In this episode, Gary Ruplinger interviews Scott Moss, Founder and CEO of M Sales Growth Advisors, to talk about how to revive dead leads, stalled deals, and how to handle good prospects that have ghosted you.

So, just keep that in mind. This one's all about deal, and prospect reactivation. So welcome everybody to the Zombie Method. This is Reviving Dead Leads, Stalled Deals, and Ghosted Prospects. I'm Gary Ruplinger, and I am joined today by Scott Moss, the founder and CEO of M Sales Growth Advisors.

Scott, welcome.

[00:00:51] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I, I, know we were talking about this last month and trying to think of some ideas here, and I. I think it was one of those things where we said, you know, I've got, because I thought personally for me, I was like, what would I want to know?

And I said, what do I do with the people in my pipeline? What are some ways to kinda reactivate them? I think we all run into that issue of, you know, you gotta, people who were good prospects, things seemed like they were gonna move forward. Things were moving along nicely and for one reason or another they didn't.

And yeah. Well that starts to add up and, and now what do I do with them? Is there any, yeah, so I'm, I'm definitely looking forward to kind of picking your brain about some of those topics today. for anybody who isn't familiar with you, Scott, can you just give us a quick 30 to 62nd introduction?

So, 30 seconds. I have been in sales, sales operations, sales leadership for, 20 to 30 years now, which makes me fairly old. my, my company here works primarily with small and medium sized businesses to bring them, defined, predictable sales operations process, optimized CRM sales playbooks so that they can more effectively and efficiently grow revenues.

So the end game is for me to implement a program of sorts so that they can see a spike in, year over year revenue growth.

Throughout. So, we've got a kind of a few topics prepared here, but, if you have questions, feel free to put 'em in the chat and as I can fit 'em in, I will certainly, ask 'em where they're relevant and then at the end we will, go through and answer any of the ones that we missed. So, please, please do feel free to ask questions.

I think it always kind of helps us kind of see where everybody's at and it helps you get an answer to your question. But, getting things started here, I guess ki who, who would you say this is kind of a good, kind of for who, who is this relevant to, for this type of, yeah.

So I, I like to think of it as like, you know, three or four qualification points, like who this, who and how, and why this can help. So, it's, it's one if, if your sales funnel. Contains dormant and aged ideal client profile leads. So there's a couple of operative words there. One is dormant and aged. The other one is ideal client profile.

What we don't want is a sales funnel full of leads that don't match the type of client or customer we ultimately want to do business with. We ultimately can do profitable business with, and we ultimately can actually have a positive impact on. So it's really important, first of all, that your funnel has ICPs in there.

but as is the case with most sales teams, there is that whole concept of dormancy and age lead. So that's, that's one thing I think we're gonna get out of this today. The other two, deals not progressing. Through your deals pipeline, which is different than the lead funnel, you know, deals pipeline is you already have confirmed that there is a legitimate opportunity for you to do business with the prospect.

You've confirmed bant, budget, authority, need, and time, right? So how do we best progress a deal through the pipeline so it doesn't get stuck and stagnant? The other one is struggling to keep your ideal client prospects engaged throughout the nurturing or what I like to call working phase of converting them into a potential deal.

So these challenges combined typically will have a negative impact on client acquisition rates, month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. So if there's a struggle with this kind of stuff, then our topic is perfect for you today.

Wanna start there and,

Get rid of the leads that don't match your ICP. Then once you have your ICP leads identified in your funnel, then it's time to decide how far back do you want to go in terms of dormancy. Do you wanna go back three months, six months, a year? And, and understand that those leads that haven't been touched, and that do match your ICP are probably worth some form of outreach.

Right. So the way we want to do that is, pull content from your content library, assuming you have one, right? And when I say content library, I'm talking about content that aligns with the buyer'ss journey, right? awareness, consideration, and decision. And sales teams need to have that sales enablement content so that they can serve it up to their buyer personas at the appropriate stage of where they are in ultimately making a decision to use your product and service.

So you've got your ICPs, you've got your buyer personas identified, and you pull content that will be relevant, that will resonate with your buyer personas. From there, it's, it gets a little simpler, at least I think it does. It's about creating a series of multi-touch, multi-channel sequences within your CR.

That you can enroll those ICP dormant leads into. And the way, the way I like to, the reason rather I like to do that is it takes the onus off of the sales team to remember that they have to consistently touch those dormant leads. So the sequence, I said multi-touch and multi-channel, that could last for a month or two months.

