3 Steps Every MSP Sale Must Have
I used to think "Always Be Closing" was outdated, sleazy sales advice, but I've completely changed my mind. In this video, I break down why ABC is actually the foundation of consultative selling for MSSPs and B2B sales.
The truth is, every single step in your sales process—from discovery calls to assessments to proposals—should be designed with one goal: moving the deal forward and closing the sale. I'll show you the simple framework I use to redesign sales processes, explain why most salespeople are treating discovery and assessments like information gathering instead of closing opportunities, and reveal the biggest mistake I see during proposals that kills deals.
If you're in MSP sales or any B2B selling, this reframe will change how you approach every interaction with prospects.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
Speaker 1
If you think always be closing like the ABC is outdated sleazy advice from the 80s, you're wrong. And I used to think the same thing. But I've I've now come full circle on this and believe more than ever that it is the foundation of consultative selling. And here's the thing. Most mssp salespeople are running their discovery. They're running their assessments.
::Speaker 1
They're running their proposals like they're their information gathering. Right? Like they're just getting the information that they need. And they're not they're more than that. Every single step in your sales process has one goal. It is to move the deal forward and close the sale. I'm going to show you why I changed my mind on this entirely and came full circle.
::Speaker 1
I'll share a simple diagram with you to to break this down and help you redesign your sales process so that you can close more deals. Now, stick around for the proposal trap that I've got at the end here, because that's actually where I see the most people lose deals now early in my career. ABC always be closing kind of stuck with me as as like a newbie.
::Speaker 1
It was a good reminder for somebody who didn't have like a natural proclivity for for sales. Hey, we're we're always closing like, we're we're always focused. And it did help keep me focused on closing deals. But the more sophisticated that I got in sales and the more that I got introduced to consultative selling, I realized, hey, like, this isn't this doesn't work, right?
::Speaker 1
Like when I go in and I'm, I'm early on in this process, qualifying people and getting acquainted with people and figuring out who the decision makers are and understanding that there's a buying process to to break down here, and you're moving people through a step of real discovery and then, you know, in it case like you're you're going to be doing an assessment and then you're going to be putting all, all that together and, and bringing a proposal if you're trying to sell your services, if you're trying to close the deal at literally every step of the process, are you going to lose deals?
::Speaker 1
Right. Like if I if I connect with somebody on LinkedIn and we start a conversation, hey, buy my shit, you know, we'll show up to our first introductory call. Like to see if there's a potential good for a buy. My shit like that doesn't work. The more I got into consultative selling, the more I started to think, yeah, it's just kind of like an outdated concept.
::Speaker 1
Or maybe it's something that, you know, for a very transactional nature type of stuff. Maybe it maybe it has its place, but it's not for selling MSP services. It's not for good B2B sales processes. As time went on and in the more that I, I understood the consultative selling process and the more that I broke these things down and designed more of them, and the more calls I listened to, the more processes that I saw, the more I saw how people executed the sales process.
::Speaker 1
I actually came full circle. I said, you know what? Like, actually, when you break this down, we are actually always closing. And it's just it's just not always how you think. All right. I'm gonna show you how I think about this. Right. So picture you got a whiteboard, right? And on one end of the whiteboard you've got open and you're or you're opening the deal on the other end of the whiteboard.
::Speaker 1
You've got a closed deal here. And I'm aware that when you close a deal, you're opening the relationship. But for argument's sake, let's say you open the deal. You close the deal, right? This is your job as a as a sales person. Every single step that you have in between these two things has one purpose. It is to move this deal into a closed deal.
::Speaker 1
Right. So that means every single call that we have, every single email that we send, every single follow up that we have, every single document that we send, every single slide deck that we create, all of them have one goal in mind, and that is to close this deal. Now, ideally you want to close and win it like that's the that's the outcome that you really want.
::Speaker 1
But some deals are going to close and lose. But make no mistake, every single step in this entire process has the objective of moving it to the next step and ultimately getting you to a close deal. This is, for all intents and purposes, this is your sales process. Now, here's what people get wrong. They think that closing all happens here, right?
