<aside> 💡 Once you’ve booked meetings from your outbound email campaigns, it’s time to get on some calls!
On sales calls, your goal is not to pitch or persuade. It’s to learn about a prospect and give them the information they need to make a decision.
At Clay, we usually complete every part of a sales process—qualifying, demoing, negotiating, and closing—in a single thirty-minute call. In this post, we’ll explain our approach using real-life examples. We’ll end with a full script from a recent successful sales call at Clay.
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Qualifying, or learning facts about your prospect’s situation, is the most critical part of your sales call. It’s all about listening, asking questions, and getting information about your prospect’s problems. If you can nail this part of the process, the rest flows naturally.
At Clay, on a 30 minute demo call, we spend 20 min qualifying, 2 min demoing, and 8 min discussing implementation. When we’re qualifying prospects, we look for signals like the sales team composition, open job roles, SDR pay, and manual outbound processes. We think about how much time or money prospects are losing by not using Clay (to use later in the negotiation stage).
Disqualifying prospects saves everyone time and energy: it weeds out customers who’d never buy your product or would churn. We recently disqualified a prospect whose only desire was to find lists of Salesforce customers. Instead of using Clay, we advised them to buy source lists from Builtwith directly.
Behind the first problem someone talks about, a much larger one might be lurking. Cover all bases before jumping into demos.
For example, we recently spoke with a Series C company who told us that they wanted to find the VP of sales for any companies visiting their website. Before jumping into a demo, we said, “We can definitely do this, but it sounds like it’s just one playbook in your arsenal. What’s your highest sales priority?”
We learned that the company also wanted to ingest lists of leads, find their heads of engineering, sync these to Hubspot, Snowflake, Smartlead, and Linkedin, and send them to ConnectandSell for SDRs.
Boom. That was way more significant. “What if all this was possible,” we asked, “and we could build it for you? Would that be impactful?”
The answer was a no-brainer. Instead of closing a minor deal, we’re discussing closing an enterprise deal.
You should spend the majority of your time on sales calls qualifying and learning about your customers. Your actual product demo should be a brief showcase of how your product solves their problems.
Don’t use the same standard spiel for all your demos. Instead, tailor your messaging to the customers on the other end of the line. Use what you learned in the qualifying stage to explain your product in the most relevant way possible.
Never **feature blast, or barrel through a list of features and add-ons to your product. If a prospect isn’t resonating with your demo, dig deeper. “You’d mentioned that X was your problem,” you could say. “What part of this flow fails to solve it?”