 You’ve planned a meeting meticulously to set yourself up for success. You’ve built rapport. You’ve started to dig beneath the surface to get at the heart of your customer’s needs.
Now it’s time for my personal favorite part of any sales call - the part where you get to share your ideas and create solutions that will turn prospective customers into signed ones. It’s also the place where, if you aren’t careful, all of the work you’ve done up until this point can quickly unravel. And if you’re entering this stage thinking about how you can “win” the customer’s business, you might alienate them before you even get started. Don't Lose the Sale with the Wrong Opening Line. “What’s your budget?” is an opening line that some salespeople swear by. “Everybody has a budget,” they’d likely argue. “Why waste time beating around the bush?” They aren’t necessarily wrong, and yet, it’s an opening line that typically kills sales (and the relationship) before the conversation can really begin. Yes, money is important. Yes, your client likely has a budget in mind. But starting there won’t help you continue to build a relationship with your client. Why? It puts them on the defensive. Clients worry that if they name a number that’s too low, they’ll be judged or offered a subpar experience. On the other hand, if they name a number that’s unnecessarily high, will you inflate your prices so that they get taken advantage of? Suddenly your entire interaction - the one that was carefully built with curiosity and authenticity - has become transactional. And that’s not a feeling that’s easy to come back from. Your Sales Pitch Should Feel Like a Collaboration, Not a Confrontation. The whole process so far, from planning each stage of the meeting to building a rapport, has centered around including the customer. Now that it’s time to start sharing solutions, that shouldn’t change. Instead of viewing the presentation of ideas as your moment, think of it as a collaborative brainstorming session where you create a roadmap with the customer. Start by ignoring the financial elephant in the room. Think big. Offer solutions that would solve their problems, share creative ideas, and take their feedback into account as you go. Share any exciting and relevant possibility during this conversation without placing limitations on either of you. Create a Safe Space to Tackle the Details. The budget does, inevitably, have to come up. But by brainstorming first, you’re showing the client that your goal, first and foremost, is helping them find the right solutions. When the time does come to discuss their budget, it will be clear that your goal is modifying the plans you created together to match their financial needs. Once again, you’re working with them to provide a solution - not asking a trick question. You're Playing for the Same Team. If One of You Wins, You Both Do. Your customer is investing one of their most valuable resources with you: their time. And they’re doing it because they’ve been happy with the rapport you’ve built so far and the direction your relationship is heading in. They believe you could be a good partner for them. They want this partnership to work. Instead of thinking of winning their business, consider that a successful sales call means both of your teams get to win. Several years ago, Karl was asked to consult with a company he’d worked with before.
“Things have been going great,” a member of the leadership team told him. “But we’ve grown a lot over the past several years, we have new team members, and I think we could use a refresh.” Karl was excited to get started and meet the new team. One of the newest members was their director of marketing. Driven, smart, personable, Karl knew he had a lot of potential. In fact, the new director of marketing’s biggest challenge was his age and subsequent lack of experience. There was a lot he didn’t know, but he was aware of it and incredibly eager to learn. Karl immediately thought about a different client of his who had an upcoming marketing conference and workshop. He knew it was the kind of experience that would benefit the new director of marketing. “Hey,” he told the guy the next day. “One of my other clients is hosting this workshop. I think you’d really like it.” Karl watched as the director of marketing’s facial expression moved from excitement to disappointment before he even spoke. “That sounds awesome, and I appreciate you thinking of me. But I just don’t think we have room in the budget right now.” Karl couldn’t let it go, especially after seeing the young director’s reaction. So he called his client and asked for a favor. “This guy really wants to attend,” he told his friend. “But he doesn’t have any wiggle room. Could you let him come free of charge?” “No worries,” the client told Karl. “Just send me his info and I’ll register him.” It was a win for everybody. There was an extra attendee at the conference networking and building connections, the new director of marketing was able to attend workshops he was really excited about, and Karl was able to help his client. When it came down to it, this moment wasn’t about selling for Karl – it was about providing value that went beyond the services he was paid to provide. None of it would’ve been possible without Iceberg Selling. Karl had to get to know the director of marketing well enough to understand that this opportunity was one he’d be excited about. He had to have a strong enough relationship with his other clients to ask for a favor. And he had to not just be professionally invested, but personally invested enough to find extra opportunities to provide value. During his appearance on the Leaving Nothing to Chance podcast, Karl does a mock sales call with host John Solleder, shares how most salespeople have the potential to go from good to great with a few small shifts in their mindset, and discusses why knowing what’s going on in the worlds of your team members and customers makes you a more valuable and successful salesperson. Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts  When looking to increase your business and revenue, there are two important (and easy!) ways that sales organizations often overlook.
