How To Turn Leads Into Sales

Transcript From Live Show

Adrian Peck:

Good afternoon and welcome once again to Love Your Business TV. I am Adrian Peck. I am the founder and entrepreneur of Better Never Stops. We deliver business advice and coaching programs to entrepreneurs and business owners who run or want to run one million pound sized businesses.

Adrian Peck:

Every week we broadcast live to the nation, giving business owners and entrepreneurs across the UK, lots of free business help, guidance and advice to help you run your businesses better. I have a massive passion in my life, which is really to help you get the most from your business. You work so hard in your businesses, trying to build them and grow them, and you should have lots of fun. And that’s what I do. I’m also the author of How To Fall Back In Love With Your Business, The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Rediscovering Your Mojo And Enjoying Every Day By Living Your Dream.

Adrian Peck:

And that’s exactly what I try and do is help you guys either stay in love, fall in love or fall back in love with your businesses. So let’s move on into today. As always, you can catch up with us on, we turn this broadcast onto a podcast with Spotify, Apple, and Google, where you get your podcasts. It’s live streamed on Facebook and YouTube, so you can catch up on all the previous episodes that we do. It’s all there. Lots of free content for you.

Adrian Peck:

If you want to catch on me always it’s [email protected] is my email address. And of course, you got any comments or questions today, and then just stick them into the comments feed and hopefully, we will be able to see them. This week, I’ve got a really exciting show this week, and I’m so pleased. Mike Killen is going to join us today, who is somebody I’ve met about a year or so ago now, and I’m going to introduce you to him in a minute.

Adrian Peck:

So we want to crack on this week. We’ve had a bit of focus now on lead generation. This is off the back of the feedback that you gave me over the last couple of weeks. I sent a survey out to lots of you, and you gave the feedback that one of the biggest challenges you have in the moment with your businesses is about lead generation and sales conversion. So I’ve put together a series of at least four programs I’m going to do now on a Tuesday afternoon. Last week, we looked at lead generation and lead generation channels. I’ll come onto that in a second. This week, we’re very much going to look on how to turn leads into sales.

Adrian Peck:

So I say last week we looked at lead generation channels. We looked at what channels are and this are things like social media, direct mail campaigns, web, pay-per-click. Those kind of things are your channels. And we looked at some common mistakes and some actions for you to take away as well. Again, you can catch up on that program, that show from last week, by going onto either the podcast or onto loveyourbusiness.tv as well. And you can catch up on that previous show.

Adrian Peck:

So this week, as I say, we’re going to focus on turning those leads into sales, and I’m super excited now because I’m going to introduce you to Mike. So hopefully I can hand him in there, and we should then be able to go onto that screen there. And we’ve got Mike in now, in fact, let’s just make you a little bit bigger first. We can introduce you properly. Hi Mike. Good afternoon.

Mike Killen:

Hey mate. How you doing?

Adrian Peck:

Mike Killen is the founder of Sell Your Service. He is a sales coach, predominantly working with marketing agencies and helps them sell more marketing products and services. He’s also the author of not one but three books. From Single to Scale, Universe Fuel and Five Figure Funnels. Good afternoon, Mike, and welcome.

Mike Killen:

Hey man, how are you doing? I’m really glad to be here.

Adrian Peck:

Yeah, good. Welcome to Love Your Business TV. Hopefully the first of many times I can get you on here. I’ve known Mike for just over about a year, about a year, 18 months. We met on a personal development program in London. He’s super great and a super bloke, and he really knows his stuff when it comes down to building sales funnels and sales conversion as well. So good afternoon and welcome mate.

Mike Killen:

Thank you, man. Yeah. Good to be here. I’m going to take that introduction there and cut that out. It’s the most generous thing anyone’s ever said about me.

Adrian Peck:

Brilliant. So let’s crack on Mike. As you saw last week, we looked at very much about lead channels and how to develop leads for your business. And that’s kind of all well and good, but then what happens once those leads come into the business and how do we turn them to sales. So I’ve got a couple of really key questions for you Mike, so I’m going to hopefully test you this afternoon, but these questions have come in from the business owners I work with and also some questions that have come in from people.

Adrian Peck:

So the first one I’ve got is we have a number of customers who just waste our time. And this is, I hear the same much with a lot of business owners and salespeople. They say we have lots of leads potentially, but they’re just time-wasters. How do we do that better, Mike?

