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Introduction to Zero-Point Selling
Zero-Point Selling is Rethink Revenue’s approach to strategic revenue generation. From Marketing to Sales and Customer Service, Zero-Point Selling combines proven industry best practices with data-driven decision making to lead you to a new sales record – year after year.
Read on or listen through the video below to learn from our Founder, Mark Perone, how Zero Point Selling applies to all businesses, including yours.
Here is the full text of the video above, edited for readability:
I wanted to show you guys how Rethink Revenue is explaining what we do and I’m going to key in on value proposition.
Let’s talk about Zero Point Selling. We call our method Zero Point Selling because it takes a very small amount of information to start the Marketing and Sales process.
This document that you see here is our Customer Journey Framework. We didn’t come up with the Known / Liked / Trusted methodology, but we are applying it to the structure of a business – Marketing, Sales, Customer Service.
The idea here is to show the workflow through the following actions:
- Targeting people who we know but those people don’t know us
- Creating a relationship with those people until they also know us
- Creating a Lead
- Qualifying that Lead as an Opportunity
- Working our Sales process
- Landing a proposal with a signature on it
Seems pretty logical huh?
At Rethink Revenue, we turn Marketing and Sales activity into Enterprise-level progress.
I am Mark Perone. Hopefully we’re connected on LinkedIn. If we’re not we should be. I put up some pretty funny stuff that always kind of rotates around the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service perspectives, mainly concentrating on Rethinking Revenue.
The Elements of an Organization
Let’s start where most people understand the delivery of Product or Services. The Part, Activities, Responsibility and Role Players all are kind of unique within the organization but every organization has these elements.
This part of the Customer Journey Framework – the “Trusted” Customer Service phase – is not the beginning. This is actually kind of the end.
It’s definitely the end for Marketing and Sales where they start an entirely different workflow from initial Sale to second, third, and fourth Sales.
These additional Sales conversations usually go like this: “Hey, you already know us already. Why aren’t you buying this item? Most people like you who bought that item have purchased this!”
“What Else are Sales People Doing?”
They’re not just sending out proposals. There’s a lot of activity to get to a proposal so we detail and document how people are Prospecting.
- Some people are Prospecting [by] skywriting.
- Some people are sending smoke signals.
- Some people are spamming with emails.
- Some people are cold calling and they swear by it.
- Some people are transactionally networking – going to business networking meetings looking for that next Lead so that we can make some money tomorrow.
Some of the people that I work with are shaking the magic eight ball asking where their next sale is gonna come from. How do you think that works for them? Not very well!
Organizing a Sales Team within Zero Point Selling
We should driving activity to a progress definition. First we define what progress is, then we determine which actions we should be taking to achieve the desired result. Then we measure that activity towards the goal.
We like to start the sequential order of how an Unknown person becomes a Customer by drawing out step by step what we want to do and then organizing those steps of the Sales process into Stages and Tasks.
The first part of this is defining Sales Part, Activity, Responsibilities, and Role Players and understanding where you are in space – you’re right here, in the “Liked” Sales stage now.
We’ve gone from Proposal back to where the Sales process executes.
Zero Point Selling Starts with a Performance Review
The Sales process starts at the beginning of the year, any fiscal year, with a performance review.
Our Performance Reviews cover:
- Annual Sales Revenue
- Sales Volume
- Average Sale
- Total Opportunities
- Close Ratio
- Total Leads
- Lead Conversion
- Sales Cycle Time
If you’re in Sales this is all kind of second nature. If you’re an organizational leader – Vice President, President, CEO – there’s usually a lot of confusion around how we cut this information up. You probably think that you have all this information already but likely you don’t.
You’re lacking that information because this Performance Review has a source of information that’s a little different than most organizations realize.
You do have your accounting software. Accounting software only covers Annual Sales Revenue, Annual Sales Volume, and Average Sale of all of these line items above.
Zero Point Selling Leverages Opportunity Management
To determine your Closed Opportunity ratio, you must track both the Opportunities that you Won and the Opportunities that you didn’t win. You need to track both “Closed/Won” Opportunities and “Closed/Lost” Opportunities.