No, it’s not new networking events or cold calling strangers. In fact, neither strategy involves reaching out to anyone outside of your existing network at all. The first is within your client pool. Odds are, you know who your top five or ten customers are right now. I bet you can picture them. “Okay,” you may be thinking. “They’re already my customers, and that’s great. But what opportunity is there for growth with them?” It’s easy for us to assume that our biggest customers are already using every single service we offer that is relevant to their business, industry, and needs. It often isn’t the case. The fact of the matter is, customers we’ve worked with for a long time often only think of us as providing the exact services they’re used to receiving from our team. We get pigeon holed and thought of as the group that does “X”, when in fact, there is so much more that we offer. Over time, our organization and our capabilities grow. We add new tools to our belt, hire new talent, gain new skills, and expand into new markets. It’s easy to take for granted that our existing clients know about all the ways we’ve changed or leveled up over time. Just as often, we fall into the same trap with the ways we perceive our clients. We’re so sure we know about their needs, we forget that their organizations have changed too - and so have the solutions they need. Here’s what you can do to expand within your existing client pool:
Now that you know where these gaps are, it’s time to reach out. Schedule some time to meet with your contacts at each organization and have a conversation about all of your team’s capabilities and how their organization can benefit from them. You may just find that one of your biggest customers gets even bigger. The second place salespeople often forget to check isn’t necessarily in their current customer base - it’s within the pool of connections they already have but don’t talk to regularly. When one of these connections has a career change, whether it’s a promotion, a new job, or a totally new industry, it can often present you with the opportunity to connect with a new team or even organization. LinkedIn is a powerful tool in keeping up with these connections. Start by going to your profile and checking to see if anyone you’ve worked with, submitted a proposal to, or even networked with previously has had any career changes. If so, reach out! Congratulate them on their promotion, new job, or exciting new adventure and try to start a conversation. The best case scenario, it turns out they’re looking for somebody who provides the exact same services you do. The timing is perfect for both of your teams: you get a new opportunity and they’re able to solve a challenge or provide a solution to their team. Worst case scenario, it turns out their team or new organization already has somebody that provides your services. Of course, even in that event, your time was still well spent. You never know what could change in the future, what other connections they may have, or who else they’ll refer you to. When looking to grow our organizations and expand our business, the natural instinct is often to find new customers. And while new business is incredibly important to ongoing growth, expanding within your current customer base and capitalizing on the connections you’ve already built allows you to quickly find opportunities you didn’t know existed.  Building or restructuring often takes place during periods of growth. Your team may be experiencing growing pains, with more work than your current sales organization can keep up with. Or perhaps you’ve had a huge wave of revenue growth, and you realize the importance of capitalizing on it to grow even faster.
