find it. But there was some, oh, what’s her name? There was an actress, long story short. And she said, essentially, what you are describing here about depression. It’s not something that I’ve ever faced or really have never really had friends that have come across it and battled with Eva.
Parting Thoughts · [36:19]
Will Barron:
But essentially her thoughts were, “Can you survive today? What are the next actions need to implement? And then kind of start the game again tomorrow.” And that’s how she got through it. For some reason, those kind of wires connected there. So anyone who is listening to this, who is in a bit of a sales slump at the moment, perhaps that’s how you can potentially pull yourself out of it and put yourself in a practical mood to take action today by looking at that next step. With that, Matt, with all this sensible advice, for everyone wants to look at you, your background, what you’re doing, the company, everything else, tell us where we can find out more about you, mate.
Matt Heinz:
Yeah. I appreciate that. You can find us heinzsmarketing.com. It’s H-E-I-N-Z, like the ketchup, marketing.com. You can me at just Matt, M-A-T-T, @heinzmarketing.com. And if you go to our website, we’ve got a tonne of content, sort of sales, marketing. Most of it’s B2B. All of it’s free. So any kind of questions you have, feel free to give me a call or check out the website and see what you can find.
Will Barron:
Good stuff. I’ll link to all that in the show notes I show it to this episode over at salesman.org. With that, Matt, again, I appreciate the practical advice here because even I haven’t done… I think 400 out these shows now was trying to overcomplicate this. I was trying to push you for a complicated answer, and I appreciate the fact that it was just so simple, mate, simple action-based. And with that one, thank you again for joining us on the show.
Matt Heinz:
Thanks man.
