From Curious to Committed: Building Your Winning Sales Process

Hello and welcome to the show. Before we begin I'd like to give a shout out to Adiba and Nos. She is involved in sales and marketing at a company at the company called Hashim Limited. Now the reason why I'm giving her a shout out is because today I received an invite or a connection request rather on LinkedIn. I accepted. I sent a message out. It turns out that she discovered the podcast on Spotify. She listened to the previous episode and then that's why she sent me an invite.

So I've put out an open invitation to her because she's in charge of sales and marketing for the organization. I've told her that she discusses with her team and they have any questions based on the previous episode that I would spend some time with them, answer the questions and then also make a podcast episode about it. So shout out to Adiba and Nos hope I'm pronouncing the name properly. Thank you very much for listening to the show and for reaching out.

Now today we're going to look at how to create a winning sales process from lead generation to closing deals. This is not a listener question, but it's something I made a note of in one of my sheets of paper. So I can't remember what the inspiration was, but I think but I figured it's it's a good enough question to tackle, so we might as well go ahead with it. Now for those of you who are newbies listening to the podcast, you might be hearing some terms in this episode that you know that sound kind of technical.

So I'll do my best to try and define things as we go along. So the first foreign term is lead generation. Now, what does lead generation mean in my own opinion? Remember, I like to give everyday simple definitions, so it might not be technically correct or it not might not be all-encompassing, but I give the kind of definition that I want people to remember so that it's always at the back of their pocket and they can work with it and you don't have to.

My thing is, if you can remember it, you can do it. And if you can do it, and you can do it repeatedly and sustainably over time, then the chances of making progress increases. So lead generation. Now, my own opinion, a lead is someone that you can approach or someone that you can call on reliably. And putting that asterisk to this whole thing, you know, reliably. Because theoretically speaking, you can go out into the whole wide world and approach anybody and approach everybody.

But that does not mean that everybody is a lead. OK, so people that you can approach or call on reliably. Now what's the reliable part? The reliable part is that people must have indicated something about what they did, where they went, what they said. They must have done something objectively that you can point to. That indicates that there might be a possible interest here. Now when somebody takes, when somebody goes through the pains of indicating that they might be interested, you are taking the initiative to reach out and to call.

So the person that has indicated interest somehow, whether online or offline, is what we call a lead. So anybody who meets his, I'm sorry, who meets that definition, we can call a lead. So remember, the lead is someone that you can approach or that you can call on, or that you can e-mail or SMS or WhatsApp or whatever, but that you can do so reliably. You need to have some sort of reason to call them. And the reason that I would recommend is that these people have done something, whether online or offline, that shows that they might be interested.

And then you take the initiative to call, you take the initiative and reach out. An example is once I was coming out of school, young man handed me a flyer. The flyer was about shoes, bags, school books, things like that. Now I did what most Nigerians do. I took the flag, I said thanks and then I left. Now if I send an SMS or to the number or I send Adm to the Instagram handle, now I would have become a lead for that business because I have done something objective that you can point to that shows I might be interested.

So then I'm a lead at the point at which the young man handed me the flyer. I was not a lead because even though I'm standing with kids, I might not be interested in these sorts of things because maybe Wifey has sorted out everything or we have a store that we like using. So I might not be a lead at that point. So not everybody that you give you a flyer to is a lead. If you hand out 5000 Flyers, it doesn't mean that you have 5000

leads. If you hand out 5000 Flyers and out of those 5000 Flyers, you get 20 DMS, one WhatsApp message, one SMS, and maybe one phone call. Add that all. Add that all up together. Those are the leads that you have for the month. OK, now let's try and define what closing deals is, what that means. Now closing deals is getting people who are interested to take the next step. Let me repeat again, most people think closing deals is collecting the money.

And yes, that is the more popular meaning of the word closing deals. So yes, closing deals is getting people to collect the money. But The thing is before you collect the money from someone, before they pay, people usually go through any smaller number of steps. If you get them to move from one step to another, then you have executed a close. So back to the flyer thing. Coming out from school and with my kids, young man hands me a flyer.