Accounting software does not track your Opportunities (both Won and Lost). It only tracks your sales. That’s an important factor. Let me say that again:
Accounting software only looks at what generated revenue. It doesn't look at the misses.
It is important to understand what your close ratio is actually based on.
If you have a thirty percent (30%) close ratio you missed seven deals. Seventy percent of the work that you do goes unpaid and if you don’t have a CRM all of the information associated with 70% of your Opportunities is not being captured.
Once we get down into Opportunities, Leads become important and this is usually a function of Marketing. Leads are the precursor to Opportunities so you’re going to actually have a ratio there that says “I got x amount of Opportunities from x amount of Leads.”
That’s another important factor that does not get consolidated in your accounting software. This is the value of CRM!
Lastly, your Sales cycle time is accurate here when an Opportunity is initiated. A Lead comes in and when it’s converted into an Opportunity – which is a hard thing – it’s a characteristic of CRM – it’s tracked with what you did against it.
Most Sales people hate it because you’ve got to update it and all your managers are asking for:
- “Well how come it’s not in CRM?”
- “If it’s not in CRM it doesn’t exist!”
- All of these sayings that have come up over the years…
We’ve figured out a way to engage people within the CRM lexicon and start to move the visibility of forecasting into the CRM.
Rather than looking year to date last year – “What’d you do in March and are we ahead of it?” – you can say – “What do our Opportunities look like and what Stage is the Opportunity in compared to when it ends?”
If you have five stages in the Sales process and you’re at Stage four, your close probability has gone up to 70%, 80%, 90%. So then you have a weighted average on what’s actually gonna sell coming out of it.
That’s called a WIP (Work in Progress) report by the way and it tracks the activity and progress associated with Marketing.
-This is fundamental to the way Zero Point Selling works-
How Zero Point Selling Creates More Sales
Let’s get into how we create Sales by starting at the Marketing perspective with Part, Activities, Responsibilities, and Role Players.
Marketing is real, guys! It’s a real thing!
A lot of companies say “we just blow all this money and all Marketing does is spend spend spend!”
We fix that by assigning accountability from the Marketing workflow to the baton handoff in Sales, at Stage One Task One as represented by the black vertical line dividing the “Known” and Marketing from “Liked” and Sales.
At Stage One Task One of the Sales Process, Marketing hands off responsibility to Sales and we measure the quality of the Conversion Rate from a Lead to an Opportunity.
All of this is captured in CRM and you can do it in a way that creates a streamlined process. It doesn’t have to be hyper manual.
There’s two terms I’m real light on and that’s “integration” and “automation.” We can create some automations that drive buy-in within the CRM concept.
It doesn’t have to be something where Sales people are like “whoa whoa whoa we don’t want to get in there! We want to keep all our information over here!”
Popular automation examples include:
- Sending a white paper to your client from within the CRM automatically adds the “sent white paper” activity to the relevant Contact, Account, and Opportunity all at the same time
- CRM can also track record customer activity for you such as email opens, white paper downloads, and website traffic
- If you send an asset out and don’t hear back within a few days, some CRMs can even send an automatic e-mail follow-up for you!
There are a lot of different ways that we can automate CRM so it supports the workflow of the Sales people rather than micromanaging them and pushing them down.
I’m a Salesperson and using CRM with automations embedded in it is really really helpful. We’ll get into some more detail in a second about that.
We View All Businesses as “Uniquely Similar”
How do we do this? Fundamentally we view all businesses as uniquely similar. You sell a different product or service in a different way; however, you still have Marketing, Sales and then a deliverable which we deem Customer Service.
That mechanized process needs fuel. That machine needs fuel.
Perfect Prospects
We start generating this fuel by building a list of Perfect Prospects. We take a small list of your favorite customers and then we go out and find a bunch more people that are very similar to those favorite customers of yours. We call these people “look-alikes” because they’re similar to those on the list you gave us.
For example, we take Shelby Carper here and we turn Shelby into thousands of look-alike people that we can reach out to.
Many times when I give this list out, people say “Um, my customers are on this list!”
My retort to that is “I didn’t know who your Customers were. How did I know that the prospect that you gave me, Shelby Carper was similar to your Customer base that’s embedded in here? I could never know that” so it validates this information and that’s a really important factor in what we do.
