Sales cycles can be long, winding and treacherous journeys. Turning this way and that to get a deal closed; but for every open door, there’s 10 that are shut. You need to navigate your way through obstacles in order to truly understand what matters most to the people that you’re selling to. So often sales reps fall to the same hurdles – lack of humanization and personalization in outreach, relying too heavily on saturated channels, not going above and beyond for prospects, not digging into pain points enough, the list goes on.
Direct Mail is an underutilized, gold mine of a channel for driving your deals to a close. Here are six ideas on how to effectively build relationships, engage stakeholders and get deals done quicker than ever before.
Post demo follow ups
So often sales reps spend too long writing out long and laborious follow ups that never actually get read or noticed by the prospect. It’s time to jazz these bad boys up! Make things more human – recognize that your prospects will likely skim through as they’ve often got a lot on their plate. Send through an eGift for a coffee and within the email body include short bullet points on the key pain points discussed within the call and how we solve them, whilst thanking them for their time with a coffee to keep them energized.
Creating a champion
Champions are absolutely vital in building momentum and winning a deal. They’re the person who always has your back and will be selling your product internally. Building a champion when you’re only speaking to them through Zoom is tough, so it’s important that you find creative ways to build meaningful relationships.
During conversations with your champs, aim to pick up as much information as possible about them – what they enjoy, their hobbies, their family, their work life. You can then use this info to show that you’ve paid attention and listened. Direct Mail is all about being personalised and human, so use the ‘Amazon Relationship Builder’ to show them that you’ve listened.
Multi-threading
In a pre COVID world, networking was significantly easier. You’d head to an event and meet prospects, you’d take people out for lunch or you’d meet in an office to present in front of the wider team. This has been completely torn out of the sales process - Gong reported that if the Decision Maker is missing in a deal, SMB deals are 80% less likely to close and Enterprise 230%. These numbers are huge - so how do you increase engagement with key Decision Makers in a world where everything is virtual?
Try offering a virtual ‘lunch and learn’ session to educate your buyers. Utilize your champion by saying “bring along some of the key stakeholders we’ve discussed and I’ll buy everyone lunch”. The morning of the session, you can send through an UberEats or Deliveroo eGift that includes the agenda and what you’ll be discussing. It’s a great way to spark some excitement for the call and to get everyone engaged ahead of time.
Building the partnership
Building excitement for your upcoming partnership is a really important way to get prospects ready for what’s to come. Now the report mentioned in the previous section is an interesting one, because having a Decision Maker in the deal is vital, however, only to a certain degree. Studies show that you want them on a call to demonstrate how you can solve their team's challenges, but they often don’t want to be included in most communication from that point on. In fact, over including a Decision Maker in deals has the potential to ruin them - they are extremely busy people after all. Something that is extremely useful at this stage is to send through a personalized ‘Thank you!’ landing page to show appreciation for their time.
Getting the deal to close
You’ve spent months discussing pain points and how you can solve them, engaging with a variety of stakeholders and building multiple use cases for your tool. Everything is moving along nicely and then all of a sudden things slow down - you try emails, calls, LinkedIn but nothing is moving that deal along from Best Case > Commit. This is a great time to have a sales accelerator campaign in your back pocket. I find the most useful campaigns at this stage are to run SWAG packs to get prospects excited about their journey with your team. Include a handwritten note in the pack that prompts them to share pictures and the ideas internally. This should help to create a buzz around the business and also gives you an awesome follow up point with the prospects you’ve sent to and other stakeholders in the business.
Welcoming happy customers
This last one isn’t on deal acceleration as such, more on keeping the velocity post sale. As a prospect moves over to a customer, it’s all too easy for the sales rep to sit back and say job done, piling everything onto their Customer Success team. Keeping the client happy rides on good adoption and onboarding of your product and there are so many ways the sales rep can support this process. Working with your CSM to send out onboarding packs that you feel like your customer might enjoy – brownies to share with the kids, wine to celebrate the partnership, a SWAG pack to show they’re part of the team.
It shouldn’t end here – continue feeding information over to your CSM post sale. Always have one eye on sales navigator and LinkedIn, as soon as you see it’s someone's birthday, they’ve posted a relevant article, they’ve won an award etc. take a quick screenshot and send it on to the CSM. They can use this information to send over a relevant gift to help the customer celebrate, it really does help to solidify that relationship!
So there we have it, closing deals remotely doesn’t have to be hard! Get out there, get creative, be human and you’ll be signing more deals in no time. If you need any support, ideas or advice on personalized Direct Mail campaigns, please don’t hesitate to reach out on hello@reachdesk.com.
Happy sending