And you might be shooting an email out with an interesting article every seven or eight days and maybe, you are, connecting with them on LinkedIn or sending them a LinkedIn message and even picking up the phone, right? So it's important to record what, what,

[00:07:57] Scott Moss: The phone, I've got one right here. And, and these things actually worked. They, you've got number pads on here and you dial and, and people pick up sometimes if they don't pick up, of course you leave, you leave a message. You always leave a message. You always want that touch point. You leave a message and right after that you send what I call a, voicemail, email that adds further clarification as to why you called.

So here's, here's how this thing, the whole thing looks. In your CRM, you've got an eight touch sequence. It's combined of four emails, two phone calls, and two LinkedIn messages, right? And it's all automated. In your CRM, it reminds you when you have to do what, or it can send the emails automatically, and you get to a point where you're seeing who's actually opening and engaging in your outreach, and you pick up the phone and you ask them if it makes sense to start a conversation.

You're not following up from the email, you're not following up from the LinkedIn message. You are asking them, does it make sense based on the fact that you've seen my emails, you've interacted with them. Does it make sense for us to talk. That is a great way to reengage, bring dead leads back to life.

[00:09:29] Scott Moss: I'll call you, Gary

Especially if you happen to have their cell phone number.

80% of your lead acquisition through LinkedIn. I know we're getting off topic, but you know, if you want to touch your dead leads, you know, look at LinkedIn, that's another way to touch them. That's another way to reengage because it's a different platform. You know, sometimes emails work, sometimes they don't.

Sometimes LinkedIn works, sometimes it doesn't. Same thing with phone calls. That's why you bundle them in a multi-touch, multi-channel sequence.

Please keep using that one if they pick up the phone and call you back. Call them if, if not, if it's, you know, always text message or something. It's one of those, you, you've got all, you've got all these tools at your disposal and we kind of talk about them. It's all the different channels you can use.

Which ones are they responding on? If they, if they go dark on one. Okay, well now let's look at some of the others. But yes, you don't have to use six sales channels if they only respond on one. That's right. Was one of, I I know that was one of the things that took a little, it was one of those.

because you everybody loves their, you know, to put their systems together and say it's this channel, this channel, this channel, and we're gonna do all this multitouch. But sometimes it's one of those where are they responding? That's that's right. And, and you

And you can then see what is the most effective method. Communicating. Right? And take advantage of that. Leverage that. If, if you're using SMS and you're getting more responses from that channel than you are from email, then you know, shift, shift some of the activity to sms. Don't entirely give up on email, right?

But, you know, focus where the, biggest bang for the buck is. Where are the results coming from? Focus there.

[00:12:24] Scott Moss: it's, it's a tactic. And yes, it's viable as well, Seth.

when someone lists their phone number, mobile or otherwise on a public channel such as LinkedIn, after they've accepted your connection request, of course you can see it in their contact inform. It's fair game. Fair game. So if they put their mobile there, they're telling you it's okay to reach out to me using this method.

And everybody knows that there are two methods to use on mobile. There is SMS and there's the actual phone call. So a well-written short text that is not sales pitchy is absolutely okay. And that should be true with everything you send. Avoid the sales pitch, especially on the first connection. And again, we're getting off topic because we're talking about reviving dead leads.

Well actually no, this is good too. Even if you are trying to bring back a dead lead, the last thing you want to do on your first outreach to them is pitch or is tell them about this great new product that you have or a great new service that you have. No, you have to reestablish credibility. You have to reestablish the relationship.

You can't just assume. That they're gonna remember who you are and what you do. If there's been zero interaction for six or 12 or 18 months, you have to assume that it's a brand new relationship and you have to start from ground zero on credibility build, in my opinion.

[00:14:32] Scott Moss: Yeah, so there's a couple of things with, unclogging a deals pipeline. The the first is, you know, preventative medicine. Don't let it get clogged in the first place. And, and what that means is don't put schlock in your deals pipeline, right? Only put legitimate deals in there that will significantly enhance deal flow and deal progression.

Okay? So let's first talk about that. A deal doesn't go into the pipeline unless budget, authority, need and timeline have been confirmed. It's called bant. Most salespeople have heard of it. There's a bunch of other different methods that you can use to validate and qualify a prospect as to whether there is legitimacy to a deal.

When you confirm that, then you can put them in the deal pipeline, an initial conversation, not a. A second follow up conversation, not a deal, right? You have to go through some level of discovery. You have to go through your qualification, you have to confirm bant, right? You have to get buy in on all this from your prospect, and then you put them in the pipeline, in the deals pipeline.