Maybe it’s the opposite: your team has had steady numbers, but wants to increase revenue potential, or has started to stall. These are times when organizations feel a lot of urgency to have their sales team start performing at a higher level, and they feel the answer to that is adding a sales superstar to their team. It’s an exciting prospect. It’s also a scary one. Building or expanding your sales team is a risk. There’s a high cost associated with adding to your team. From the financial cost - a salary, benefits, extra equipment - to the valuable time and energy it takes to hire, onboard, and offer continuous training support, expanding your team takes more work before it alleviates pressure on your team and costs you money before it increases your revenue. Doing it the right way takes time - but the cost of doing it wrong is high. Keep reading to learn the three most common challenges organizations face when building or expanding their sales teams and the steps you can take to overcome them. Hiring Your First Salesperson Many small businesses have their first initial leaps of growth (and continued business) simply from word of mouth. Their reputation is their biggest selling point and biggest selling tool. Through close customer relationships and consistently providing quality services or products, they get new customers from referrals alone. However, at some point, they’ll likely decide they want to grow faster or on a larger scale than their one-on-one connections will enable them to do. They need to get intentional about getting more business. The natural next step is to hire a salesperson or form a sales team. Of course, for businesses that have never approached selling strategically, it’s hard to know where to start. They wonder:
Sales have always happened organically instead of intentionally, so approaching the process with a different mindset is a big adjustment and a bit unsettling. Trying to Clone Yourself In many small businesses where selling is an intentional part of the outreach and growth process, it’s not uncommon for one person to hold all the keys to the castle. The owner or founder of the company is the sole person who is truly responsible for revenue growth, or given the opportunity to close new customers and expand existing relationships. It’s obvious why this becomes unsustainable as the business grows. The owner suddenly needs to be on every sales call. They need to have touch points with every customer. They’re involved in every aspect of the business, no matter how small, when they should be focused on the big picture. However, transitioning away from this model isn’t easy. When one person is responsible for managing and building all client relationships, they rarely have a set process. Instead, they work intuitively, drawing on their extensive knowledge of the industry, customers, and business. And while this may work really well for them, it gives new team members joining the sales force or existing team members transitioning into a selling role no roadmap to follow. The owner may think the answer is finding someone who is essentially their clone in order to circumvent this problem. “I don’t need to develop a process,” they think, “if I work with someone who just gets it the same way I do.” This is, almost all of the time, a big mistake. Even somebody with the same selling style as the owner will need onboarding and training, and in the absence of that, you end up in a frustrating situation for both parties. The salesperson will start to feel micromanaged, like they lack autonomy, and aren’t given the trust or ownership they need to actually do and succeed at their job. Meanwhile, the owner will continue to be so hands on, their workload likely won’t decrease much at all. Scaling Your Team by Adding More Team Members When your current team is overloaded by the demands of a growing company (in many ways, a good problem to have!) it may feel necessary to quickly expand the size of the team. However, bringing three extra people onto a two-person sales team overnight isn’t easy, might not be necessary, and should absolutely be done with caution. Sales teams that are small often lack solidified structure, processes, and routines. The success of the existing team is, in large part, due to the fact that they’ve established relationships with clients and industry partners, have extensive industry knowledge, and have found a personal system that works for them. In small, adaptive companies, this can work for a time - but it causes big difficulties when adding new people into the mix. There’s no roadmap or strategies for growth, aside from “sell more stuff.” There’s no process to onboard the new hires because there likely aren’t any processes to begin with. There may not even be a clearly defined person in charge. Without processes in place, it’s impossible for new hires to learn and adapt to the company quickly, to understand and communicate the nuances that set them apart from competitors, or to get up to speed so they can succeed at their jobs. Businesses may not even need as many new team members as they initially think - they just need to be intentional about who they hire and what exactly they’re providing to the team. How to Overcome These Challenges Put simply, the way to overcome these challenges is to create a selling process, determine how exactly your current team fits into that process, and understand where your gaps are. For small businesses looking to bring on a dedicated salesperson for the first time, consider how you picture bringing in leads, nurturing them, and closing deals. What part of that process, if any, would somebody on your existing team continue to do? What parts do you need assistance with? Now, when you start the hiring process, you’ll understand exactly what kind of salesperson (link Hunters and Farmers blog) will best fit your needs. For businesses looking to expand their sales team, it’s time to create a clearly defined selling process. Start by figuring out how your funnel currently functions. Where are the leads brought in from? What are the different touch points they experience? How do they move from “lead” to “customer”. If you don’t have a process here, now is a great time to make one. Next, identify where your current team is falling short. Is the team so busy that there isn’t enough time to dedicate to bringing in leads? Or maybe you have so many leads that consistent outreach has started falling through the cracks, making it harder to close customers. This will help you figure out how your funnel needs to be improved - and how a new hire would fit into your organizational structure. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. |
Meet Me
Archives
October 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
We are headquartered in Colorado with domestic and international teammates and clients. Please use the contact form on this page to inquire about any of our books, podcasts appearances, speaking engagements and workshops, any of our offerings, or simply to connect.
|
|