So, you SQO’d a deal? Sick. Now, you think you can actually close it? Let's see.
Naturally, your close deals rate depends on dozens of factors: the accuracy of your ICP, the quality of your lead generation, the strength of your SDRs, and more.
But identifying an SQO doesn't automatically mean you're going to close. The average close rate sits at around 20% for all B2B companies, though high-performing sales teams can inch that up to 30%. Even the best B2B salespeople can fall at the final hurdle.
At Warmly, we've optimised the sales process by bringing in inbound sales representatives to our sales teams, which has a significant effect on the quality of new leads and speeds up the process of identifying SQOs. After that, it's all down to our AEs.
Specifically, AEs at Warmly are expected to do a minimum of 3 out of 16 of the following B2B sales techniques if they've got a good deal on the line. With the following B2B sales strategies, the KPI for all AEs is to improve close rates by 15%.
A Rundown of Our B2B Sales Strategies
The Must Dos:
- Pre-amble: The basics
- Mid-amble: Do you even have a deal?
The Options:
- SQO Follow Up Sequence
- Multi-thread
- 3Ws Recap
- Good Word Referrals
- Charm the Prospect’s Reps
- Gift-giving
- Get Personal
- Gap-selling
- Targeting Customer Success
- Business Case
- Sales Leadership Over-the-top
- Loop in Decision Maker/Stakeholder
- Create Urgency with Carrot and Stick
- Sign the Deal on Conditions
- Customer Referral
- Get Wacky
Strategy Details: The Must Dos
1. Pre-amble: The basics
Post SQO, it's a good idea to first get your house in order before getting involved with potential buyers.
- Add a Buying committee.
- Add everyone on LinkedIn and follow their company for company news.
- Ensure the next meeting is on the books.
- Ensure you have the full list of steps and timeline from now until the finish line. A recommended line of questioning:
"Working our way backwards, what needs to happen to be able to sign?”
“What is the process you used to sign with your last vendor?”
“Why can’t we sign today?”
“Will you be the signer? If not, when can I get them on a call?”
“Do you need a security/privacy/compliance review?”
“Who else on the team needs to see this? Do you want ground level reps to see it? What are their names/emails?”
“Do you need to do a data trial?”
“Do you need a business case?”
“Will there be a meeting with the CFO? Can I get them on a call? What are their names/emails?”
“By what date do you want to start seeing impact? Assuming a two-week onboarding we will want to sign one month before.”
2. Mid-amble: Do you even have a deal?
So many supposed 'qualified' sales leads are not SQOs. You will improve your barometer over time but it’s highly encouraged to review C/L deals and decide what you missed so you can look for it in the future, and refine your B2B sales strategy.
Key Questions: Understand
- Has your champion purchased a tool before?
- Are you talking to the decision maker who will be signing?
- Has the prospect articulated which key annual/quarterly business level priorities this project aligns to?
- Did your prospect explain what budget this is going to come from and if they’re authorized for budget?
- Do you really have the 3 Whys?
For “Why Do Anything?” (Problem), could they articulate the cost of their business of making no changes?
For “Why Warmly?” (Solution), could they articulate why they can’t manually do this? Why they can’t use another tool? Which other solutions they’ve already tried that have failed?
For “Why Now?” (Urgency, is there truly real urgency? Have they articulated the day by which they have to deliver results? Have they said what happens if that day passes and problem is not solved?
- Can your champion articulate the 3 Whys you wrote for them internally? They need to verbally say the 3 Whys out loud back to you to know they can do it internally.
- Can the prospect articulate how it will be added into their existing processes & tech stack?
Key Questions: Learn
“Why wouldn’t you move forward with Warmly?”
“What do you think X other stakeholders biggest objection with Warmly is? If you don’t know, can I ask them directly?"
“What are you going to say when the decision maker says we shouldn’t move forward with Warmly?”
“Which of these 10 pieces of collateral do you think will have the most impact when viewed internally? How do we get them viewed?”
Our B2B Sales Strategy: Details
Once an AE has run through the pre-amble and mid-amble, it's time to get to the meat of closing deals. At this part in the B2B sales process, as mentioned above, we expect Warmly AEs to complete at least 3 of the following 16 sales tactics, and it's up to them how they do that.