Mike Killen:

Yeah. This is a problem across all businesses I think. I don’t think this is exclusive to any one industry. There’s always tire kickers. And there’s also always people who are window shopping at not the right time. So they’re like, oh, actually… If ask someone, well, when are you wanting to start the project? They’re like, oh, we’re just kind of window shopping. It’s like, oh, well we’ve just wasted a lot of time selling to you and going through that process.

Mike Killen:

This question that comes up, the way I believe that you can, in fact, the way we know that you can solve this is to qualify out as early as possible. And I’m sure we’ll talk about that in a bit, like how we do that. But it’s interesting to first of all note, what is it exactly that indicates that it’s a waste of time because for some people it’s, for some businesses, for example, you might say, well, it’s a waste of time because they’re not able to start for another six months or another 12 months. That’s a huge waste of time for us. Our industry has a three-month buying cycle. They’re clearly just window shopping.

Mike Killen:

Another waste of time might be budget. So your projects might be 10 grand, or they might be 500 quid or whatever. And someone comes talking to you and you sell to them and you have a conversation with them. Those leads come in. And then all of a sudden they’re like, oh yeah, well, our budget is 50 quid or 500 quid. And you’re like, well, that’s a huge waste of time.

Mike Killen:

I think the third, probably the biggest one. And there’s a few other areas, but the biggest one is again when you have a conversation with someone and this one used to drive me absolutely nuts until we kind of eliminated it was, I would talk to typically a marketing manager and I would say, this is what we can do for you and this is how we can help your business and this is how we can help you grow. And they go, fantastic. Thanks so much for that. Thanks for the proposal. I’m just going to show this to my boss and I’m going to show this to the director, and they’ve got to sign off on it and I’m like, well, that was a huge waste of time because now I’ve got to sell to him or her as well. So I kind of wished that they were on the call in the first place.

Mike Killen:

So anytime you’ve ever thought there’s a customer or a lead or whatever you want to call them, who has wasted our time, it’s probably because you haven’t qualified them.

Adrian Peck:

Okay. Brilliant. And that probably brings us quite nicely actually onto our second one, which is then all my customer ever wants to talk about is price. And again this is a massive issue, challenge that I see for a lot of salespeople is that the customer, all they’re interested in is price. Predominantly most of these markets are saturated with choice and therefore it’s kind of always a race to the bottom. And one of the things I hear and it makes me smile in a way is a comment I had back from business owners to say, well, we’ve got a really great relationship with our customers. They tell us what price we need to be. And it’s kind of like, oh dear.

Mike Killen:

Oh my God. That sounds like an abusive relationship rather than a… That’s insane.

Adrian Peck:

How do we get around this, Mike? What’s the principles here?

Mike Killen:

So no matter how well our previous agency did, we would always get customers and it was funny, sort of the higher up the food chain we went it was almost like the most immediate question that they asked. They were like, look, just give us your price. And the first thing I want to quickly mention is what I call is the turn. It’s a little bit of framing. So it’s a little bit of me saying, actually, I’m in control here. I’m here to sell you. You actually don’t decide this yet. I’m here to work out whether you’re the type of customer I want to work with, not whether I’m the type of supply that you want to work with.

Mike Killen:

So we have this turn, which is, they immediately say, just give us the price, give us your best price. And I go, I absolutely am going to give you the best price I can. I just need to ask a few questions first, so I can give you the most accurate price I’ve got. And then we don’t have to do a lot of back and forth. Does that sound reasonable to you? And of course, every customer’s going to go. Yeah, of course, that sounds perfectly reasonable.

Mike Killen:

So immediately we’ve batted that off the table because if I tell you the price, if I just say, “Oh, this house is 500 grand,” it’s irrelevant of what your budget is. You’re going to go 500 grand is a lot of money. And then I’ve got to work up to that value point. Instead, I want to flip that and make sure that I stack all the value first and then tell you the price and you go, 500 pounds is a steal for this particular house. So the first thing I do is turn them and I say, I’m absolutely going to give you the price. I want to give you my most accurate price, so we don’t have a lot of back and forth. I just want to ask you a couple of questions. Does that sound reasonable? Yeah, of course. Fantastic.

Mike Killen:

And the second thing we ask and if at any point the price comes up during the sale stage, the proposal stage, the follow-up stage, whatever, it’s probably because you haven’t qualified them first. If your customers get to the proposal stage. And I see this a lot, both with agencies and sorry, I work a lot with agencies, so that’s why I keep referring to them. If the proposal comes through, and they go, oh, we were kind of hoping it could be a different price. Or like you say, you might have a supplier who says, “Well, our customers want to pay this.” Finding out and qualifying them first is a really good way of pushing that question later.