Okay? So now that we've got that part of it solved the preventative medicine part, how do we make sure the deals continue to flow through? We make sure they continue to flow through by creating like, just like we do with leads in the sales funnel, we have to do the same thing for deals in the pipeline and create cadences to work those deals through the pipeline.

Right now, they're different than your, lead cadences because you've those, the purpose of those is to get them to an opportunity, to a defined deal. The purpose in the deal pipeline is to keep them flowing through, to ultimately get to, yes. Right. So the type of content and the type of communication we need to have with them is further upping our game, further, upping our credibility, providing them with decision making content, the buyer, right?

The decision maker with decision making content. And we do that throughout the course of the deal pipeline so it doesn't get stagnant, right? We're not always trying to sell them, you know, we've already gotten them to a deal. So it's not about pitching every single communication, it's about consistently providing valuable content that further solidifies your company as the best solution to help them accomplish their goals and objectives or, or overcome a problem or a pain point.

and the way we need to look at a deal pipeline is not just one. One, I guess continuous, stage. There are multiple stages in the deal's pipeline and if you can recognize that and have really clear definitions for each stage, it's gonna make it a hell of a lot easier to progress a deal from one stage to the next.

For example, I like my first stage to be deal on deck. I've confirmed bant and I like a 90 day to 120 day time period where that deal could possibly close, right? Whether it's won or lost a decision will be made within 90 days, right? So that's deal on deck. And there's a concept of, well, how do you get a deal on deck into actual.

Proposal, right? We have to go through scoping and, and you know, further deep dive on discovery. But you have to have a stage for actually working on the proposal. And you don't start working on a proposal until you actually have a proposal review meeting scheduled. So that will ensure it doesn't get stuck in one stage.

because you've gotten a commitment from the buyer that he or she in, I don't know, two weeks or three weeks or four weeks, will sit down with you and allow you to walk them through your proposed solution. Okay? So it's forcing almost a commitment at each stage of the funnel from your buyer. And you don't stop.

Once you have a proposal review meeting, there's a stage after that, it's called proposal and review and that's where your buyer is making a decision. Maybe they're building stakeholder consensus with the other decision makers and the other influencers, but it's a stage in the funnel and during that stage is where most deals go to die.

So it's important to have a specific nurturing or like a, like to say, working cadence for deals that are in the decision making process so that you can consistently stay top of mind. Remind them of why you are talking in the first place. Suggest to them some valuable information that they should pay attention to, and position your firm again as the best option for, for them to select.

Right? And when you get a yes, that's not a closed deal, that's just a verbal commitment. So you send them a contract or you send them an agreement, right? And there's no following up to an agreement. There's no calls to say, Hey, just following up to see how things are going with the agreement. It's doesn't make sense for us to get signed up on this agreement now.

What other things we need to look at to get this agreement signed and taken care of. Once it's signed, then it's one, and I was just talking to a prospect the other day and his challenge is having, and I kind of alluded to this earlier, his challenge is having unqualified deals in his pipeline. because it messes up all of his forecasting and his sales team hasn't been very diligent at categorizing the deals according to the stage.

because with each stage comes a percentage of likelihood to close and you can use that to, to wait the actual proposal amount for better forecasting. And you don't count a deal in your forecast unless you know it's best case, which is you are. you have a proposal in review or it's commit, which is you have an agreement in review.

So that's my take on keeping a deal pipeline flowing smoothly. And, and it's not the easiest thing to do in the world, but it's not rocket science either. It's really not.

Yeah. and I liked the idea that sure, you're, you can send a because, but on the, on the flip side, some people aren't gonna buy. You mean there's a lot of businesses that are not buying if they don't get the proposal. So saying, oh, I don't do proposals, is not really a valid option either. Right. So kind of having that.

Meeting scheduled. Sure. You know, we'll send that. You know, and then scheduling, you know, when that proposal review is gonna be as part of that process before you send it so you're not spending the time to work up the proposal?

That often happens when a salesperson says, yeah, I'll write a proposal and I'll send it to you. No, don't do that. Don't just flip a proposal over the wall because you have no control over it. If someone is that interested in you, and this is a good litmus test, it's part of the qualification process. If they're interested enough to schedule a proposal review meeting with you and devote 45 minutes to an hour to walk through that proposal, then they're legitimate.

If they don't have the time, I'm too busy. I've got a bunch of proposals to review. I gotta take my dog to the vet. I don't know when I'm gonna be back. No, no, no, no. They do not get a proposal. You have to schedule a proposal review meeting after that meeting. Then you send the proposal.

