149-Make More Sales with Sean Doyle
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Selling and marketing for today’s consumers according to behavioral science You got to start with a belief that selling is about helping people, not manipulating people to do something. In Marketing, we call it a consumer decision journey or a buyer's journey. Sales know the pipeline report, which is just a codification of that. We all know that.

But the behavioral science that we follow is called the Trans theoretical theorem of behavioral change. There are nine codified best practices to help people as they make the decision, from no action to action, from being unaware of your product to understand the need of your product, to buying your product.

And there are some things that sales can do intuitively and intuitively that can be codified by these nine best practices. It's countering. It's environmental controls. It's rewarding for private, for good behavior. It's helping relationships. It's social liberation. That's a bunch of scientific terms. That's what sales do. 

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  Buyer-centered We call it centricity because it's centered not on sales need, not on marketing need. It's centered on the buyer. And if you center all your company's thinking, your sales teams, and your marketing team's thinking on the understanding of the buyer, there's an alignment that's created out of that. Sales and marketing should never align with each other. They should align with the customers. The result that is they'll be aligned with each other.

  What is Private-Public commitment? Private-public commitment is effective from the middle of the buying journey to the very end. In sales barrier analysis we break down a pipeline and understand where there are problems in this pipeline. And in a client's pipeline, we almost always find there's more money to be made in late-stage deals and fixing late-stage deal problems than there is in creating more awareness where most marketing advertising starts.

 So private public commitment is one of the most powerful tools because you've got to equip both sales and marketing to understand what it is. So if you can fix that, you'll close more deals that get stuck. 

  Why you should have Private Commitment in sales Buyers have to have safety first as they make a change. So if you’re going to buy a new service or product, if you’re going to put risk, you’re not going to do it without understanding privately first whether this is good to proceed. 

Founders, you're leading your sales and marketing efforts. Have you created an intentional way where a buyer can, without revealing to anybody else, explore your product or your service? And if your marketing team and your sales team don't have a way to create a private commitment, then that's a gap that you've got to add. You've got to fix that. It's going to stop people from moving forward.

Take a look at what Sean did with his company FitzMartin. His prospect has eight agencies to choose from. So Sean offered to pay $10,000 of service for his prospect so they could see if it’s going to be a good fit. (It cost him around $5,000 in actual employee time and materials and costs. He lowered his internal cost of sales and given his prospect value, and gave the prospect enough safety in that journey.)

So the prospect gets to (safely) experience the service, while Sean’s company gets to evaluate his company’s ability to help him and the prospect’s capability to purchase. FitzMartin gave them the equipment and eliminated the risk through this journey and lowered his cost of sales.

*Take note that Sean said he, as a founder, is going to pay for it and not say it’s free.

  Frictionless buyers journey Remember that time you decided you were going to get in shape and lose weight? Right? You didn't post it on your social media first. You went to the gym and you're like, ‘okay, I've been going for a month now. I might post it on my social media. I've lost ten pounds.’ Now you are comfortable telling people about it.

Well, think about your salesperson. You've set up a commission structure or some sort of motivator, and your goal as an owner is to fire up that salesperson to close deals. So now they're in front of a prospect, and they are fired up to slow the deal down. But the buyer isn't where you are. If you’re a buyer, it's taken you a long time to understand and get to the point of preparation to purchase.

Slowing down, offering a helping relationship and a private commitment where there's no risk, gives the buyer the time to come around and understand the solutions with full transparency. It’s giving frictionless buyers' journeys.

We would call it Stage five closed or exchange relationship. But you should have a stage five closed deals, diagnostic or private commitment stage. It is a true engagement. It's an ongoing relationship. So add that little step to your pipeline.

  Triage Use triage as your scaled-down version of the private commitment stage. So you've been pushed out of late-stage deals by sales for a long time. Why? Because sales don't trust marketing when the deal is close to the finish line.

Why? Because you don't know what the buyers need. You're good at early stage stuff, but you've never studied this late stage. You've never studied what it takes to close a deal. So you should be understanding things like private-public commitment and you should be bringing ideas to the table.

Role of marketing And by using marketing automation technology, you'll know if your prospect read the report or not or how far down the report they read. Marketers, you can do so much to help a salesperson close late-stage deals. If your marketing team is not doing this, then that's a gap in your organization.

You're going to close more deals, you're going to make more revenue. If you get somebody that understands how to close deals in the marketing role, you don't need a salesperson in the marketing role. You need a marketer in the marketing role. Marketers have long views. Marketers are not driven by this week's commission or this quarter.  Sales should be focused on this week. Marketers should be focused, though, on a full pipeline approach.

So in finding an agency for you, ask about the agency’s theology, understanding of a full pipeline, buyer's journey, and how marketing impacts every step in it.

Build a deal page Build a deal page for your most important deals. If you build a page where you look at this business and you know from your experience with other clients, you know that they're looking for safety, right? So build a deal page where a previous client does a little video or has a dialogue with you, or be a written quote that says, ‘I trusted Anthony when we were at this stage in my series, as investors said he was the best thing that happened to us.’

Build a deal page where you know there are specific weaknesses that you don't want to be public about, per se, and then guide and direct people to that deal page. It's marketing. It's not closing deals.

So deal pages are incredibly effective if you've got an agency helping you. There's a term called account-based marketing where you can deliver advertising just to one business. 

So at the very least, your marketing should equip your sales team with a deal page. It's not a page on your website that anybody else can find, but it would say, ‘ABC Manufacturing rapid Growth Medical.’ The language changes. It becomes very specific. You could use people's names.

It's a way to represent. Privately looking at it, the prospect might forward it to other people in the executive team and say, ‘hey, Anthony sent me this. I'd love your opinion, and marketers can track that engagement.’ It's a trackable metric that you can realistically, you can learn a ton.

  About Sean Doyle Sean is a principal at FitzMartin, and our leading mind and voice on sales and marketing strategy. Sean is particularly adept at applying the science of behavior change to the art of sales and marketing. It’s an approach that he and FitzMartin have developed over thousands of client engagements since 1992.

Sean is an author and speaker. His first book, Shift: 19 practical, business-driven ideas for an executive) in charge of marketing but not trained for the task, was published by Rockbench Publishing in 2018.

Website: seanmdoyle.com)

Company website: fitzmartin.com)

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