I said thanks and drive away. Tomorrow I send Adm. That means I might be interested. I'm a lead. There's something to follow up on. Now let us say that, OK, Since I don't sell these sorts of things, I'm not sure what the next step should be. Let's see. So I'm thinking on the flyer here. OK, so if I collect the DM, OK yes. So maybe the next step if you're in this business should be to try and get someone to narrow down to a particular item or a range of items.

So if you're responding to the DM, the goal is not to collect 50K from me because I bought 2 pair of shoes. The goal actually the next step actually should be can I get this fellow who is on the phone, on the DM? On the WhatsApp, can I get him to identify three or four things that he might be interested in? That's the next step. If you're able to get me to do that in the SMS, in the WhatsApp, in the e-mail or the phone call, you have closed, you have executed a close.

You have taken me one step further. Somebody who resists taking this next step, possibly relatively speaking, is not going to buy from you. Well, the person who identifies a couple of options has moved one step closer. It doesn't mean that the person is going to buy. It just means that the person has moved one step closer. And that's the philosophy that I want you guys to have when it comes to talking to leads and closing deals.

It's not about collecting the money. Now. There are some situations where you collect the money. Now, I'm not good at that. I wouldn't recommend that for a couple of reasons. But if you look at closing the deal as walking people through small steps, everything becomes manageable. So you hand out the flyer. You know that people are going to reach out. When people reach out, you don't have to be nervous about how how many deals will I close now?

The first thing is going to be how many people am I going to get to take the next step? And the next step is that they look at something on Instagram or they look at the catalogue and they tell me I might be interested in 1-2 and three, how much could they be? So that's just one step. So if you take things step by step, it's a whole lot easier. Now what we have discussed, technically speaking have names. One of them is called the One Call close.

That is where you take the person to the next step. Every deal is broken up into small steps. You're trying to take somebody to take one small step. So one small step leading up to the big step, which is they pay the money and you guys have a business relationship. Say one call close is what I want you guys to practice on every single call. Move one step the person calls you move one step you go to the person's house.

Move one step the person sends you Adm move one step. The goal is not always collect the money. Now now the thing about collecting money that is called a one time close. What that means is one time you've met this person. Today you've met this person. First time you've met this person, you're feeling like a bad guy, or you're feeling like a correct girl. You collect the money. Now, now, now, now, now, the very first time you meet them,

now we can be done. There are people who show up. You were a total stranger before. We liars. We talk, and then they collect 1.5 M today as deposits. There are people who can do that, but I don't have that skill set. It's not something that I've studied and so it's not something I'm going to teach. But the reason why I don't recommend it is because it is really high pressure, because it's hard every day to go out thinking this week I'm going to jam somebody who is a prospect and I'm going to collect my money complete, I'm going to collect the money one time, as in I'm a bad guy like that.

It is hard to put you under a lot of high pressure and this is the kind of pressure that breaks sales people easily over time. So it can be done. I don't know how to do that. If you're interested in that sort of thing and maybe you found someone think you can that can teach those sorts of things, hit me up in the inbox. Let me know, at least I'll make sure that you're not going to be taken advantage of by a hogster or a fraudulent person.

So that's a one time close. I don't recommend that. I recommend one call close every single call, every single interaction. Take the next step. So another way of looking at this question, how do you create a winning sales process from lead generation to close? Another looking at this question is this, Let's paraphrase, how do we get people to show interest? So that's the main thing. How do we get people to show interest?

How do we start chatting with them and how do we get them to take the next step? So behind all this fancy language, lead generation, sales process, closing deal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is the simple thing we're trying to figure out here today. And we try to figure out all the time, how do we get people to show interest. The young man gives me a flyer. That's one way. How do we start chatting with them? I send Adm to them.

We can take that as permission to start chatting. How do we get them to move to the next step or to take the next stage? So we're trying to solve that process. We're going to have to look at a couple of other smaller questions. And the first one is, first of all, we have to define our ICP. The ICP is the ideal customer profile. Some people call it the target avatar, the target customer, the ideal customer. But you get the point.