::Speaker 1
They think that this is where the closes happen and it's at the bottom of the funnel. It's at the end of the process. It's after you've given the proposal, it's after you've given the presentation and you go in and you're going to ask for money. The problem is, if you get to the end of the process to really think about closing, it's too late.
::Speaker 1
Everything's already been been presented. You've like, you've had all of these different touch points and different opportunities to help influence the outcome at the end, before it actually happens. In the way that I think about this is if you have a discovery call, for example, here, then the purpose of that discovery call is intended to get you to whatever your next step is, say it's an assessment, and when you do your assessment, your goal is to get the information that you need to continue to move that deal forward.
::Speaker 1
Now, here's where people mess up, right? Like go back to discovery on on the map. Right. So you look at this and you say this here is our discovery process. I'm not good at art, okay? I'm much better at sales processes. But we've got our we've got our discovery process is baked into here. And that's, you know, a series of emails that we're going to send in advance, maybe some, you know, presale information, some reminders, and of course, sitting down and actually going through the discovery process, a lot of people treat discovery like you're there just to learn about the business.
::Speaker 1
Oh, yeah. Tell me that. Tell me about the history. So about the teams or about the structure. Tell me about you. Right. They're there to get the information, learn the business. And don't get me wrong, like you're not being disingenuous, but you're learning about the business with one goal in mind. It is to close the deal like this is not curiosity.
::Speaker 1
This is not a podcast. This is not an interview. Just for the sake of interviewing people. This is getting information that you need to identify can we solve this problem? And if we can, what is the best way for me to position this and to frame this in a way that helps me actually close the deal? The questions that you ask are either information gathering, or they're helping you improve the likelihood that you can close the deal.
::Speaker 1
Bad discovery, in my view, is something like, oh, hey, tell me about your your current setup. You know, like how many users do you have? And you know, how many servers you have? Okay. Well, that's cool information. I mean, it's information you can get the different ways you're you're wasting bandwidth in real estate in my opinion. But good discovery asks hey, tell me about the impact that it is having on the business today.
::Speaker 1
Is it do you feel like it's accelerating the growth and helping you guys hit your goals, or do you feel like it's more of a hindrance right now? What I'm doing is getting the information that I can then come back to later in the proposal when we're positioning this for an actual close. And I'm saying, hey, remember when you told me that it was a hindrance?
::Speaker 1
It wasn't moving the business for it was frustrating. It was this. Right? Like I'm getting into the actual business impact. Do you see the difference? Like when you when you approach discovery like it's part of the closing process as it is, it's going to change the questions that you ask. It's going to change the the information that you get, and it's going to change the way that you process the information.
::Speaker 1
As you get it. You go in more like a detective looking for the problems and the pain points, because I know if I can get that right, if I understand that that's going to tell me, is there any real urgency? It does the the cost of switching, like, outweigh the benefits that we're able to provide? What are the real pain points here, like, are they are they actually painful enough to to compel them to make a change, like all of those things that you really want at the end?
::Speaker 1
They start at the beginning. Now the same thing happens with the assessment. So if you if you go back to your not well designed map here, then and we say, hey, somewhere in here we're going to do an assessment, let's say that's about here. Okay. So we've got this assessment process and we get that, we get that scheduled.
::Speaker 1
We get that done. A lot of people think, hey, I'm here to get information that gives me the data I need for a proposal and even finds like the vulnerabilities in the threads in the network. And to an extent, those things are helpful. Like, yes, those are the essentials. So let's go ahead and check the box. You need those things.
::Speaker 1
But there's a huge difference between going into a prospect and saying, hey, you've got a lot of problems. We found here you have X number of cracked passwords. You have these vulnerabilities, this number of people are admins on the o365. And you've got gaps here. And you know, like you know the drill, right? So you get you get the information that you need.
::Speaker 1
But there's a huge difference between that and going in and saying, hey, we have X number of cracked passwords. And a couple of them were on, you know, essential systems that you have and, you know, if those things are leaked, if those things get too into the wrong hands, this is what the impact of that is. And it's severe.
