Sept 2024
In 2021-22 I went from anxious engineer to closing ~$700k in sales for our own business. A key part of this success stemmed from three discoveries I made during the process that took our close rate from 30% to 80%:
- sales is information theory
- charisma can be systematized
- story-hacking
Growing up I always thought there was some formal "sales process", but sales is literally:
- finding prospects who need your product/service any way you can
- convincing them to talk to you
- getting them to buy
The first one's easy enough, just use a tool like Apollo or find your prospects on LinkedIn.
But once you have your list, how do you stand out among the hundreds of emails soliciting their business?
This is where the information theory lens comes in.
Discovery #1 - Sales is information theory
If the spammy emails are noise, our goal is to boost our signal-to-noise ratio in some way that makes us stand out from everyone else.
When we contact someone we're providing them information about ourselves beyond just the content. When we reach out in a text format (say via email or LinkedIn), the extra info they receive is our written prose, vocabulary choice, spelling etc.
When we reach out in an audio format, say a cold call or voice memo, there's a bit more information, our tonality, voice, etc. And video outreach provides yet even more, audio as well letting them see our facial expressions, micro-expressions, clothes, lighting, etc.
And powerfully, this information isn't entering the buyer's conscious brain, it's being parsed by their lizard brain -- building a subconscious opinion in real-time.
This added information:
- takes more effort
- provides more avenues to go wrong
Solving the problem of extra effort needed was why we built Dopplio, so we could scale this high-information, high-converting approach as simply as we do text outreach.
Having bad tone, creepy lighting, etc are all ways this extra information can cause the buyer's subconscious opinion to go against us -- thus most people don't use them.
But when done well -- it massively boosts our signal-to-noise and likelihood of success.
Okay so how do we do it well?
That's discovery #2.
Discovery #2 - Systematizing charisma
Contrary to popular belief, charisma is not something purely innate, but can be learned.
A great resource for this is Olivia Fox Cabane's The Charisma Myth, where she summarizes charisma as conveying "power, presence, and warmth".
The essence of the book is about using non-verbal communication to convey to others' lizard brains that we're:
- powerful
- friendly
How can we use this in sales? Simple, we make sure both our language and delivery convey these things.
Language
Language makes up 25% of charisma -- messages must be succinct and engaging, using social proof, hooks, all elements of good sales copy. Here's an example of how we construct an engaging video script at Dopplio.
We also use framing, categorized by the famous "It's not 20% fat, it's 80% fat free" adage, to frame everything in the customer's interest.
Delivery
Delivery is the remaining 75%, and by far the most important. This is the non-verbal communication most people think can't be learned, but we simply need to consciously drill the many small components that signal authority and warmth until it becomes innate:
- use your "late-night FM DJ voice" as explained in Never Split The Difference
- emphasize “content words” and de-emphasize “function words” (from TFCS) to bolster message understanding
- tonality patterns - up high mid-sentence signals candidness, ending low signals assurance, use both.
- adjusting our phrasing to the personality type (are they a straight-shooter, analytical, or more emotional?)
- body language - blink between eye movements instead of flitting eyes (watch actors like Chris Hemsworth in interviews, they do this), use hand gestures (but not too many) and make sure movements are smooth, not jerky.
- zoom setup - use a ring light at minimum, double light-box is ideal to make you look well-lit, bad lighting signals "sketchy". High-quality microphone makes you sound smarter and more trust-worthy. Camera should be just above eye level and you should be looking near it (place the Zoom/recording window near it). Wear a white or blue shirt instead of black to signal trust.
These can be infinitely trained and improved, but the 80/20 principle applies, you can make some quick wins in the beginning that massively improve your outcomes.
Discovery #3 - Story Hacking
Charisma and information theory are enough to launch a high-converting outreach campaign and get meetings booked, and also play a large role in running a successful call.
But the biggest driver of taking our close rate from 30% to 80% was discovery #3, story-hacking.
Story hacking
Most salespeople will follow some sort of script, I personally prefer the question progression from SPIN Selling -- that's pretty standard.
What we do differently is use the questions as launch points to tell stories that portray whatever we want, e.g. a great case study, use case, traits.
This works because of how humans build rapport -- by exchanging stories. Simply asking someone question after question turns a conversation into an interrogation.
But after asking a question and hearing someone's answer, there's an unspoken rule in human conversation that you can now go into your own story.
And specifically, we do that with pre-planned (true) stories that convey whatever we want the prospect to hear!
An example from our recruiting business:
Salesperson: "Are you looking to hire long-term or short-term?"
Client: "Long-term"
Salesperson: "Okay great -- because we've had candidates who've rejected an offer from a client, change their minds to yes after speaking with us, so we like to make sure we're only working with employee-centric firms."
^ demonstrates our ability and flips the script to where we're vetting them, a very powerful frame change.
Here's another example from our Dopplio calls:
Salesperson: "How are you planning to use Dopplio?" Client: "For my digital media company outreach" Salesperson: "Oh very cool -- that's how Dopplio came into existence originally actually, we [then tell the story of how we used Dopplio to scale our own outreach, generate sales, and get acquired]"
And we continue to do this, cover as many pre-planned stories as we can while keeping the conversation natural as we move through the discovery questions and demo.
Results
The results of implementing these three changes were pretty immediate, we saw our close rate jump from 30% to 80%, leading to ~$700k in lifetime bookings before our company was acquired in 2023.
There are obviously many different aspects to sales, but these three yielded the biggest difference in our process -- so hopefully it helps!