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Despite spending countless hours and resources, your sales numbers just won’t budge. It can be frustrating and demotivating, but you’re not alone. Many business owners and sales teams face the same challenges. Luckily, there’s a solution that’s guaranteed to work.
The single most effective approach to improve sales close rates and shorten the sales lifecycle is to utilise ‘They Ask, You Answer’ (TAYA). In this article, you’ll find out exactly what TAYA is and how you can start utilising it to increase sales. By the end of this article, you’ll no longer be stuck, but instead equipped to make a difference in your business.
You’ll learn four key things to increase sales:
The Rapidly Changing Buyer and What it Means for Your Sales Team
Before you learn about TAYA, it’s important to understand how the buyer has changed in the last two decades.
The rapidly changing buyer has resulted in a need for sales teams to approach their craft in a very different manner than they did in the past in order to truly be successful.
With the internet now being the predominant point of research for most buyers, there is less of a reliance on the sales or customer service department of a business.
So, how and why has the buyer changed in the last two decades?
Did you know that on average, today’s buyer has already made 80% of the buying decision BEFORE the first sales call?
-Marcus Sheridan, Author of They Ask, You Answer
Think about the last time you made a big purchase, like a new car or a home renovation project. If you’re like most people, you probably started your research online.
You likely looked up information about different products, read reviews from other customers, and maybe even watched some videos about all the alternative options available to you. By the time you were ready to make a purchase, you already had a pretty good idea of what you wanted and what you were willing to pay for it.
This is the reality for most buyers today, and it’s important for businesses to understand how this impacts their sales and customer service strategies.
With the internet being the predominant point of research, buyers have access to a wealth of information at their fingertips. They no longer rely solely on the sales or customer service department of a business to make informed decisions.
Today, a buyer has generally already decided on what they want before they even speak to a salesperson, because they’ve done all their research online already.
This means that the salesperson’s role has shifted from educating you about the product to helping you make a purchase decision and addressing any concerns you may have.
Why is this important?
You guessed it – marketing. This is the single department which is responsible for having the most impact on the buying decision, in every industry, for every product and service, and in every single instance.
With marketing being a major factor in determining whether a customer purchases, the role of marketing has in impacting the bottom line is significantly more important than ever before.
Unfortunately, many businesses still treat marketing as a cost centre when in reality (based on what we know about how marketers can impact purchasing decisions) marketing needs to be treated as a profit centre.
With something that significantly influences your customers buying decision, it transforms from being an expense to becoming an investment.
You’re probably wondering, how can marketing help my sales team close more deals? That’s where TAYA (and the concept of Revenue Teams) comes in.
Why a Revenue Team is the Biggest Needle Mover
‘They Ask, You Answer’ (aka TAYA) is a practical framework and sales and marketing philosophy that assumes one simple truth: if your prospect or customer asks a question, you answer, and in doing so, you will become the most trusted voice in your space and will gain more business than you ever have before.
Core to TAYA is the alignment of marketing and sales teams through what we call a Revenue Team.
More often than not, marketers sit in their ivory towers and produce comms without the reality of the frontline. At the same time, the sales team is working day in/day out on the frontline speaking with prospects without any real idea of what content is being produced by marketing. When marketing and sales sit in their separate silos, it can cause problems for both teams. Revenue Teams help align marketing and sales for a more effective approach.
A Revenue Team is a combination of your sales and marketing teams and is made up of key players from both sales and marketing. All activities, regardless of individual roles, are focused on the shared goal of increasing company revenue.
How does a Revenue Team increase sales?
The Revenue Team meets weekly or fortnightly to discuss the questions that buyers are asking in the sales cycle. This essentially doubles as a brainstorming session.
Marketing then produces content that customers are already asking sales reps in sales calls.
What’s more, a good Revenue Team also has a reporting dashboard that both sales and marketing understand and respect. These reports are also discussed and covered during a Revenue Team meeting.
In our experience, creating a formal Revenue Team is the best way to align these two important but often working in silo departments.
Once you’ve sowed the seeds with a Revenue Team, it’s time for your sales team to reap the benefits by using Assignment Selling.
How you can use Assignment Selling to close a deal tomorrow
Assignment Selling is another big part of the TAYA framework.
Assignment Selling is when we assign “homework” to our prospects in the form of educational blog articles or videos anytime during the sales cycle.
Assignment Selling can be implemented at various stages of the sales cycle; before the first sales call, after the first sales call, before a deal is signed, and so on.
To give you an idea of what it looks like, here’s an example.
“Hi, Harry! I’m looking forward to meeting with you next Wednesday. I’ve attached a guide to read before our meeting that will answer all your questions in advance and go over options you need to consider. This way, when we meet, we can make the most of our time together and focus on your specific needs. If you can’t read this before our meeting, let me know and I will reschedule for a better time. Can you confirm you’re able to do this before Wednesday?”
Using this tactic ultimately increases close rates and shortens the time needed to close deals on average. How do we know this?
If a prospect visits 30 pages or more of a website, there is an 80% chance that they’ll buy. If they view 30 pages or fewer, there’s a 15-20% chance that they’ll buy.
Marcus Sheridan discovered this statistic when he tested groups of buyers to find what factors influenced their buying decision.
It helps increase our close rates and shortens the sales cycle, because prospects become educated and move closer to having viewed 30 pages or more.
Once Marcus discovered this, he began assigning prospects at least 30 pages to read before each sales call to see if it would help closing rates.
After implementing this process, his closing rates went from 25-30% to over 80%.
When we use Assignment Selling, we move closer to this magic number and the positive impact that comes with it.
On top of this, Assignment Selling also has the following benefits:
- Your buyer perceives you as a trusted advisor instead of an salesy salesperson, which makes it easier to sell, since trust is the secret ingredient to more sales
- Saves time on education which means your sales rep spend more time selling and less time explaining
- Helps you strengthen good-fit leads and weed out bad-fit prospects as the assignments act as a qualifying mechanism
As you can see, Assignment Selling is an extremely effective way to increase sales, and it can be the single biggest needle mover for your business.
How to start using this tomorrow?
The best way to start using this is to learn more about Revenue Teams, Assignment Selling, and TAYA. Here’s the best resource to learn all about these: Everything you need to know about TAYA.