So inevitably there are going to be people though. You're gonna do all the things right. And they're still gonna ghost you. They're not gonna, and they're still gonna ghost

[00:23:03] Gary Ruplinger: Right. They're, they're gonna still disappear, right. They're, yeah. Their, their mom's brother's dog, you know, passed away and it just totally threw them out of the loop.

You know, there's certain times of the year where I fear for people's, you know, aging parents and things like that because . Especially when it's getting close to signing deals, people are gonna die. Very dangerous. Right. So what do we do about, people who've kind of ghosted you?

How do we kind of reengage with them, bring them back in. Right. Whatever things change. Right. and you know, in a lot of cases it, it could have still been a, it probably was a good prospect at some point. . So what is, what are some of the strategies you use to kind of deal with those people that have ghosted you?

I will work on a solution. I will present it to you, you, Mr. Or Mrs. Prospect, you need to commit that you're gonna respond to me in a timely manner. If you can't do that, that's fine. It's probably not as important to you as you think it is. The solution. Right? But you have to get buy-in. You have to get that, that contract from them that says, yes, I will respond to you.

That's about setting expectations and that has to happen throughout the entire sales process. Right? So that's a preventative way to ensure that your prospects don't ghost you. And again, if they're legitimate prospects, they won't, but it's, it's incumbent on the salesperson, you know? It's our responsibility to consistently qualify.

You can't just have, yeah.

[00:25:09] Scott Moss: Yeah. Well, sometimes it's, it's a matter of, you know, being confident in, in who you are and your solution and, and you can't seem needy, right? It's not like. I need all of these deals to come through, or my business is gonna shape, is gonna, is gonna fall through.

And so you get back to me whenever you can and, and that's fine. And, and I'm, I'm afraid, you know, it reminds me of, that movie Swingers, you know, and they were talking about Mike and the girlfriend being the little bunny and she's just there waiting. And you can't be the little bunny, right? You've gotta be the grizzly bear.

And that means you have to have the authority and the command of the entire process. Okay? So you set the expectation upfront. It's, look, we are gonna spend time on this. It's going to be something that we're both gonna work on with, with the, prospect. And I will put all this work in. But I need to know if, if this is important enough for you, that you're gonna respond to me.

And you can say it just like that. Just have the conversation. You know, you're, you're both people. You both are time starved, you know, probably resource poor a lot of times, right? Just ask them, I'm absolutely gonna do this. Can I expect you to respond to me in a timely manner? Is it three days? Is it three weeks?

Whatever it is, get that commitment and schedule the next call before you hang up or finish a meeting. Always get the next step. It's the call to action, right? Whether you're doing it via email, whether you're doing it via one-on-one in a boardroom, there has to be an agreed upon next step and a date for that next step if they don't make that date, right?

Not everyone, not everyone comes to the appointments that they schedule, right? Then it's a follow up that you're sorry that we missed each other, but I know this is important to you. Let's reschedule Tuesday at three o. If that doesn't work for you, how about Wednesday at four? Offer them those times, be specific and get them to commit to that.

Right? And throughout this process, Gary, you still have to provide them with engaging content and information and value. If they think for one second that you're just like everybody else that they're talking to, it's gonna make it a hell of a lot easier for them to blow you off. So you always have to give them reason to stay engaged, right?

If they have become disengaged right, then it's a matter of getting back on the phone. You know, don't send an email, get on the phone and call them and ask them. Does the, does it make sense for us to continue our conversation in your mind? Mr. Mr. And Mrs. Prospect, what are good next steps for us? If they say, I don't know, the response is, well, what do you think is a good next step for me so that I don't continue to knock down your door?

Right. Put the onus back on them. That's, that's how I like to coach my teams. I do that for my own business. That's the I, I drink my own Kool-Aid. It's the exact approach I take here. and what's important also is look at what has worked to keep prospects engaged. Right? Hopefully, you know, you're using a CRM, hopefully that CRM has the ability to track opens and clicks and engagements and activities.

And we talked about this earlier. If there's a channel that your prospect likes to respond in, if there is a message type that your prospect typically responds to, leverage that. Go to that channel, go with that type of content. But that's gonna come from being able to see it all in reports and, and dashboards within your CRM.

So there is, a certain degree of, data analysis on engagement rates. Right. So use what's worked.

because you can tell me exactly where they are in, in which stage they are. If they even made it into the deal on deck and a lot of them don't, because go through the trouble of actually qualifying them. You don't just assume that everybody that you know, you're gonna have an a meeting with Oh, deal on deck.