These are people that we should be spending most of our time chasing, people who might be most likely to be interested in our products or our service, or that could be an example of the best class or category of kinds of people that usually buy from us. We need to figure that out. Step one, the person who sent me the flyer, if you notice, was hanging outside my children's school. The business sells children's bags and shoes and plates and cups and books.

So part of their ICP was that people who buy from us are people who have children and people whose children are in school. You can see how now, if you ask yourself this question, your job of selling becomes a whole lot easier. You don't have to get out into the whole world and start handing your flag to anybody. Since you know, in this case that ICP are people who have children and the children are in school, I guess it only makes sense that you hang around schools.

But what else? Maybe church? People coming out of church who have children, I don't know. Hospitals. OK, maybe hospitals. Women who have just given birth. OK, no, maybe that's too soon. Yeah, that might be too soon anyway. But you get my point. Once you define the ICP, what you should do next now becomes a whole lot clearer. Now, ways that you figure out your ICP are you can use demographics or psychographics. That is what determines where it is that you look.

I'm going to repeat that. Demographics or psychographics. Now, for those of you who are newbies, I'm going to define what those terms mean. Demographics are the sorts of things that they taught us in primary school. That's for those of you who are Nigerians when we're talking about population characteristics, So we're talking about height, age, location, occupation, those sorts of things. So you should be thinking in clear demographic terms.

So back to the person who handed me a flyer, Demographics, parents. So the guy is not concerned about people who are single, and he's not concerned about people who are dating. He might not even be concerned about people who are married or unmarried because you don't have to be married to have children together. But he's concerned about people who have children. That is demographics, OK, Adult with children. It was outside my children's school, so that's in Abuja.

OK. So that's also part of demographics. Adults who have children and who live in ABCD, parts of Abuja, that's demographics, then psychographics. Those are the things that people are interested in. It also helps. So if the SO excuse me, so if the psychographic elements here are people who are interested in their children's education, then maybe you have an Instagram handle and you're always blogging on the Instagram handle.

Yeah, things related to children's learning and you know, blah blah blah, things like that. So people who are engaging with those sorts of things, you know, might now fit the psychographics. So you can see that you have demographics to go off of. You're looking for adults who live in Abuja, certain parts of Abuja whose children go to school and then psychographics who might be interested in 1234. Now these are important because these are the things that determine where it is that you are going to look.

So defining your ICP really, really, really important. Then the next step would be to identify your lead generation strategies. Now remember I said the lead, anybody that you can talk to, reach out to call, WhatsApp, SMS. But they have good reason for doing so because they have done something you can point to that shows they might be interested. So now we're looking at the most effective channels to reach these sorts of people that we have identified.

Now for the young man that handed me the flyer, what he did made perfect sense, looking for parents who shouldn't in school so that I'm going to hang out outside schools. So you look for strategies for reaching people online. You can do online marketing. You send out advertisements on Facebook and where else, Instagram, places like that. Maybe Tiktok. I hear that people are not advertising on Tiktok. And then people who respond to those ads, those are leads.

That is somebody you can chase because the person has done something that you can point to. The person responded to an advertisement. Then let's see, there's also social media, people engaging, people liking, stuff like that. You can do community building online. So based on the conversations that you get and the engagement that you get there, those people might be leads because they have done something, they commented they liked, they shared, they sent you Adm.

So content marketing is also stuff you can do. Networking events, that's something you can do. Industry trade shows, that's something you can do. There are lots of things that you can do online or offline, but whether you do online stuff or social media stuff that will determine that will be determined by who your ideal customer profile is, your ICP. So that's why ICP, the first question. Now the next thing that we have to do that we have tried to identify lead generation.

Lead generation just means how do I get people to show their hands? If I run an advert and somebody clicks, the person has showed their hands. If I go outside school and I hand a flyer and the person DMS, that person has showed his hand. So that's what we're trying to get. So next we have a qualification process that we have to run people through. Now qualification is just a series of conversations or interactions that you use to separate the wheat from the chef.

