The Temperature Check Sales Tactic is one of the best ways for your organization to identify whether or not you are likely to convert a potential sales target.
If you’re doing this effectively, it should transform your close rate, but also impact your marketing in real time. So we’re going to talk about what it is, how to implement it, some common flaws you might be making when trying to implement it and how to connect it to your marketing automation.
What is the temperature check sales approach?
There are different types of temperature measurement that you can use to see how interested your potential sales target is.
Questions you may ask to check your client’s initial temperature can be-
- How likely are you to want to use Farotech as your provider?
- 9 times out of 10, the answer is almost always a 7.
- What would you need to prove to get you from a 7 to a 10?
When we sell our products and services there is a first time appointment, a second time appointment and sometimes a third time appointment.
The first time appointment we’re doing heavy discovery and showing a little bit about our unique process and what we do in the marketplace and how we’re different from our competitors. During the first appointment, you will get your client’s initial temperature.
The second appointment is very important to this process. You walk through your entire unique process to your company’s stakeholders. At the end of this meeting, you get a temperature reading on where the client is at on a scale of one to 10.
As you go on to meet with your clients more and more, it is vital that you conduct temperature monitoring to stay on the same page.
Transparency is key
The temperature check without pricing never ever works. So you have to be in a scenario where you can explain your pricing or the nuance of your pricing to your clients.
Make sure that they have the critical stakeholders in the room or on call when having these discussions. The temperature check is worthless when you’re not speaking to decision makers. Their initial temperature is crucial to take into account so in the future you can disclose important information they may need to stay on the hook.
Before the next call, you are going to try to answer those objections. That’s table stakes, and that’s what a good salesperson will do.
Don’t be good, be great
A great salesperson is going to be in connection with their marketing team.
When your marketing team is in unison with your sales team, it allows for the information needed to answer client questions concisely and catered to their specific wants and needs. The better answers you give to clients, the better the temperature range.
Every question that the sales people hear on the front lines from clients gets reported to their content marketing team in the background, so that we can so that we as marketers, can create something we call quasi.
Quasi
Quasi means questions with answers and simple information. So, when the sales person takes these basic steps of conveying the client’s information to their marketing team, the sales person now is armed with a short answer and a long form answer.
Another format is called simple questions with complex answers. Complex answers are hard to do in person, but can be strategized in a content marketing approach to answer these questions more effectively.
When the answers are crafted specifically for the client at hand, it can act as a temperature controller and hopefully keep your client interested.
Why use temperature monitoring and checking?
The larger, more important reason why your marketing team would do these types of temperature measurement is because every question that you’ve been asked, soon becomes a library or a catalog of frequently asked questions that you can share with future potential sales clients.
This allows for when clients ask you a question, you’re able to answer it fast and easily. You can now find the exact blog post that your content marketing team wrote, and give your clients a long formatted answer.
How you integrate your marketing team into temperature readings
The salesperson usually poses the question to the potential sales target and then they write some of their answers themselves. But it is recommended they also check in with marketing to make sure that the team either knows it’s a new question being asked or it’s a question that they’ve answered before.
As a salesperson, you don’t want to answer the question with a different content approach that’s different from your marketing.
Marketers often get scared that salespeople go rogue. Rogue meaning that they answer questions in their own way, that’s very different from the branded, formulated way that the marketing team has spent a lot of time and energy developing.
Going rogue as a salesperson can hinder the temperature monitoring process. When you have these questions being asked by the client, it should always goes back to your marketing team. Your marketing team can act as a temperature controller in the sense that they will create content specific to your client.
Your marketing team will either support you with your quick answer, or decide that it’s a new content area for them to deliver a response to. This response will suffice the client while also providing more content for your content marketing team to display in their catalog.
PPPO
A common temperature checking approach we use is called PPPO.
The first thing is, it’s going to be pain. You need to empathize with the pain of your client. Almost every question or objection you get usually comes down to a pain point. You need to make sure that you understand the client’s question completely, and that you do not just skim over it.
The next piece to talk about is promise. The pain talked about in part one is the promise of what you do as a solutions provider to solve that pain the client is faced with.
The next piece is proof. Proof can come in a variety of different formats such as case studies or testimonials. You can also look at how it’s been previously solved in your industry. You can even reach out to your service provider and they can provide you case studies about industries that’s very similar to that potential client and how content marketing has transformed their business.
Finally, the last piece is opportunity . With opportunity, you want to invite them to take the first step with you. The first step commonly means get on the phone with the decision makers so you can make sure that everyone is on the same page. It is essential to conduct a temperature check in real time to see how the key decision makers are feeling.
How to formulate answers and responses
There are several formats that you can create your responses within.
You can apply these FAQ’s to your website’s blog, where your marketing team’s catalog can live.
You can also add answers to your knowledge base, if you have one. If you don’t have a knowledge base built within your website, I would highly recommend that you consider building one. You can do that either through HubSpot service portal, or through a service like Zendesk.
Finally, you can also build your answers into something we call slippage campaigns.
Slippage Campaigns
Slippage campaigns are a form of marketing automation that we help our clients do to keep their clients interesting and on the hook.
As soon as we hear any objections, or any questions from a potential client early on in the sales cycle, you should catalog where those questions are, and sort of what bucket they fit in.
If this potential client slips off the hook, I want to drip market to them to get them back on the hook. The temperature monitoring process is crucial within this timeframe.
You can do that with general drip marketing emails or slippage emails. But the more specific to the original pain points that the client talked about, the more likely they are to jump back on the hook.
Let’s just say hypothetically they say your price is too high, you will start to drip market them about value over pricing. Or they say, they love your products and services, but now’s not the right time. Then you will drip market to them about the cost of procrastination.
A great salesperson notes exactly where those potential objections are in the buyer’s journey, so that if they ever slip off the hook, you can drip market to them later.
You can also inform your account manager about if you ever took them that they’re on board, and they trust your team, but you want to make sure that your team delivers these critical answers. Having your account manager know about their initial temperature is important for future partnerships with this business.
Sales Reach Pages
Sales reach pages are a piece of HubSpot technology that we implement. It allows us to create a customized landing page for that specific client.
When the client comes on to the page, essentially, we see every email and every conversation that we had and highlight them. We usually have it in video format as an archive that they can look back on for information.
You will also see calls to actions on the bottom of the page that are going to be able to address frequently asked questions and link to our unique process. It can also be links to previous sales calls, testimonials or case studies. But what makes it so great is that it’s specific to them and it’s 100% trackable, which is extremely helpful in the temperature monitoring process.
We’re not just tracking if the client came to the page. You are able to find out what videos they watched, did they scroll and what buttons they clicked on. This information tells you the exact engagement level of each potential client.
With the temperature checking sales approach, you are able to convert your potential sales targets into clients. It will transform your close rate, while impacting your marketing with the help from our award winning digital marketing agency, a leader in the temperature monitoring market. Implementing this approach is a step into generating more business and clients while creating content for your marketing team to display.
We look forward to hearing from you! Please contact us today with any questions about our temperature check sales approach.