The very best sales reps are flexible and adaptable. That's why we don't prescribe a 3-step process for closing deals: it's a case of personalizing for each and every prospect company and their unique needs.
Our ultimate list of techniques for effective sales closing is a go-to road map for a successful sales cycle.
B2B Sales Techniques Part 1: First Step Options
1. SQO Follow Up Sequence
Adding sales leads to sequences is an easy way to stay top of mind, with little to no work on your end.
- Drop the champion/decision makers and each new person you meet into a SQO follow up sequence.
- Drop the finance decision makers in a CFO Sequence/Financial Decision Maker Sequence.
2. Multi-thread
A successful B2B sales strategy involves more than one person. Really, you need to be in conversations with 3+ people in the organization, and ideally have strong relationships with each of these people.
Start the process of looping in people early by:
- Asking the champion for coffee chats or 15 min intros.
- Find warm intros into the buying committee or anyone in the company and get them to pass you along to a GTM team.
- Try to loop every person on their end in every email (no sparing inbox!)
- Inform the buying committee on new developments/updates as the deal progresses.
- Offer/ask to join a team meeting.
- Offer value to the buying committee (see other strategies.)
- Don’t let your champion box you out by trying to be the liaison.
You can also reduce the burden for the champion and speed things up by:
- Getting on a Slack channel with the champion then direct add the buying committee with invites.
- Sending good forwardable warm intros to the champion to intro you in a new clean email thread with a compelling subject line.
- Direct emailing the additional person (assuming they're not the boss of the champion - ask permission for that) and ask for forgiveness not permission.
3. 3Ws Recap
Because the cornerstone of a real deal is if the champion/decision maker can articulate the 3 Whys, an easy recap slide to kick start a post-SQO meeting is always helpful - for both yourself and potential buyers.
It helps you realign the deal and surface any issues. Plus, when a new person is joining the call you need to catch them up on the Problem/Solution/Urgency and figure out what new pain points they would add.
Key questions while screen sharing:
- Has anything changed since we last spoke?
- Before we start, let me review the 3Ws for you, is this right? X New Person, do you have anything to add here?
- Let's review our timeline - we accomplished X/Y, have any new steps popped up? Is our decision date still the same?
Remember that a 3Ws recap is sneakily co-building the business case together with the prospect.
Part 2: Cementing Strong Relationships
4. Good Word Referrals
Very often, a successful B2B sales strategy really can be about who you know. Warmly’s leadership team should have an in at many of your prospects, and this can make a huge difference in your warm sales pitch. Ask for a connection of ours to put in a good word for your deal via a warm intro from ConnectTheDots.
5. Charm the Prospect’s Reps
If the prospect's reps (who will inevitably have to use Warmly) love you and the tool then you’re in good shape already. In this case, you can turn the charm-meter up a little more - here are some suggestions:
- Join one of their team meetings to say 'Hi' for 5 minutes.
- Show their reps the platform to see if they will like it.
- Host a fun upbeat lunch-n-learn for their sales reps to learn about the latest in sales tech.
Remember: the motivations of reps are super different from managers. To get them on your side, make sure your demo touches on:
- How much time they’ll save not doing manual work.
- How Warmly will empower them to make more money.
- How you and our SDRs use Warmly ourselves (maybe bring an SDR to show their workflow) to make it more human.
- Show that we at Warmly are real GTM experts by offering them a tip or two maybe they haven’t thought of that you you use.
- Be friendly by offering them your cell phone number and connecting on LinkedIn. Tell them about our free SDR community SDReady they can join for tips/content.
6. Gift-giving
Please check with leadership for our current limits on gift-giving. However, if you think it'll help strengthen customer relationships and contribute to the buying process, we can work something out. For example:
- Offer them an AI-generated personalized spirit animal photo ($4).
- If you or another team member is in the same city as them we can buy them lunch or coffee for an in-person meetup.
7. Get Personal
Deals always close faster when you make an effort with your customer relationships. No, B2B buyers don't need to become your best friend, but you'll build strong relationships if you get a little personal with people.