We're trying to sort out customers. We're trying to look. So I'm trying to sort out people who are going to buy from time wasters. There's no point in spending time with time wasters. You can have what you think is a fruitful conversation with someone for two hours, but if truly, truly, truly the person was a time waster from the beginning, you have wasted those two hours. So qualification is what we try to swap through people.

Who is meant to buy? Who is a time waster? Who is interested? Who is just curious? Who is a Wakapas? This is what we're trying to figure out now. We can only do this if we go through a process of engaging with people, having a conversation with people. So you do something, they respond. You see the respond based on who it is that responds. You keep talking. You keep talking to people who have responded positively. Yeah, let me put it that way.

So back to the flyer example. I take the flyer, IDM. Now, it's cool. Someone takes the flyer and throws it, crumples it and throws it into the dustbin before your very eyes. Don't let that discourage you. It's just normal. You're looking for people who have responded positively. Just forget about the people who responded negatively for now, the stuff that we can do in the future to reduce the negative responses. But for now, let's only be concerned about people who responded positively from those who responded positively.

Let's find out who is interested. Let's try and figure out how interested are they. Let's try and figure out how our product or service might solve their problems or help them achieve their vision. Because in this case, if somebody DMS the young man who put out the Flyers, it might be because they have a problem, my son's bag is spoiled. That might be a problem. Or you could have a vision that they're looking towards.

I don't like the way my son's bag looks. My son looks like an orphan. I want him to look like a child that is well catered for, you know? So in that case, that's a vision. So no matter the product or the service that you have, when people call you, they're either trying to solve a problem or they have a vision. I'll need to try and be able to figure that out. Then we need to make sure that money expectations are close enough.

Because if you have a product that is 2500 naira, but the person you're talking to thinks 500 naira can solve that problem, your expectations are way, way off. There's no how you can close that deal. You can't get a 500 person, 500 naira person to spend 25, but if the person is thinking it might cost 2000, but your solution on average is 2500, there might be room for you guys to do some business because you can get somebody who is thinking 2000.

You can get that person to pay 2-3, maybe 2-4, who knows, might be able to get that person to pay 27, but you can't go from 500 all the way up to 25. It's just too much. Then we also have to make a proposal, then ask for a commitment. So this is the process, more or less. So whether online or offline, we always have to be doing something, create some sort of engagement, like handing the flyer. If I collect it, that is engagement.

If I send Adm, that is engagement. If I call, that is an engagement. And when people engage, we always have to be trying to ask for commitments and get them to take the next possible step. Now we've done 21 minutes so far. I wanted us to look at the fictional case study for someone selling shoes. The reason why I thought about that is because I'm currently chatting with someone right now. This one is just personal chat,

someone that I met in my wedding photography days and she's currently selling sneakers. And I just thought, wow, that's interesting because I didn't know that there are people in Nigeria, particularly young women, who make a living selling sneakers. Because I thought that sneaker heads, I just figured, 'cause my generation, I think, are the kind of people who used to be sneaker heads. But I figured, you know, we're growing old, you know, we have other things to do rather than buying sneakers.

So I'm going to have a chat with her. It'll be nice to learn about that part of Niger, because I didn't know that we have a collector's market in Niger. I always like finding out new and interesting ways about how people are making money. So, oh, sorry. OK. Yeah. I think I accidentally paused the recording. OK, I think I'm back. So, yes, So that's what inspired this case study. So what I'll do is since we are 20 minutes over, we'll do the case study tomorrow.

And we're going to be looking at a fictional example about a female based in Nigeria who wants to start selling sneakers online. And the focus will be on how we're going to create a winning sales process, going from lead generation, getting people to show their hands to closing deals. So that's it for today. Thank you very much for your time and your attention. Please connect with me on LinkedIn like Adi Adi, BA Enos did.

So please connect with me on LinkedIn. You can confirm the spelling of my name from the link. We're currently listening to this episode. Also, if you'd if you prefer, can connect with me on WhatsApp. The phone number is 08064662140. The country code is +234. As for those of you who are not Nigerian, thanks for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next episode.