Mike Killen:

We have this process called BANTS. So it’s B-A-N-T-S. Before I even talk to them about the project or how we can help with them, even if I’m available to work with them, I want to get these five questions out of them. So B-A-N-T-S, which stands for budget, authority, need, timescale and suppliers. B-A-N-T-S. We have forms, project inquiry forms. I’ll share my project inquiry form with you guys. And you can just rip that however, you want. It’s worded slightly differently. But even if I had to get on a call with someone back when we were first starting our agency, I would pick up the phone and I’d say, “Hey, I want to have a really quick conversation with you guys. First of all, what kind of budget are you looking to spend on this?”

Mike Killen:

And if they um and ah about it, unfortunately, we don’t have time to go into how to get that question out, but I want to get that firm answer from someone because anyone who ums and ahs about it later and kind of brings up price is a problem. It probably means I haven’t qualified them or asked them that question early enough. I’d way rather on the call them say we’ve got 500 quid. I go, there’s nothing I can do to help you. If my price is 15,000, and they’ve got a budget of 10,000, chances are they’ve got 15,000. So I at least want to know the margin that they’re in.

Mike Killen:

So budget, authority, who’s the decision-maker. Is it just you? Do I need to also talk to your manager as well? They go, yeah, but they’re really busy. I go great. But I need to talk to Batman. I can’t just have a conversation with Robin. I need to talk to the head honcho. So I want to understand who the decision-maker is, who chances are is probably the person who holds the purse strings, and they go, well, that’s the accounting department. Great. Get them on. I want to make sure that that someone is on the call. I need the decision-maker on every single call.

Mike Killen:

And again, if they go, well, we aren’t really able to do that. I go, but then I can’t help you. If your decision-maker isn’t able to say, yes, this sounds like we should spend some money on it. I could sell to you all day. It could be the world’s greatest project, but if they’re not able to see the value, it’s irrelevant. So A for authority, N is needs, what are you actually looking for? What solution are you looking for? What is it you’re suffering from? What can I help with?

Mike Killen:

And that’s where we get a bit softer because they say well, these are our goals. These are our problems. We’re looking for this. We’re looking for that. Great. I want to get that out. But again, you’d be surprised. Social media marketing is a really good one. You might have an agency that deals exclusively with automation and you might have an agency that deals with audience management. As a social media agency, you’re potentially going to deal with both of them. But if someone comes and says, we’re looking for someone to just automate all of our tweets and Facebook posts you go, well, we’re actually not the agency who can help with that. It’s not our specialist area. So you still want to get their needs.

Mike Killen:

T is timescale. When are you looking to start? When do you actually want to kick this off? They go three months, six months, maybe that’s suitable for you. Yeah, well we’re just window shopping at the moment. We haven’t really got a firm time. And again, all of this is telling you how serious are they about working with you. And as you’ve talked about, especially in your book, the more you commit back to that business, it’s funny how much people want to work with you. And I believe qualifying is actually a really good way of getting people to want to work with you. It’s kind of getting them to jump through hoops. So T timescale, when do you want to start working.

Mike Killen:

And finally S for suppliers. Who else are you working with? Have you approached anybody else? Who’s currently doing your marketing or your finances or whatever it is? So B-A-N-T-S. Budget, authority, need, timescale and suppliers.

Mike Killen:

And eventually, if you can get those questions down, you can put them into a form and say well we’re swamped at the moment. Could you just jump over to this web, loveyourbusiness.tv/project? Get them to fill out this form, qualifies them, takes them 10 minutes, less than that. Or, if you’ve really scaled, you’ve just got people on the phones, just qualifying your customers saying, hey, we noticed that you downloaded our worksheet. You downloaded our report. Are you the decision-maker, you’re the best person to go through and just go through those same five questions. And yeah, eventually you’ll start actually seeing fewer. Less ratio or a lower volume of leads, but good. Because the ones you do see will be really ready and waiting to work with you and you know you can add value to them.

Adrian Peck:

A lot of clients I work with Mike are the kind of businesses that manufacture something, and they sell, or they’re making something and sell it in terms of it could be an engineering type of product, or it could be where they have boxes of kit that they’re making into a bigger kit and sending that. So a lot of it is kind of trade-based. So how would you apply BANTS to a trade-based… A B2B sale?