Some suggestions:
- Get their cell phone number and send them a selfie or a fun thing that you did that weekend.
- Learn about their pets, kids, plants, hobbies etc - and recall that info in calls as fun conversation starters.
- Send them recommendations for restaurants in their city or for travel locations they want to go to.
- Before you join a call with them, change your Warmly Nametag to add a fun fact in your bio that you share with them or make up that you share it with them “Oh wow I see you ski, I love skiing."
- Ask them when their birthday is: “This might be premature but what is your birthday? We love to send our customers a little birthday present.” Then just add a reminder to send them one on the day.
Part 3: Dialing Down on the Value Proposition with Solution Selling
8. Gap Selling
Gap selling is like ice cream. Too often, we go in first with neapolitan instead of chocolate.
To clarify: Warmly is not special in the mind of the B2B buyer. Warmly is a tool that helps them solve a problem and they have a lot of tools to solve different problems. To sell our platform is to understand how to focus on selling a small piece of the platform to the right person to solve that person’s problem. The right tools + the right people = closed deals. This is solution selling.
This strategy involves AEs making a map of the prospect company's current techstack and sharing how and where we fit in. And there's an easy three-step process for doing that.
Step 1
Listen to your prospect to find the key pain points, and the problem they want to solve. Then, match that problem to a subset of the Warmly platform.
For example, "I want better inbound without doing any work." = Focus on AI chat.
"I want better inbound with a human touch." = focus on warm calling.
Step 2
Find out all the tools they use. For each tool, understand where we could plug into their techstack (as seamlessly as Lego clicks together) to make it better and save them money for just that one problem.
Step 3
Figure out who in their organization is responsible for which tools. Start by sharing with the champion but then ask to share with other stakeholders.
We want to explain:
- Where do we Integrate* with what they already have.
- Where can we Replace* what they already have (because it’s better, e.g. saves time or is cheaper.)
- Where can we Add* to what they already have by offering them a discounted partner tool or our own.
But don't get distracted. Be clear that we have a great core value proposition for the one pain point of the champion and the one solution (subset of Warmly). This is how we get our foot in the door.
Then with the prospects you can paint a picture for how over time we can save them time and money by Integrating, Replacing or Adding in other places across the organization. For example, maybe you get the marketing team excited about how to optimize their marketing strategy by replacing Drift at renewal with our Chatbot, but for now we’re going to get started with sales to save time by automated outbound emails to warm leads.
Don’t forget that we have partner companies via the Warm Bundle that can step in as part of this tech stack adjustment. So when the prospect asks if they can replace Drift Fast Lane with us (Drift’s scheduler and form builder), we can say yes, that we partner with Default and Warmly to do just that for half the price.
9. Targeting Customer Success
Equal in importance to our software is the strong belief that we can offer value to potential customers through our other services. The B2B sales process doesn't have to be all about our products, but what other knowledge and expertise we can offer.
Warm Bundle Intros
Ask them if they are planning to make any GTM software purchases this year. As experts in the GTM space and because we’re a layer across all GTM software - you can ask them if they’d like any intros to our top chosen players/innovators from the bundle. Explain how as a Warmly customer they get 10-25% of all of these, however you’re happy to intro them before they commit to Warmly too. We're helping them out, not just pushing a sale.
Content
Do they need help with any pain points? Recommended long-form blogposts or videos we’ve made intending to teach & train GTM leaders on GTM strategy from our 100s of customers. Ideally tie something you know about their business to why you’re offering the relevant information.
To elicit a response, be sure to ask them a question about the content. E.g. “What did you think about X in the context of your business? Is there someone else on your team I should send this content to?”
Customer Referral
Can you find anyone in your network that might like what they do? Even if you can’t, you can say, "My CEO offered to try to find a lead or two for you manually from his network before we get started - would you want that?"
If they're interested, ask the prospect to share:
- Their ICP/ideal B2B buyer persona or target account list.
- A preferred two-liner on what they do.
- Which person our CEO should loop in for the leads he sources.
