The Sales Success Formula : Gong Stats

In my experience, experienced salespeople hate being monitored. They develop an individual style and don’t take advice easily.

In my early years of stockbroking, I was not taught sales; you just tried to copy the best people around you.
Generally, my method was to fill any void in a conversation with content to keep the client on the line and hope something sticks. We called it machine gun broking.

The most significant change came in 1999 when I received coaching from Richard Wentworth-Ping.

In a hilarious exercise, he taught us:

1. Ask questions
2. Listen, and don’t be afraid of the pause.

He would listen into our sales pitches, help us with objection handling and fundamentally changed how I approached challenging sales calls. It also provided a framework for maximising value from easy calls to your friendliest clients.

Now I had a new method, sniper stockbroking. Extract information and deliver relevant content in an efficient manner.

But what if this could be quantified? Seventeen minutes into the Michael Lewis podcast, Against The Rules,I found the formula.

Gong analyses sales calls and uses AI to search for patterns for successful sales pitches. 

1. On average, 46% talk time is optimal. Let the client talk. Sales monologues are bad. Monitor your talk ratio.
2. Ask no more than 13 questions. Too many questions can irritate clients. 
3. Pause, think, then reply. Patience is critical.

 Interesting observations

1. Filler words such as ums, errs & like don’t matter. I’m not telling my kids this.
2. If the buyer starts with swear words and you match that is ok, not if you start first.

So a simple game changer is: Ask questions, listen, don’t be afraid of the pause and don’t dominate the conversation.

When we switched to logging client calls via a CRM system, each Friday I would task the sales team to sort clients by the least called (hardest) and work through to “turn the screen to green”. We all develop habits where we make easy calls first and relegate the hard calls. Two observations here:

1. Productivity improves with measurement, no matter how much salespeople hate oversight. 
2. Friday was usually a great day for cold calls. Clients are usually thinking about the weekend not the stress of the week ahead.

My record pause from a client during a sales pitch was well over 80 seconds. That feels like a lifetime, but he was thinking, not ignoring us!