Mike Killen:

Yeah. And like everything, as soon as you say, this is what you want to do within your business, everyone says, well, it wouldn’t work for my business.

Adrian Peck:

It’ll never work in my business.

Mike Killen:

Right. I’m like, well it must work for someone otherwise you wouldn’t have it.

Adrian Peck:

Our industry’s different Mike. You don’t understand our industry. It’s always different.

Mike Killen:

Exactly. And as someone who has worked in insurance, health insurance, dental, car rentals, welding equipment, garden manufacturing, all the way up to really big SAS projects and data security on a government level. One of the companies we worked with did the data protection for number 10 Downing Street and everywhere in between. Qualification is not for the benefit of the customer. It’s not for them to go I actually want to push you back. It’s for your benefit. First of all, stop thinking of it in terms of well, it wouldn’t work for our industry, because we categorically know that it works for every industry. Any industry that is worth their salt chances are the reason that they’re the number one or number two player is because they have some kind of qualification process, regardless of the questions, they have a qualification process.

Mike Killen:

And the reason is because they’re looking for signals we can add value to this customer. That’s what they’re actually looking for. The budget question is not just a case of how much money can we get from them or how much money have they got to spend it’s can we actually add value to their business? Do they have the resources to add value? When you’re starting a business, it’s all well and good paying a grand for a website, but chances are you actually wouldn’t get any benefit from one of my 15,000 or £25,000 websites because you’re just starting out. So even as a manufacturing business who literally just sells bricks and someone comes to you and says, I want to work with you.

Mike Killen:

Let’s say two sides. First of all, the big side, you’ve got a massive housing manufacturer. We want to work with you. We want some of your bricks. Awesome. What’s your budget? Oh, right. Well, we’re looking to spend this much. Great. If you’ve got 10 million, we can help you because that’s the minimum order quantity that we work with. We need to know that information because I need to know, is it worth me continuing working with you?

Mike Killen:

And on the other side, let’s say, you’re looking smaller scale. You’re B2B. And you’re looking with tradies. You go great. What kind of budget are you working with? You want to know everything about, well, are they even going to be able to continuously work with us? Are they going to be able to continually buy bricks from us or are their prices so low that we know that they’re going to be out of business in three months’ time?

Adrian Peck:

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Mike Killen:

You’ve got success signals. You’ve got stories and classic customers who you think we hate working with them, but we’ve got customers that we love working with. Great. There’s probably some pretty key differences and I guarantee you, they’re going to fit around that B-A-N-T-S formula where you think we know that the people we like working with and that we can add value to typically spend 20 grand a month with us.

Adrian Peck:

But that’s always the big barrier, isn’t it? Because I’m a sales guy. I’m in my business and if I start applying this BANTS process and what you’ve kind of pushed I’d said brilliant, okay, but I’m going to push back now Mike and say, but if I do that, I’m going to have less customers.

Mike Killen:

Yeah. Good. Don’t you want fewer customers? This is always fascinating to me because first of all, I would way rather, even from kind of the fear of loss or the scarcity thing, I’d way rather work with 10 customers who are really high value than a hundred customers who are low to mid-value. So yeah, the chances are, but we want to lower the number of customers that you work with. We actually want to do that.

Mike Killen:

In terms of initially is the number of customers going to drop and your cash flow going to drop? Potentially, yes, but this is how… And we had to look at this again, when we were running, our agency was if we stop getting the £500 websites through, or the five grand websites through, looking at those projects, they weren’t profitable anyway. So although the cash flow came through, the customers were of such low quality and it’s not their fault.

Mike Killen:

It’s our fault because we took them on that we were running ourselves ragged, and we weren’t making any money on them. We physically weren’t making any money on them. And I think a lot of the time that we’re trapped in this cycle of, well, feast and famine kind of those waves. I have to go get the next customer to bring some cash in. If you spend some time just stepping outside of that and thinking are these types of customers profitable? And a lot of the time they’re not, and that’s like a whole other conversation that I’ll let you take care of the fear of letting go of customers. But I would way rather have fewer profitable projects.