Strategy Session
Tell prospects that because we’re recognized as revenue operations gurus for our work the past five years in sales and marketing automation, and because we integrate with all the important tools under the sun, we could do a GTM strategy session with them. You can offer this pre-sign for an hour for any Mid Market deal+ and post-sign for 30 minutes for any other smaller deal.
The session would be a deep dive on their techstack and recommendations for them to maximize success from what we’re seeing work in 2024. Specifically, we’ll look at how to orchestrate humans and the right tools together in harmony to maximize pipeline. Notably, it won’t necessarily include Warmly - we can talk about things like conferences, lead magnet ideas, CRM setup, sales rep quota setting and inbound optimization. Let them know we typically charge $1000/hr for this as advisors to a dozen startups for this strategy.
Pull in someone in sales leadership for the call (lean on your founder for big deals and for founders of small startups early in their journey). You can then make the point that we’ll try to offer more over the course of the year in consulting value than the cost of the software alone.
10. Business Case
With tight budgets, everyone needs to make a clear economic argument on how we make them more money over the status quo. So, make ROI business cases that are flexible and matched to your sales process needs depending on the prospect.
Select a business case that fits! However, it's important that if they have a specific problem they want to solve, give them the business case for the specific solution, not for the whole platform.
Part 4: Bringing Authority to Sales Pitches
11. Sales Leadership Over-the-top
Sometimes, it's a good idea to get leadership involved to help close deals or just speed things up.
Your first option is to ghost write an encouraging email from us to your prospect and we’ll send it off. Wording options could be:
- "Hey, I am excited about this deal, X Rep told me a lot about you!"
- "Hey, I’m CEO, I’m looking forward to our next call, X Rep tells me we’re meeting on Thursday - can I meet you then?"
- "Hey, I heard you have concerns about X, can I give you my founder perspective on it in our next live call?"
It might even be preferable to add leadership to a late-stage call to encourage the prospect to show up. Consider using it as a carrot to get their decision makers in on a call as well.
12. Loop in a Decision Maker/Stakeholder
Whenever you need to loop in a decision maker, it’s a good strategy for you to do it - not the champion. Primarily because the champion is lazy and could take awhile to do it and not set you up well to meet with the DM.
Let’s say you had a great demo call with Stakeholder 1 and got permission to loop in Stakeholder 2 in a direct outreach (CC’ing the first stakeholder). Why this is a good situation: you save time from Stakeholder 1 having to do the follow up so you can get to second meeting faster.
But beware of common pitfalls. If your follow up email is not eye-catching or too lengthy, Stakeholder 2 may ignore it or take forever to reply. Additionally, Stakeholder 2 might be annoyed that Stakeholder 1 didn't ask them first.
Some crisp email suggestions:
- We address Stakeholder 2 and CC Stakeholder 1, not the other way around (nor address them both). Otherwise Stakeholder 2 will skim the email and not reply (since they don'y think its for them).
- The subject line should make it feel like a warm intro.
- It should be super short and all about scheduling. If it's an intro, we don't need to spend 10 sentences convincing Stakeholder 2 to book with us.
- Put almost everything in a PS to make the email short - ain't nobody got time to read long emails but everyone reads a PS.
- Use Stakeholder 1's words as weapons to convince Stakeholder 2 to take a meeting. Stakeholder 1 has way more internal understanding than we do so their words matter more than ours. You can also share a snippet from the first meeting where the junior champion was really excited.
Part 5: The Final Dash to the Finish
13. Create Urgency with Carrot and Stick
It's a tried and tested B2B sales strategy, but carrot-and-stick sales pitches do work.
Carrot methods include:
- We have an end of month special - X creative discount if you sign by end of month.
- I’m one deal away from hitting my quota! It would be such a gift to me to be willing to sign this month?
- We have 2 slots left this month for GTM Strategy Sessions with our CEO. They're totally free, custom, tailored 1:1s to maximize your success on tools and people efficiency. Do you want to take one and add it on after our next meeting?
- Take a meeting to offer temporary increase on their lead limits.
Stick methods:
- Shoot - our board meeting is coming up next week and my CEO told us that the board is going to make him raise prices by 10-20% since growth has been so consistent. I’m sorry, but I can only honor my original quote if you’d be able to commit to signing by X date.
