This presentation explores what successful salespeople do to differentiate themselves and ultimately win bigger and better projects. We discuss SPIN selling, positioning statements, scripts, proposal templates and more.

1. SELL WITHOUT SELLING
linked.com/in/brentbice | @brentbice | brentb@getifx.com

2. AGENDA
1. Prospecting and research
2. Connecting and qualifying
3. Asking tough questions
4. Scoping projects
5. Writing killer proposals
6. Don’t forget legal
7. Exercise: Creating user stories

3. Prospect and research
work smarter, not harder
[1]

4. WHAT you’re looking to accomplish
• Determine if the lead is workable
• Set your priority (High/Med/Low)
• Start to qualify the lead (SPIN + BANT)
• Determine their web/marketing sophistication
• Find opportunities to develop a connection
•Personalization
•Rapport building
•Trust development

5. •You work the company not the contact
•Initial research should take 5-10 minutes
•Next attempt pre-call review…5 minutes
•Add your prospect as a Contact in your CRM
(Nimble, Salesforce, Sugar, etc.)
•Title your activity: Research
•Tag your prospect: Research
THINGS to keep in mind…

6. Connect and qualify
activity is key
[2]

7. [2] Build credibility and trust
[3] Begin the qualifying process
[4] Decide if prospect is a good fit
[1] Establish initial relationship
[5] Set an initial appointment
PURPOSE of Call

8. LEAD Approach
• [Intro] Hello, Prospect. It’s ____ (your name) from
iFX______. (Pause)
• [Transition] Sounds like I caught you at a bad time?
(Pause)
• [Purpose] I am calling because I noticed that you came to
the website and downloaded our __(offer)_______ on
_(date)_.
• [Get Them Talking] Does that ring a bell?
• What were you looking for help with?

9. COLD CALL Approach
• [Intro] Hello, Prospect. It’s ___ (your name) from _(your company name)______.
(Pause)
• [Transition] Sounds like I caught you at a bad time? (Pause)
• [Purpose] Prospect, I’m calling because I notice you sell business intelligence software.
Pause)
• I also notice that you are trying to drive leads from your site…(Pause)
• [Positioning] My company helps business owners who have a website and are trying to
drive more leads but are frustrated because they have spent a lot of effort, maybe on a
new site, or SEO, or adwords, but they still aren’t getting the leads and return they had
hoped for.
• [Get them talking] I was calling to see if…
• this might strike a chord with you [or]
• You might want to chat for a few moments about this and then see if there is anything
worth talking about.

10. CALLING Referral Leads
• [Intro] Hello, Prospect. It’s ___ (your name) from iFX. (Pause)
• [Transition] Sounds like I caught you at a bad time? (Pause)
• [Purpose] Prospect, I’m calling because (Person’s Name) introduced us over email.
(Person’s Name) felt that we should talk. (Pause)
• [Positioning] My company helps business owners who have a website and are trying
to drive more leads but are frustrated because they have spent a lot of effort, maybe
on a new site, or SEO, or adwords, but they still aren’t getting the leads and return
they had hoped for?
• [Get them talking] I was calling to see if…
• this might strike a chord with you [or]
• You might want to chat for a few moments about this and then see if there is
anything worth talking about.

11. INBOUND Opportunities
• Prospect calls in
• [Intro] “Hello, Prospect. (Pause)
• Your client, ___(common connection) referred me to you. He said you
did a great job helping him ____ . I’m interested in redesigning my site
again. Is this something you could help with?”
• [Transition] Hey Barry. Nice to meet you. Thanks for calling. John was a
pleasure to work with. Since you said “again”, I’m guessing you
recently did this and it didn’t have the desired result? Tell me a bit
more about why you want to redesign your site again.
• With John, his goal was to not just do a redesign, but to figure out how
to attract more traffic, capture more leads and convert more leads to
customers. Is this something you’re looking to do too?
• [Get Them Talking] Tell me a bit more about what you did in the past
with your website and online marketing, and what you plan to do
going forward?

12. Positioning Statements
• I help small business owners like you who are frustrated that they have spent a lot of money in
making improvements to their website and they are still not seeing leads come in as they
expected. Typically they have either hired a SEO consultant or put some money into Google
Adwords to increase their rankings in search engines. Now they either still fail to show up in the
results or they are ranking for some keywords but not seeing any increase in leads. Are you
experiencing similar challenges?
• I help marketers like you who are frustrated that they’ve spent a lot of time and money working to
please the sales team with high quality leads that close faster, but they have yet to see the quality
leads they expected from their website and online marketing efforts. Typically they’ve hired an
outside agency to do the work, purchased lists or gone to tradeshows in order to achieve their
goals and they aren’t seeing the results so upper management and the sales team are concerned.
Are you experiencing similar challenges?
• When I talk to marketers like you I typically hear that the two biggest aggravations they face on a
day to day basis are bringing in enough leads to satisfy their bosses and the challenge of
showcasing the ROI their lead generation efforts produce. Does that ring true for you as well?

13. LISTEN for cues or pain points. It’s incredibly
important to stay in the moment and not let
your mind wonder.

14. Preliminary Exploration – High Gain Questions
Goals
• What are you hoping your website will
accomplish?
• What metrics do you look at to
determine how well you are doing?
• Why are these goals important for the
business?
Challenges
• What’s holding you back?
• Why is it important to fix these?
•If you fix these, would it really make
much of an impact on the business?
Plan
•How are you currently generating new
business?
•What’s the current plan?
•Why not just do more of what you are
doing?
Timing
•It sounds like you are pretty serious about
this, why now and not 6 months ago.
•What timing is driving your initiatives?
•Maybe you should hold off doing something
new for now?

