Environment Management: Keys to a Scalable Sales Pipeline

In the end, the goal of every sales and marketing department is to help their organization close more deals. But did you know six key elements can help manage how a professional relationship operates? In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is joined by sales expert and founder of The Sales Evangelist Donald Kelly in the first of a three-part series to learn how to apply a framework to build and maintain scalable sales pipelines. 

Environmental controls dictate the boundaries of the relationship. 

• Environmental controls have to impact other people beyond the individual buyer. However, you must be buyer-centric and focused primarily on their goals and expectations.
• Environment management is the key to establishing and maintaining good behavior while limiting and preventing bad behavior.
• Sellers can’t intentionally change many attributes of the conditions surrounding the selling process, but there are some we can exert and influence other elements.

Preventing buyer’s fatigue: 

• Throughout the buying process, many buyers grow tired of pushback from teammates, management, and sellers, especially when the status quo is so easy to maintain.
• If you want to take people through the journey of change, understand how quickly a person is willing to move and scale the journey with the individual.
• Learn the internal politics within the organization. For example, one person might not want to risk jeopardizing their growth at the company by making the wrong purchase decision.
• Supply your contact with knowledge as ammunition to reinforce the connection and combat potential objections in-house.

Managing different perspectives at different touchpoints within the buying journey:

• Pain mapping is a powerful tactic because the human desire to avoid pain is incredibly high, whether financial, strategic, or personal.
• The wrong thing would be to take everyone to golf or dinner and expect everyone to be at the same point in the journey - because they aren’t.
• People don’t buy products; they buy the improvement of the business.
• Marketers and sellers must convince the buyer not about the product's viability, but how purchasing the product will correlate with meeting their business objectives.
• Constrain the pain - Use social liberation with positive insertions of company collateral in pitches and develop the processes in later-stage opportunities to make the buyer process not only seamless, but designed explicitly for the organization to implement.
• Environmental changes either add positive or remove negative elements to the deal that convinces the buyer to move forward.

Aligned Episode Resources:

• Read the transtheoretical theorem of behaviors in “Changing for Good” by James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Dr. DiClemente.
• Check out the Pentateuch, otherwise known as the first five books of the old testament.
• Tune in to our past episode with Donald discussing reward behaviors on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment program will analyze your current sales and marketing structure to deliver a plan based on the needs of your prospects, bringing you increased revenue, expansion opportunities, and (above all) a unified front when communicating with prospects. 

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results. 

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Company culture and retention are directly connected. After all, if you fail to build good company culture, you fail to retain top talent. At FitzMartin, we help leaders like you raise their NPS scores from the low 60s to the high 80s (and, more importantly, present a plan to help you do the same.)

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.