Once we have the Target list, we clean it up and put it in your CRM. If we start with an initial list of one hundred I can create millions more if you have a business that applies to that broad of an audience, and import those people into a CRM so now you can start prospecting a little bit differently.
We don’t buy into the cold call cold call cold call, spam spam spam, situation we actually create Audiences then figure out what the Messaging for unique audiences is.
How to Craft the Perfect Marketing Message – Hook, Story, Offer
We use a methodology called “Hook – Story – Offer” in all our messaging sets. We choose Vehicles – things that are going to carry our Messages out – and embed Assets so we can get some kind of “currency exchange.”
Currency Exchange is trading information for information, not necessarily Product or Service for money.
There’s a Value Ladder that we follow there that says “give them a little bit of something so that they give you a little bit of something.”
“Something” is namely signing up with an email address. Offer your Target some information so they give you an email address then follow up. The way that we measure this is all built into the systems we use.
Which Comes First: Audience or Message?
You can have an Audience or a Message, one or the other. If we have a Message we can go find an Audience for it. If we have an Audience we’ve got to create a Message for it.
These Vehicles that we highlight are Marketing Channels – things that are going to carry your message out. Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, email and phone are the five that we really focus on. Instagram somewhat because it’s attached to Facebook.
We build a creative brief to get some assets out there and then we follow up.
This follow-up happens during our understanding of your metrics. The platforms that we use are combined to tell a story.
Some of those metrics are reported in CRM, some of them are reported in email, some of them are reported on the website.
The Lead Machine – KITE Model
This is what that full feedback loop looks like. We start with information down here then curate it – add it into a CRM.
We’re CRM agnostic, by the way. Salesforce is the most prevalent CRM on the planet but it’s not for everyone. Salesforce is rather large software that takes a lot of support so we consider company size and take that into consideration when we’re talking to businesses. We don’t sell CRM software, but we’ve worked with many popular CRM products.
Working with a million dollar business is much different than a 50 million dollar business is much different than a 250 million dollar business and on up. The Lead Machine / KITE Model is scalable from around that million dollar mark all the way up to billion dollar company.
The mechanisms that we use – LinkedIn, Facebook, CRM, email, phones, website – we come at from a little bit different perspective so make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to learn more about those.
The “Lead” Concept
Then we move into the Lead concept. When a Lead drops in, we start to process it. Notice what we said – accountability lies in Stage One Task One, right?
So receive a Lead from Marketing, Qualify the Lead through Workflows and create Opportunity associated with that Lead and its corresponding Account.
This is the sixth step that we’re highlighting but it’s the second step in the Sales process.
All this takes place in your CRM under “Opportunity Management”.
Opportunity is a hard definition. An Opportunity is a container full of information that lives with a Contact and an Account within enterprise-level CRM.
Enterprise-level CRM can cost $45-50 USD a month per user all the way up to whatever you want to spend with Salesforce, which is generally the most robust platform that you can get on the marketplace.
We represent beginning steps of the Sales process and in steps of a process that have complement within your Production area. If you have a service or you have a Product you have to have the Deliverable happen after the Proposal.
Once we start to get down to some kind of delivery, a deliverer takes over. Usually this is a Customer Service perspective.
Your Sales people generally don’t do the work that they advertise the company does for its Clients. They sell the work because they can talk about it.
Next we look at this Production support services concept that we started with where most people think that work actually happens and we drive through the same kind of staging here.
The downstream effect is really important! We focus on that to make sure we’re setting the Customer up correctly and working them through Stages and Tasks.
That way the Deliverable at the end and inventory management and bandwidth and a concept of on-time delivery is expected because we’re getting information back in the Sales process to let people know where they are on their Deliverable.
Sales people generally check in and then from there we go back to remarket them – retarget them for campaigns and secondary/tertiary Marketing Campaigns.
Conclusion
That’s the focus of Zero Point Selling and Rethink Revenue’s methodology.
We want to take activity and turn it into progress – create sequential order that drives to an end goal.
All things considered, that’s it! I just wanted to give you guys an update on how we’re doing and what we’re executing.
If there’s anything I can answer for you let me know. I appreciate your time and I look forward to seeing you in my feed!