It's, I'm our partner. Some didn't make any sense at all. so I know yours is always, I'm always impressed at how organized your, your system is and you know exactly where everybody is. because it's, you've, you've taken the time to build that system. You've put the work into building the CRM and, and having it serve you.

Whereas I, I think in a lot of cases, right, it's the, the training that goes into it is either nobody wants to put the work into to train it or they don't . Kind of keep their, their teams kind of hold 'em accountable to it. So you don't know where, where people are.

You know, and, and you have to have your CRM set up so that you have visibility into those key performance indicators that will, show you whether you are tracking towards goal or not. And you go back and you look at those activities and you look and see where a prospect is and what is the next activity for that prospect.

And if there isn't one, why isn't there one? Right? But you have to set your CRM optimize it to be able to accommodate that. And that's not just with, you know, different views you have, like you're talking about when we have our conversation, I can go into Pipelineology and I can see everything that's come through and I can see what.

Funnel stage they're in, and if they're in the deals pipeline, I can see what deal stage they're in. I can see what the next step is. I can see close date, I can see expectations. It's, it's a matter of requiring that kind of information to be present from your sales team. And that allows sales leaders, whether you're a CEO or a director of sales, to, better manage their business.

I don't know how people do it without it, I just don't know how like spreadsheets. It, it boggles, it boggles my mind. And even when clients do have CRMs, you know, they're using half of what's available. So it's a big deal. It's worth the upfront time to set up your CRM to accommodate your sales operations process.

You have to have them both.

[00:32:49] Scott Moss: right.

Right. So us salespeople, we're always too busy. I, including myself in that group, we're too busy, we're being pulled in a hundred different directions. It takes too much time. So you can use your CRM to create workflows and automation for higher levels of efficiency, right? So, you know, based on certain activity that a, lead or a prospect takes can, that can trigger.

Another activity and setting up a workflow to accommodate for that in A CRM will take the onus off of the sales rep to remember to do that, right? We can set up automation not just to carry out the task, right? In a lot of cases, it's, you know, send an automated email or it's, send this SMS text or send a LinkedIn message, but we can also create it so that it triggers a manual task for the salesperson to pick up the phone, right?

Or to take some other action, whether it's filling in an additional field or updating an additional field within a contact record so that it's accurate or it could be, as simple as a to do that, shares with you a certain lead score, right? So most CRMs do lead scoring and you can set up an automated workflow that notifies the sales person.

Their contact is scoring based on their interactions with email, for example. Right? So, you know, you can set it so there's a threshold and we'll say the threshold is 10. I don't know, maybe they get two points for opens and they get three points, four clicks, and they've done enough of those where they hit 10 points.

That can trigger an automatic notification in your CRM to the rep that says, Hey, Gary is interacting with your content. You should probably reach out to him, right. With a phone call. Or we can even set that up so that it automatically sends an email to Gary. That is, you know, well-written. Thanks for reviewing all this information, Gary.

We'd love to get you on a call to discuss some of the things you've been clicking on. here's my calendar link, or how does next Wednesday at three o'clock work? Right. So using your workflows, using the automation that the CRM has, in its engine. We'll do a couple of things. Create efficiencies for your sales team, right?

But also bring additional visibility to activity success metrics. And with that visibility, you can then make more educated and informed decisions on outreach, methodologies. That answer the question. Sounded like I was getting off track there, or long-winded.

So let me just take a step back here. One of the things that, I know I've experienced in my career is that you've got this automation part running, and then you've got the manual process running, and sometimes it will step on each other's toes. Okay? the automation asks, somebody gets too clever with the automation part, and it asks questions that have already been handled.

At some point with the personal follow up and then the automation looks like it's personal follow, they want it to look like it's all personal follow up.

[00:36:13] Gary Ruplinger: think really muddies the whole experience in it. . What happens is you start to look stupid and I'll, I'll give you a yes. I'll give you an example here.

We recently bought a, my, I bought a car, so . We went to the, to dealership. We were planning to buy in the, say, long story short, we didn't end up buying from them, but they kept following up because they put us in their automation system. And every single contact was totally irrelevant or something we'd already covered or told them about.

But nobody fixed it. Right. And nobody, nobody even took us outta the automation. I replied every single time. I was like, you guys kind of look foolish here because we've already talked about this. You said you told us this. Oh. So. How, how do you kind of handle the automations that they help the deal move forward instead of

Instead of herding.

herding

foolish. So first I'll tell you that automobile dealerships are the worst offenders of that. I, I used to, my wife used to drive a Buick enclave like eight years ago, seven years ago. We're still getting messages from Buick on email about turning in that enclave and training it in on a new car.

