Craig Lowder: The Secrets of Smooth Selling

Conversational Selling

About Craig Lowder: Craig Lowder is the Founder and President of the Main Spring Sales Group, a specialized client acquisition consultancy focused on creating significant, predictable and sustainable sales growth for successful Financial Advisors, Consultants and Business Leaders making a 6-7 Figure Income seeking a strategic senior-level sales executive on a part-time, contract basis to develop and execute sales strategy, including sales process development, performance management systems, and ensure sales execution. With a 30-year track record of helping business owners and sales teams achieve their goals, as author of two highly-rated books, Smooth Selling Forever and Trusted Advisor Confidential℠, and as Founder and President of the Main Spring Sales Group, Craig has learned that success in sales comes down to three things: process, teamwork and access to experience that shortens the learning curve. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Craig.

In this episode, Nancy and Craig discuss the following:

• Craig’s journey into sales
• The importance of understanding buyer journeys and aligning sales strategies accordingly
• The specifics of Craig's target industries
• The value of choosing the right fit for sales roles within organizations
• Assessments in hiring salespeople: value or harm?
• Exploration of Craig’s new book “Trusted Advisor Confidential”
• Recommendations on maintaining a healthy sales funnel
• Increasing importance and the shift in buyer behavior towards virtual selling

Key Takeaways:

• The basis of selling is understanding the person that you're talking to from a professional as well as a personal level so that you can communicate with them effectively.
• A professionally statistically valid assessment helps you to determine whether what you're looking at is real.
• We were going towards virtual selling prior to COVID and COVID was just like the spark plug that initiated the change.
• If you think effective virtual selling is a 20-to-30-minute conversation at max, maybe 40, but the shorter the better.

"I have not found a company yet that has a defined, documented sales recruiting process. Step by step: what are the steps, who's involved, what are the desired outcomes? So, number one: having a documented sales hiring process. Number two: developing filtering questions based on the characteristics that you're seeking, so that you can also build an interview scorecard, which will tell you whether they're a good fit for your organization." – CRAIG

"I've been on a four-decade journey of being a trusted advisor, a salesperson, a business development person, a new client acquisition person. And I saw a huge gap out there for individuals who are in business. The only way that they can earn a living is by eating what they sell. Unfortunately, whether they're financial advisors, commercial bankers, insurance brokers, consultants, coaches, or even marketing firms, they're very, very good at delivery, but they're not very competent or competent in developing new clients, having a process to do that. And with those, in many cases, particularly those who have letters after their name (PhD, JD, even MBA, I can say that because I have one of those), they go, "No, no, no, selling is too far below me." So, in the book, we don't use the word selling, but that's really what it is. If you were to ask every one of them, "Would you like to have more of the right fit clients?" Unanimously, they're going to say, "Yes." Well, as you and I know, that's technically business development and social selling. But it's like taking the curse off the call by talking about client acquisition. So, trusted advisor confidentiality is about communicating to them what are the six stars (and we're using that in celestial terms) that they need to follow to successively build a book of business filled with right-fit clients and significantly increase their personal income. And those stars include: targeting, messaging, sales process mapping, establishing sales success standards, effective generation, and having a healthy funnel." – CRAIG

"Well, the six stars are developed in a hierarchical fashion. You have to have a good target audience and you have to have a message that resonates with them, and you have to have a lead conversion process that mirrors how they buy. So, it really all starts with targeting the right prospects, the right audience so that you can get the most out of your marketing activities as well as your limited sales time." – CRAIG

Connect with Craig Lowder:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craiglowder/
• Smooth Selling Forever: https://www.smoothsellingforever.com/
• Personal: https://www.craiglowder.com/

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