- Our sales VP is making me close/lost the deal and focus on higher priority deals, should I push back and ask him to hang in there another week?
- Sounds like our founder is going to meet with your founder soon via their investor connection. He’s asked me to share an update on our deal progress to communicate over - what do you think I should say?
14. Sign the Deal on Conditions
Every objection is not a deal breaker, its actually just a potential condition. In a deal cycle, you need to surface as many objections as possible and don’t be afraid to ask and suggest objections to see what is real. You should never be surprised if the prospect turns you down and an objection came out of left field.
Once you get all the objections you can handle them in two ways.
- Overcome it through assuaging them with collateral, discussion, testing - whatever.
- Sign the deal on the condition that we overcome those objections. If we know we can overcome it then it's no problem to sign on it!
For example, in a deal where their primary remaining objection was Hubspot compatibility, we offered to move forward on the condition that Hubspot was to their liking.
In the contract, we said, “Customer may terminate this agreement and entitled to a refund within 2 months if they are not satisfied with the depth of the read/write functionality of the Hubspot Integration."
We need to be careful with vague contract terms like “They can opt out any time if they aren’t happy with Hubspot” to avoid issues.
Good objections to be willing to sign on:
- I’m worried implementation will take a long time.
- I’m worried this integration won’t work the way I need it to.
- My security team needs you to pass this special security questionnaire.
- My manager is worried your business will go under in the next year and we’ll have wasted time with you.
We know we can crush all these things!
Bad objections to be willing to sign on:
- I want to do a monthly contract.
- I want 1000/leads/month.
The best way to illuminate objections (under which some can be included in the signing of the contract) is to ask for them and mirror back what you heard while asking for more objections.
- “Tell me some reasons you are skeptical about signing?”
- “Ok, I hear that you are worried implementation will take a long time. Are there any other reasons you are skeptical about signing?”
- “Prospect, what I heard you say is that you’re ready to move forward and sign this contract today on the condition that we have an easy implementation, 1000/warm leads/month and you close your fundraise to be able to afford this next month. Is that right?”
- “Ok, well, I can’t promise you 1000/warm leads/week since that's dependent on how much you use us and how much marketing automation you set up and your industry reply rates but hopefully X, Y, Z make you feel better. But how about I add in the contract that it’s only binding if the implementation is easy and you close your fundraise?"
15. Customer Referral
Prospects will feel comfortable if they know that others have gone in their footsteps. Think of their ICP and try to match as best you can. Namely their title (e.g. Deman Gen) and company’s GTM motion (e.g. PLG) and find a similar industry (e.g. DevTools).
Then, follow our referral process so as to not bombard our agreed-upon advisors and current customers to serve as referrals. Bonus points if you can find an example of social proof on the Wall of Love to share with the prospect.
Try to save this for really the last step - and only if they insist on it.
Part 6: Free Reign
16. Get Wacky!
Here's space for you to add in your own suggestions on unexpected/wacky/innovative B2B sales techniques. Feel free to try your own where you think it'll work - but the below often work, seriously!
- Add a calendar invite on their calendar for 5 mins without their permission. Usually, they show up or you get a reply. Both are ideal outcomes.
- Ask to join one of their internal team meetings for 5 mins to say hi. Explain that you’ll cover 1 min on Warmly then share 3 trends you’re seeing in GTM that will help give knowledge to their reps.
- Make a ChatGPT rhyming poem about them or about the deal going cold and email it to them or post it on LinkedIn.
- Use emojis to start your subject lines of emails to maximize visibility in their crowded inbox.
- Take a selfie video when you’re on the move to show them you’re human and ask where they are at in their deal cycle.
- Send a gift card that is specific to something that aligns with their interests.
Building a More Effective B2B Sales Cycle
Want to learn more about how Warmly trains our sales reps in B2B selling? Warmly founder Max Greenwald shares even more secrets on LinkedIn (Warmly's going 100% clear in 2024, if you didn't know already.)
All that's left to say is, if you want to crush your sales quotas in 2024 - maybe give Warmly a try?