We haven't had it in six, seven years. The reason that happens is data entry. They're not, they're not updating their systems in CRM and because of that, their automation is not recognizing that a lead might be disqualified for that specific communication piece. So it really comes down to the discipline of the sales team to consistently.

Update all of the appropriate fields in the contact record. So that kind of stuff doesn't happen because you do look foolish, like an absolute idiot that that's one. The other is you can set up automation tasks. So if something has been in a stage for too long, you can set up a task that goes to the rep that says, have you updated this contact record?

We're about to send a mass email, and you need to make sure it doesn't get stuck in that mass email, send. The other is to make sure that when you do enroll someone in a sequence, there are automatic, unen enrollment conditions. A reply to a sequence should automatically unenroll a contact from a sequence, right?

A meeting scheduled from a sequence should automatically unenroll somebody from the sequence. A certain field update in a contact record can be tied to that automation. Right. So all of those things are really, really important because yes, you can trip over yourself and you can make yourself look foolish.

So managing the manual with the automation really comes down to making sure that your automation is truly, pulling accurate information from the fields in the contact record that trigger the automation. But it's really up to the salesperson to keep that stuff updated. And most salespeople will tell you, I don't have the time to do it.

And you know, I know there's probably a lot of salespeople on the phone right now, but I call bullshit on that everybody has time to update fields, everybody. There's no reason not to update a field in a contact record, never. There's no reason not to document a call, not to document what the conversation was about, not to document what the next step is, right.

All of that will go to making sure that you don't make a fool of yourself.

[00:40:01] Scott Moss: Either that,

either that or they need to go to time or they need to go to time management classes, they're not managing their day right. So that, that's one thing. And don't get me started on time management and, and time blocking.

Spend an hour talking about the best ways to accommodate a busy schedule by blocking time so that you can, you know, hit all of the, the key activities you need to produce during any given day. But that's a whole nother podcast, Gary.

He says, which CRM do you recommend?

The dashboard features the, the outreach features. It's just so easy. There's no programming involved. and you have the ability to configure it almost any way you want to. And I have clients on, Microsoft Dynamics. I have clients on Zoho. I think I might have one even on Salesforce. but the majority are on HubSpot and, and I've been using HubSpot for I think eight or nine years now, and I use it for my own business and I've been recommending it since I started this company, three and a half years ago.

It's just that easy to use.

Interesting question here from, from Crispin. Does AI come into play yet? yeah.

And it's easy to see when something is ai, driven. So use that as your starting point. Take a couple of ideas from AI and then make those ideas your own, put them in your own voice. AI tends to be a little bit wordy, but I think it's an amazing tool. I will tell you this, it is an amazing tool and I'm a believer that AI has a place in sales outreach.

I just don't advise my teams to rely solely on ai, right? that's what I got. But it does come into play, Crispin.

Yeah. It, that it, I, I didn't have a chance to really dig into it. I only watched like a, a one minute clip of it, but holy cow, it was, wasn't quite perfect. The pause was a little too long to be comfortable, but boy, was it close. so some very interesting AI stuff.

some good stuff out there.

Look, I'm not gonna deny it as a place, I'm just suggesting that, you know, until it's like perfect. Don't rely on it solely. Use it as a tool, don't use it as the, the end result.

[00:44:38] Scott Moss: Yeah, I'm, I'm wide open guys, so feel free to ask, but what you haven't asked me yet, I don't know, Gary. So we talked about, you know, we've talked about dead leads, we've talked about stall deals, go to prospects. We talked about using automation to help. We've talked about a clean pipeline with defined stages.

We've talked about a leads funnel that only has your ICP and, and, and creating, you know, sequences to reengage dormant or aged ICPs in the funnel. So there, there's a lot here. Oh, I do have, we forgot to mention this at the beginning. I, I've created a guidebook for all of this that we'll be, sending out with the link to the, the video.

I'm not sure if you're gonna say that at the end, but just in case anyone's wondering, there will be, there are handouts.

There's over 1500 of you, so please give my team a few days to get through all of you guys. love all, love all that you signed up. it just takes us a few days to do it, but actually, here's a good one from Rick. does the nine word email come into play? Scott? he did correct

himself

below that.

Are you still interested? Right. Those words are very powerful and they have specific calls to action. Right. Let me know what we should do next. Okay? Again. Are we still interested in this or are we not still interested in this? Use it. It works. Especially in the deals pipeline.

[00:47:16] Scott Moss: Nothing else. Nothing else. In fact, the subject line should be name, comma, still interested.

