Energy flow in complex sales

There’s a yearning amongst team coaches and consultants to simply get to work with exciting and transformative projects for our clients. It often drives people to sign up for expensive automated tools that promise coaches six figure dollar incomes in six weeks.

While some of those tools are useful to generate initial leads, the process of getting to an actual contract for work that transforms an organization is more complex. It requires our very human energetic input.

There is a deep complexity to real life B2B sales. Quite appropriately, most organizations are careful about how they buy services designed to transform the way their people work. As a result, selling our services to them as team coaches and consultants is always subject to both conscious and unconscious vetting by the client, at many levels. Transformative contracts are not decided by a single individual and many considerations go into the vetting process. I teach the skills of understanding and engaging with the complex processes of corporate decision making as a core component of the Wider Value business development programs.

It can be daunting engaging in B2B sales. I find Lisa’s Law a comfort. In essence she reassures us that the energy we put into sales does yield results – even if we can’t always track the flow of that energy in a mechanical way.

Lisa’s Law: what you put out does come back to you

When I first met Lisa Garson 19 years ago, she shared such an important truth with me that I call it Lisa’s Law:

You have to put marketing energy out, every week or better, every day. It will come back to you in sales enquiries. Typically, though, the incoming sales enquiries won’t be directly from the people you reached out to.

There is a complex web of connection, referral, influence and engagement through which your initial message passes, becoming transformed as it passes from mouth to mouth, post to post, comment to comment until somebody somewhere decides to call you or visit your website.

Referrals for some of my biggest deals came from dinner party conversations, where I was not present but my name came up – and then the leader emailed or called me when they got back to the office on Monday. Others came because somebody who didn’t know me forwarded one of my posts to somebody half way around the world.

How Lisa’s Law enables you to communicate better

One of the areas Lisa and I will explore in the seminar on April 22nd, is how understanding her law can improve your marketing and sales messaging. In its essence, when your focus is on getting a sale from every person you speak to in the organization you are addressing, you come across as needy and often self-focused.

Once you understand that your job is to give of your expertise and capability, and to be curious about your potential client as a system – well that energy goes out along with your message. And you come across as a potentially valuable transformation partner.

It’s that message that you want going out into the complex web of referral out there, so that when your name comes up for your real potential client, it comes up in the right way. And then they reach out to you.

Live interactive seminar April 22nd

These are complex issues, easier to discuss in person than to write about. But the energy you put into your sales and marketing is actually the lifeblood of your business. It takes courage and depth and insight, as well as skill and persistence, to do it well.

Lisa and I invite you to join us in a 90-minute live global interactive seminar for advanced team coaches and consultants on April 22nd at 12:30 pm Eastern time / 18h30 CET. Experienced practitioners will be invited to share our experiences and build up our collective expertise as we grow the new industry of team coaching worldwide.