15. Book Exploratory Call
• Of all of the challenges we’ve discussed today, are any of
them important enough to you that you’d want to start
fixing them?
• Would you like to schedule an exploratory call to determine
whether I can help you?
• During this call, we’ll review data about your site and online
marketing success to date, as compared to your
competitors. Can you provide me with some information, so
I can do some homework?

16. My 5 Favorite Gives
• Page Titles Stink
• Service Pages Aren’t Optimized
• No Good Tofu Calls to Action
• No Good Calls to Action on your Blog
• Not responsive (usability & search)

17. Asking tough questions
empathy & pain
[3]

18. Questions persuade more powerfully than
any other form of verbal communication.

19. Not all questions are equal.

20. Closed vs. Open (Probe)
Closed Questions:
• Can be answered with a single word,
often “yes” or “no”.
• Do you make purchasing decisions?
• Is that important to you?
• What is your close ratio?
Open Questions:
• Require a longer answer which allows
you to gather additional information
• How are your purchasing decisions
made?
• Why is that important to you?
• How would improving your close ratio
impact your business?
COMPANIES SPEND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TEACHING THEIR SALES TEAM TO ASK OPEN
QUESTIONS. THEY ARE WASTING MONEY. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT ONE IS BETTER
THAN THE OTHER WHEN IT COMES TO THE SUCCESS OF A SALE.

21. Problem
Implication
Need / Payoff
Situational
SPIN Selling

22. SITUATION Questions
Important fact-finding questions:
• Often used early in the sales cycle.
• What are your sales goals for the year?
• Are you on track to reach those goals?
• What is your close ratio?
• How many leads does your marketing team generate per month?
• How are leads generated?
The problem with situation questions:
• Who benefits from these types of questions – the seller or the buyer?
• Important to us, but often bore the buyer.
• Research shows that successful salespeople often use less situational questions.

23. PROBLEM Questions
Exploring problems and dissatisfaction in areas where your product can help does
numerous things: provides you a better understanding of your market, helps you
realize the level of value you could potentially bring to them, builds trust with the
buyer in demonstrating your knowledge of the problem.
• What challenges are your sales and marketing teams facing?
• What actions are you taking to overcome those challenges?
• How difficult is it for your marketing team to manage your website content
and users?
• How much money are you losing per month on those inefficiencies?
More success in sales process than problem questions. Very effective
for smaller sales and are the foundation for big sales.

24. IMPLICATION Questions
Implication questions take the problem that you’ve already diagnosed and explores
its impact or consequences. It takes critical thinking, tact, and deep industry
insight. Large sales are won by asking more implication questions.
• How are the low number of leads impacting your sales team’s efficiency?
• How much additional time does your sales team spend creating their own
leads?
• How much time does your marketing team waste waiting on a developer to
update critical information on your website?
More success in sales process than problem questions. Very effective
for smaller sales and are the foundation for big sales.

25. NEED-PAYOFF Questions
Research has shown that top sales performers ask these types of questions. The
need-payoff questions help paint a picture of “what could be” with your solution.
• If we could increase the number of leads you receive by 50% per quarter, how
would that impact your sales?
• If you could double your sales, how would that impact your business?
• If we created a portal that allowed your partners to login and access sales
sheets and reports, how much would that reduce your support costs?
More success in sales process than problem questions. Very effective
for smaller sales and are the foundation for big sales.

26. Scoping projects
[4]

27. CHAOS Report
39%
43%
18%
Average cost overrun: 45%
Time overrun: 63%
Functionality delivered: 67%

28. WHY DO PROJECTS Fail?
• Inability to communicate
• We estimate intangibles
• We make the most important decisions
when we know least about the product
• Business models/requirements change
often which changes the scope

29. Waterfall vs. Agile
Requirements Design Implementation Verification
Strategy Requirements
Design
Implementation
Verification

30. User-centered Design

31. IT
Executive
Step 1: Identifying Your Audience
5
Busines
s
Owner
Marketing
Manager
Website
Developer

32. Step 2: What Problems Do They Face
As a marketing manager, I find it
difficult to determine what type
of content provides the most
value.

33. Step 2: What Problems Do They Face
As a small business owner, I
struggle to generate high-quality
leads for my sales team.

34. Step 2: What Problems Do They Face
As a web developer, I’m tired of
having my code overwritten by
other developers working on the
same project.

35. Step 2: What Problems Do They Face
As a potential customer, I find it
frustrating that the website does
not display well on my phone.
I’m forced to zoom in and adjust
screed to fit on my phone.

36. Focus on your customer’s needs and solving
their problems.

37. Prioritize stories by the amount of value they
provide to the end-user.

38. Align stories with business goals.

39. Step 1: Break story into tasks
As a marketing manager, I find it
difficult to determine what type
of content provides the most
value – traffic, engagement and
conversion.
1. Install Intelligence module and
configure GA.
2. Install AddThis and Disqus and
configure APIs.
3. Configure Intelligence based on
business goals.
4. Test to ensure it’s tracking
correctly.

40. Step 2: Estimate tasks
As a marketing manager, I find it
difficult to determine what type
of content provides the most
value – traffic, engagement and
conversion.
1. Install Intelligence module and
configure GA.
2. Install AddThis and Disqus and
configure APIs.
3. Configure Intelligence based on
business goals.
4. Test to ensure it’s tracking
correctly.
8 hours

41. GETTING TO THE Total
• Estimate each user story – always keep value
in mind.
• After estimating all stories, get a total of hours
for all stories.
• Add 20-30% of total for project management.
• Remember…these are estimates!

42. Writing Killer Proposals
[4]

43. Don’t Forget Legal
[5]

44. Exercise: User Stories
[6]