Question mark. And then you're, your content is name or high name. Curious, are you still interested or just, are you still interested?

[00:47:38] Scott Moss: easy to respond

to that. Right?

[00:47:57] Scott Moss: absolutely. So, I, I love thank you cards. I love handwritten thank you cards.

but they should be short and sweet. They shouldn't be paragraphs long. They should be on nice clean letterhead or they should be on, you know, those little thank you cards that maybe are five by eight that you fold in half? And it's, Scott, great meeting. You appreciate your time. Looking forward to next steps.

Best, Deb, that's your thank you Card gifts are tough. Because gifts, if you're sending, if you're sending before a deal, has been consummated right before they're a client. Because gifts kind of look like, again, you're needy, like you're trying to, buy them with your gift. so gifts, be careful of. Now it's okay to offer like a coffee, like one of, one of the emails I really like to use is let's grab a virtual cup of coffee and you know, you can share some challenges and I'll give you a quick overview of what we do.

Let me know. And you know, it's a $5 gift card. That's okay. And I've gotten meetings from those and I'll, I'll tell you right now, no one ever asks for the gift card. They're like, no, that's good. I'm good. You got my attention. You know, I asked for a virtual coffee and people are gonna say everybody and their brother does that well because it works.

Right. That's one reason why everybody and their brother does it. But the other is that it's a nice way that's not overly flaunting big gifts to say, you're important to me and I'm happy to give you, you know, this cup of coffee for taking the time. It's just a nice gesture. But again, the wording of the email is important too.

[00:50:04] Scott Moss: yeah, so thank you. Cards are great after a proposal, right? thinking cards are also great if you've had a, like a face-to-face discovery meeting, right? So if you've had an intro discovery meeting or a fa I mean a face-to-face intro meeting.

Or a face-to-face discovery meeting. Thank you. Cards are great. Follow up from there. If it's, if it's a virtual meeting, a Zoom or a teams, now, you don't need to do thank you cards, but thank you. Emails are a must. Always, always, always send. Send a thank you email, but don't sell. Please do not sell in your thank you email or in your thank you cards.

Just thank them for their time. Let them know you found the conversation productive and that you hope that they found it productive as well, and that you're looking forward to talking again in six days or on September 28th. Right? Just keep it short and sweet. You don't need to keep selling over and over and over again.

Emails should be short and sweet, not paragraphs long. Don't include 50 attachments in an email. Don't even include four attachments. One, maybe two tops. That's how it should be done. oh, but the, the gift, Gary, like, an onboarding gift is good. So after they've signed the agreement, it's absolutely okay to send an onboarding gift, but not just to the person.

It has to be to the company. So like a basket with a bunch of food or candies, stuff like that. Those are great gestures and, and it, it starts the relationship off, off, right, with other team members that might not have been involved in the deal process.

Now, real quick, I'll address this one. she's, this is Eileen and Barbara, I see yours. same thing here. So you didn't sign up for today's talk, but would like the summary, if you didn't sign up for this, but you would like these just drop. Drop a comment down in the, in the chat and I'll have one of my team members go through the chat and make sure we get it sent out to everybody.

So we'll make sure we hook you up if you just let us know that you'd like to, to see them. If you did sign up for this, you're already set. We're gonna, we're gonna send it up to you, but if you're, you just happen to, to hop on and got the notification that we were live, just drop a comment and we'll make sure we get you the handouts, from today's.

is that here? Oh, let's see here. got, got a little bit more time yet. Scott, we do have a few more questions.

[00:52:40] Gary Ruplinger: Alright. This one here from Ms. Kim is, could you highlight some of the AI tools you found most effective in sales?

you could probably go to like Gartner into their quadrant and, and see, see how they rate 'em and, and other rating agencies like that. But, outside of that, that's all I can really share.

The vast majority just about everything is, is kind of based on chat GPTs model. So they're all running off that same API. Mm-hmm. so if you can. You know, Chad, play around with Chad, GPT. If it can do what you're asking for, great. There's, there's probably a solution out there. if, if not, then it's probably not quite ready.

But I, I, a lot of times that's what I end up doing is I just go straight to the source and we will kind of script it out and, and run through it. In fact, we use that for, to help kind of anytime somebody's got writer's block and doesn't know what to say in a follow up, that's oftentimes what I'll send my team to do is just go, go ask it for an idea.

[00:54:24] Gary Ruplinger: question here from Julie. Any tips for someone who is not a salesperson by trade, attempting to leverage re relationship upselling as a start

On different products or services that you offer. So we'll go with that assumption, Gary, unless I'm, unless you read it differently.