::Speaker 1
You've got this many people on the admin side of 365. Let me tell you, let me tell you a story recently about a company who had, you know, disgruntled employee, knew they were leaving, did X, Y, and Z to to the system on the way out or, you know, took x, y, z information, something like that.
::Speaker 1
What I'm doing is I'm taking the facts and I'm turning them into business impact. Right. Like I'm framing it in a way that they go, I understand why that problem is a problem. I now have some fear that's associated with it. I now potentially have some urgency. I now also see you as more of a not just an IT person, but like you're now in a consulting position, like you're giving me insight input that's valuable to the business.
::Speaker 1
All of these things are designed not just to fill in the proposal and get the numbers right. These things are designed to help you close. But the biggest mistake that I actually see in this, in this process is, ironically, around the proposal, which is the time that most people know you've got to close, right. So again, going back to to the sales process that we have here, we've got, you know, somewhere in here we're moving to a proposal.
::Speaker 1
Right. And we've got our proposal meeting is somewhere about here. And we're, we're looking to to get that deal actually closed. Now, most people know this is the time where you're actually closing. Ironically, what happens is what I see is time and time and time again that people go in, they get their presentation. If they even have a presentation.
::Speaker 1
Sometimes it's like a, you know, 30 page PDF quote, which is which is not what I would recommend. But say you go in, you've got, you know, presentation, you go through, you go through your slides and you say, hey, like, this is, you have presented all of this stuff. I'm sure you want to, you know, take some time to think about this.
::Speaker 1
So let me go ahead and leave this with you, and then we'll we'll follow up next week and see where we go from there. Whoa. Hey. The purpose of this proposal is not to inform. The purpose of this proposal is not to educate. The purpose of this proposal is not to deliver information and let them make their decision on their own.
::Speaker 1
The purpose of this proposal is to close the deal in you as a salesperson. Your job is to help them make a decision. Your job is not to deliver information and leave them to make a decision on their own. If you really believe that, you can solve a problem, if you can make pains go away, if you can make their business better, if you can improve their network, if you can improve their systems, they're not like all of that stuff.
::Speaker 1
If you really believe that, then you have an obligation to help them make a good decision. And guess what? There's no better time for you to help them make a good decision than when they're sitting right in front of you. The presentation. The proposal is designed to set you up to ask one very specific question. Are you going to buy or not?
::Speaker 1
Where do you land on this? Like what is your decision at this? At this rate, how you ask it, you take hey, any reason not to move forward today? There's a I have other videos on all of that, but that is the purpose of that presentation. That is the purpose of that meeting, and that is the ask that you make in the meeting.
::Speaker 1
All of that should be designed intentionally to set you up to close that deal. You look at it and you say, hey, we're going to revisit those pain points. We're going to make it very clear why we're the best solution. We're going to make it very clear, how much the investment is going to be. We're going to make it very clear that onboarding is going to be easy.
::Speaker 1
We're going to, you know, reduce all of the perceived obstacles. We're going to address all of the objections proactively, or if they're not ready to make a decision when they when you ask for the sale and they come up. But that's I'm going to create the slide deck in a way that addresses all of the obstacles, the things that keep people from making an actual decision.
::Speaker 1
That's why the proposal deck is designed the way that it is. So here's the reframe for me, like full circle, like going from early in my career saying, okay, like this is this is good. Like I'm always I'm always, you know, closing to in the consultative sales or it's like, hey, I you know, this isn't quite for this.
::Speaker 1
And now full circle realizing yet is like, yes, it is every single step, every single email, every single call, every single playbook. Every day is designed with one goal in mind, and that is to close more deals. That is what an optimized sales process looks like. And when you look at it that way, you understand really two things.
::Speaker 1
First is what what the purpose of each step is. I go back and look at pictures on a whiteboard, write out every single step that happens when you open a deal to close a deal, and then look at it and say, hey, the purpose of each one of these is to get to the next step. All right. Cool.
::Speaker 1
The second thing that you realize is you really are always closing. So sorry, Alec Baldwin, I owe you an apology. BBC.
