P.S.I. Selling Overview
Many companies sabotage themselves by scaling their sales teams without building the right sales conversations or thinking carefully about how to hire the right reps.
It turns out that the key to scaling successfully is structure: defining your company's value messages according to a rigorous structure, turning those messages into structured sales conversations, and hiring reps with the communication skills to deploy those conversations effectively.
Check out our six-minute overview video to see how P.S.I. Selling will help you make it happen. Here's a preview: It all comes down to defining the Problems you solve, the Solutions you offer, and the Impacts you deliver. P - S - I. That's why we call it P.S.I. Selling.
Sales Messaging: Proving Value Throughout the Process
Most startup sales messaging kills sales processes before they even start. It's natural to talk about things you care about, like your company's vision or your features. But prospects don't care about those things.
What startups need is a messaging framework that's persuasive, easy to deploy in real sales conversations, and can adapt to the needs of a specific sales process.
This video will show you how to do that with Themes and Summary Slides. Product Themes are a simple set messages that combine to make your case for value. You'll define the Problems you solve, which set up the Solutions you offer, which lead to the Impacts you deliver. P - S - I.
Summary Slides encapsulate those Themes and lead off most sales conversations, ensuring that your value messages shape real prospect conversations.
Skillful Discovery: Uncovering Information That Helps You Sell
Poor discovery kills revenue by causing the team to waste time on deals that will never close and by depriving them of the information they need to sell effectively.
Startups need a simple way to start doing better discovery and to be sure that their discovery shapes their messaging for the rest of the deal.
This video will show you how to improve your team's discovery almost immediately and how to build better discovery resources in stages as you have time. It will also provide some simple tips for making sure that reps deploy the information they uncover effectively so they can prove prospect-specific value.
For more on this topic, check out our article on effective discovery.
Overview Presentations: Setting the Agenda
Companies often try to to cut out steps in their sales process by covering every detail in the opening conversation. That's impossible with complex products and trying to do so leaves prospects feeling confused.
Great opening conversations accomplish more by trying to do less.
They provide an overview of the product that verifies potential fit with the prospect's needs, gets them excited to participate in the evaluation, and gathers the information you need to set right agenda for future conversations. They don't cover everything, they help you decide what you want to cover later on.
This video will show you how to make that happen by building a great overview presentation using Problem, Solution, and Impact Themes.
Software Demos: Proving You Can Help
Most software demonstrations are a confusing mess that burns leads. The reason they go wrong is that sales reps organize them as a series of features, one after another after another....
Great demos prove that the product generates value by solving the prospect's problems. Each section addresses a problem, unpacks how the product solves it, and then discusses the resulting business impact.
The result is a conversation that is clear, persuasive, and drives the deal forward.
Check out the video to see how to make this happen.
For more on this topic, check out our article on structured software demos.
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Scoping: Growing the Deal, Gathering Consensus
Too many deals die after a demo because sales teams don't know what to do next. Prospects are interested but not yet convinced. There's also lot of work left to do to build consensus and to grow the deal.
This video will show you how to use the scoping process to grow the deal by finding additional use cases, win the deal by proving that the product can deliver, and gain consensus for a purchase by by appealing to the right stakeholders in the right way.
Proposals: Proving Value, Driving to a Decision
Ever send off a proposal and wait for a response... and wait... and wait?
Too many teams drop the ball by treating proposals as a document that shares a price.
Effective sales teams look at the proposal as part of a process proves value and drives the evaluation to completion.
How do you prove value? Here's a hint: A lot comes down to connecting Problems, Solutions, and Impacts.
Proposals: Rolling Up Complex Deals by Proving Component Value
Too many proposals get ignored because they don't address the decisions that the prospect is actually considering.
Sales reps think that prospects are either choosing to buy or not to buy, but in complex deals that's not the case.
Prospects are making a series of small decisions that could add up to a huge deal... or no deal at all. Three departments are considering your product. All three could buy, two could buy, one could buy... or none of them could buy.
This video will show you how to structure your proposal to address all of the decision components that combine to drive the outcome of your deal.
Proposals: Growing Deals With Pricing and Negotiation Strategy
Are you relying on your gut when you decide on pricing or set your negotiation strategy?
If so, you're lighting money on fire. You're likely to either make bold offers and get no concessions in return or to be so inflexible that you miss the chance to make trades that could result in a better deal.
Great reps follow a logical process for formulating pricing that looks for compatible interests and grows the deal. They approach negotiation calls strategically, ready to explore both sides' needs and prepared to react to moves from the other side.
This video will show you how to do that by considering the four key pricing questions and by using the negotiation strategy spreadsheet. For more on negotiations, check out our article on the Four Modes of Negotiation.
Want a copy of the negotiation strategy spreadsheet? Drop us a line.
Closing Deals: Managing the Closing Process
There's nothing more painful than missing your goal for the quarter because a deal that could have come in on time got delayed due to a preventable mistake in managing the closing process.
This video will show you how to to run an organized closing process that avoids surprises, works action items in parallel, and motivates the prospect to keep moving forward with a purpose.
Persuasive Sales Writing: Winning When You're not in the Room
The most important conversations happen when you're not there: Think of the internal meeting where the CFO meets with the VP to decide on the budget for your deal.
How can you influence that conversation if you can't be there?
You have to write well. If you do, the CFO and the VP will use your materials as part of their discussion, relying on the points you've made and the examples you've provided.
But that only happens if you write effectively.
This video will show you how to master the art of persuasive sales writing. Also be sure to check out this set of sales writing templates, which are a preview of our full templates repository.
Want access to the full templates repository? We're happy to share them as part of a qualified conversation. Just get in touch.
Forecasting: More Accuracy, Less Friction
At most companies, forecasting is horrible. The process creates loads of stress and the forecasts themselves aren't accurate or well-reasoned.
The first step to a better forecasting process is to avoid the most common mistakes that sales reps make. With those errors excluded from the process, everyone can focus on using good judgment to arrive at a sound forecast... and getting back to their core responsibility of selling!
This video will show you how to eliminate four common forecasting errors.