[00:54:56] Scott Moss: Okay. So, you know the best, the best way to do it with an existing client is to make sure that you have consistent, strategy sessions with that client.

Those are the greatest opportunities to talk about the future for their business, what they have planned next, and how you can work with them, whether it's your products or services or somebody else's to help them grow. And that has to be the mindset. The mindset going in can't be, I'm gonna upsell you on products C and D because you've already bought products A and B.

That can't be the mindset. The mindset has to be exploration to learn about the next six months or 12 months for their business. You know, the things they need to accomplish. If there happens to be alignment with a solution that you offer that they haven't taken advantage of yet, then you should absolutely say, Hey, I might be able to help with that.

And if you can't help with that, it's also great to be able to refer them to someone who can, because they will now view you as valuable as an information source. And that is very strategic for them. So that if you happen to make a mistake at one point in your relationship, you're not gonna get fired for that one mistake because they're gonna recognize the strategic value of working with you over the long term.

I hope that answered your question, Julie.

see

here. Here's one from Eileen. Now some of these are probably getting a little bit more process oriented, but a lot of questions there about CRMs we could, we could probably do a whole call on on CRMs at some point. But, yes, this one here from Eileen is when a proposal is agreed upon, how quickly should it be sent to the prospect?

And when the meeting is done, you send the proposal. That's when you do it. But before that meeting is done, you, you, determine a next step, whether it's a phone call in a day, in a week, whether it's a second meeting, agree upon the next step. Get that next Yes, before you end the meeting and send the, proposal.

Alright, thanks for the question, Eileen.

What was the main factor When the prospect was hot and then dies after the agreement is sent? How do we engage? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

So again, you have some sort of verbal contract of expectations for next step, right? You agree that, it's okay to reach out to, discuss moving forward at a certain time period. and you make sure that your agreements aren't overwhelming and scary, right? So if you're sending a 25 page agreement for a project that costs $2,000, that's probably a problem.

You're gonna scare away your prospect, right? So make sure that your agreements are, I, I guess, in alignment with the type of service that you're offering and the cost of that service, right? If you're doing a hundred thousand dollars deal, that's another story. If you're doing a $2,000 deal, be careful about that.

How you reengage is, is picking up the phone and, and asking that question, are you still interested? Or What is a good next step for us? You know, and look, deals do die after the agreement has been sent. Hopefully it happens only, you know, one out of, a hundred times, but they do happen.

last one I see here is from Deb. Hi, Scott. How do you segregate sales stages? If you can elaborate on that, please.

Then the next stage down is your ideal client profile. Those are the companies that match your description or definition of your ideal client. Right? From there, it's really about engagement. Okay? So if somebody engages with your outreach, if they schedule an introductory phone call with you, if they score a certain number of points, from opening and clicking on emails, then they become what's called marketing qualified.

because they are responding to your outbound marketing efforts or maybe inbound. Maybe they filled out a form on your website, maybe they've, requested to download, a white paper. So you score them based on those scores, they become marketing qualified. Now is when it gets turned over to the salesperson to sales qualify them, right?

That's where you go through the process of bant. That's where you go through mini discovery. That's where you understand their challenges. That's where you position your solution as a, a way for them to overcome their challenges or achieve their goals. And, and after sales qualified, I like to move them into deal on deck into the pipeline, right?

So you have three or four stages in the actual sales funnel. You get them down to being sales qualified, which is that interaction with the salesperson, and they can move either into the deal pipeline or not. But the key is for each one of the stages, you have working cadences that are designed with content that is relevant to your buyer.

They're designed to push them through to the next stage.

[01:02:00] Scott Moss: Perfect timing because we are just a bit over and I do wanna make sure that I get to my next commitment on time.

[01:02:16] Scott Moss: Oh Gary, it was awesome.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I really enjoyed it. Love all the questions from the group and, and hope you found, hope you got a little bit of insight. Perfect. You know,

everybody, if you need some, wanna dive into this deeper with Scott, feel free to get in touch with him. know he does some great work.

Like I said, having, having seen his organizational systems, if you've got a sales team that's could use a little bit of help and, you know, helping holding them accountable to their CRMs and all that, definitely look him up. He's a great guy for. we will get the replay sent out to everybody. If you've, if you signed up or if you commented, we'll make sure we get that all sent out.

Give us a few days to get that taken care of. Otherwise, with that, thanks everybody. Thank you Scott, and, thanks everybody. You guys next time. Take care. Thanks for listening to the Pipelineology podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's episode and look forward to seeing you on the next one. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.