Are your team speaking to prospects with the power to buy?
The “puppy dog close” is a technique where potential buyers get to try a product for themselves and in doing so, sell themselves on the product.
Changing rooms in retail stores is a classic example of this technique. As people try on clothes, or test drives a car, they begin to mentally take ownership of the product they are trying out.
Whist try before you buy is a long-established process in B2C, it is the SaaS industry that has taken the puppy dog close to new levels.
It started with free trials, which are easy to control.
However, the model has moved to predominantly a freemium model.
However, companies with a freemium client acquisition model find themselves in a situation where their free users within an organisation are often at a low level and more significantly, the “free users” do not have buying power within their organisations.
This means thousands of organisations are dependent on their sales teams to engage with their free users and ask them for an introduction to someone with the power to buy a higher level of functionality or multiple licences.
In this interview, we are joined by Alan Morton of SBR Consulting, who will share his top 3 strategies sales professionals can use when needing to navigate to the person with the power to buy. Over his 13 years in consulting, Alan has trained over 12,000 sales professionals and worked with many of the world’s leading brands, such as Google, Facebook, Rackspace, KPMG, EY, Deloitte, Expedia and Dropbox – to develop their sales process, sales teams and sales results. Where he will share his top 3 strategies to help organisations convert more of their free users into paying clients.
Key Areas of Discussions with Alan Morton, Managing Director at SBR Consulting:
- Developing a proactive mindset in your sales team.
- The importance of mapping the route to power within your target organisation.
- The role of Persona’s to support the inside sales team’s confidence.
- Creation of a unique value proposition tailored to the organisation and the level of the person you are talking to.
- How to gain access to individuals who have the power to buy.
About Alan:
Alan started off in sales simply to fund his postgraduate education in Marketing, but quickly realised that the challenge and intricacies involved in achieving and then duplicating individual success in professional sales and client engagement across all functions had him hooked.
20 years into his career, it has involved selling, leading sales teams, and running projects and programmes to transform individual and organisational sales capability in the US, across EMEA and APAC.
Alan is passionate about continuing to hone and develop the habits of a high performer in himself and in others.
At SBR, he works closely with organizations helping them to drive revenues, improve productivity and develop high-performance sales cultures and capabilities across all parts of their client-facing teams.
As part of his passion for sales and customer engagement, Alan writes a number of articles for SBR Consulting’s Sales Community to help sales professionals and those that contribute to customer engagement achieve their potential.