Mike Killen:

And it’s a funny thing about the universe or whatever, as soon as you start putting that stuff out there, it tends to reward you. It tends to say, cool, you’ve started qualifying customers. Clearly you only work with customers who pay 10 grand and I promise you that those higher-quality customers have got high-quality referrals as well. They’re your referral engine. If you’re only working with low-value customers and it has to start somewhere. So yeah, the profitability is probably the number one thing I’d look at per customer. It’s a good question though. It does happen. It is a problem.

Adrian Peck:

So yeah, I mean, there’s always the pushback when I work with businesses as well. And you talk to them about changing their marketing and going after the kind of the bigger fish, obviously, there are fewer of them, but they are more profitable. They are less grief. And actually they fit better as well with the values of the business itself. And therefore they’re much easier to actually deal with and much more rewarding.

Mike Killen:

And I actually, personally, I don’t think there’s any data to say that there are fewer high-quality customers out there. I think if somehow we could magically find that data, I’m sure Google or Facebook have probably got that, but we would find that actually there’s as much across the spectrum, but for whatever reason, there’s actually fewer people trying to aim for that higher tier of customer. That we do know. And I have data on this because I ask my customers how much do you spend per marketing funnel or whatever. We know that there’s fewer people going after that higher echelon. So bizarrely that’s actually where there’s less competition.

Mike Killen:

Yeah, you’ve got to work harder. You’ve got to have processes in place, but I’d way rather… You talked about the fishing analogy. Just because it’s a bit more of a hike to get to that pond with bigger fish in it, take the hike then. Fine. I’ll spend an extra hour walking there. So yeah, it’s worth aiming for.

Adrian Peck:

Excellent, brilliant Mike. We try and limit this, but I think we could talk all day on this it sounds a bit, but the shows we try and do are around this 20, 25 minutes. So what about key actions to take away from this, Mike? What’s the key things that the [inaudible 00:22:50] should be doing in terms of sales conversion?

Mike Killen:

So first of all, having some kind of BANTS framework and also knowing what you want the answers to be is critical. Have a sit-down and think, well, what do we actually want to hear when someone says, what’s your budget? Do you want to hear five grand, 10 grand, 250,000, whatever? Who are the decision-makers? So knowing what that framework is. And personally, like I said, I’ll send you over that worksheet URL

Adrian Peck:

That would be brilliant.

Mike Killen:

Try and automate it. Try and get someone else or something else to take care of it and then you can focus on other areas. That’s what I would work on.

Adrian Peck:

Brilliant Mike. Thank you very much.

Mike Killen:

Thank you for having me.

Adrian Peck:

You’ve been absolutely fantastic and thank you very much for coming on. I hope again, hopefully it will be the first of many times you’ll come and join us. How can people get in touch with you, Mike, if they want to know more about you and the wonderful work you do?

Mike Killen:

Sure. Well, you can head to hit to sellyourservice.co.uk or you can check out my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/sellyourservice all one word. And that’s got tons of sales videos and pricing and objection turning. Don’t worry, once you’re on my funnel or once I’ve remarketed you I’ll find you.

Adrian Peck:

Brilliant, Mike, thank you ever so much.

Mike Killen:

Thanks, man. Thanks for having me on.

Adrian Peck:

Great, thank you.

Adrian Peck:

That was Mike Killen. Really great guy and hopefully he’s given you some great advice there. Well, I know he’s given you some really great advice there. If you want to know some more stuff again head over to sellyourservice.co.uk.

Adrian Peck:

Remember the actions that we’re taking away. My motto, one of my mottos in life is only shit happens. Everything else you have to make happen. So think about some of the stuff that you’ve learned this afternoon. How are you going to apply it to your business? How can you apply that BANTS philosophy and put that structure into the business? I think could be really powerful for you. So as always, you can grab a copy of my book, just drop me an email and I’ll send you a free copy of my book. All the stuff that we discuss is all in there.

Adrian Peck:

You can catch up on the previous shows of course as well. There’s a score app. It’s peckuk.scoreapp.com. That gives you an ability to go and measure your business from across lots of different varieties and gives you a benchmark of where you are on your business and stay safe.

Adrian Peck:

Next week I’m going to do some stuff around asking for the order. There’s always that awkward bit when it comes to the end of that, so with conversation about how you actually ask for the order. So I’m going to deal with some barriers that you come up against and I’m going to knock those barriers down for you next week as well.

Adrian Peck:

So as always stay safe and really looking forward to again, to seeing you next week. Get any questions, any feedback, please just drop me an email or put comments and stuff in there and I look forward to seeing you all next week and remember better never stops.

And remember…Better Never Stops