This Mistake is Killing Your Sales Calls

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,415 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 10 minutes to read.

In today’s post, I’m going to tell you how to stop feature vomiting on your sales calls.

Feature vomiting is an ineffective way to show “value” during the sales process. When you stop doing this your close rates will increase, prospects will accept higher prices, and you’ll drive more revenue + profit to your firm.

Unfortunately, many people never overcome feature vomiting because they are never coached on how it hurts them in the sales process.

What is feature vomiting?

When holding a sales call, inevitably the question of “value” will come up.

It can show its face in different forms:

• Directly: “Your price is higher than others I’ve talked to.”

• Indirectly: “This feels like overkill, I’m not sure I need all of this right now.”

When you are faced with these objections, your natural reaction is to defend the value of the proposed service.

And you do that by listing all the wonderful features/benefits the client will receive:

“I know the price is high but we are proactive communicators and reply within 48 hours to emails, we prepare returns within 4 weeks of upload, we do your books monthly and even have these sweet dashboards we can spin up for you to track key KPIs… they are so cool!, we also do a ton of tax planning - we’ll educate you on the strategy and help you implement throughout the year by….”

Stop!

It’s incredibly boring (because it isn’t framed to solve the specific problems the prospect has) and while you are going on and on the prospect is thinking “wow they do a lot, no wonder the price is so high… I don’t need all of this so let’s wrap this up and I’ll find someone else.”

Here’s what to do instead:

Step 1: Ask clarifying questions

The same word/phrase means different things to different people.

For example, when I say “I want to run a high-margin firm” we all have a different idea of what “high-margin” means.

Your job on a sales call is to ask clarifying questions so that you can arm yourself with critical information that will enable you to better frame your pitch for your services later in the call.

Many times this will require you to politely challenge the prospect to define the words they are using.

Let’s look at an example:

• Prospect: Your price is a bit more than I was hoping to spend.

• You: Curious - is price the only thing that matters in your decision making?

• Prospect: No, of course not!

• You: What else are you evaluating?

• Prospect: Well, I’m looking at communication, responsiveness, team structure… I want to be well taken care of.

• You: Based on what you know about our company and how this call is going so far, how do we stack up against those things?

• Prospect: Well it seems you are personable and good communicators, I like how you structure your firm (lists benefits + continues to sell themselves on your firm).

• You: I’m glad you agree we can provide a great service to you and meet your needs. Our price enables us to hire great talent to serve you. It’s high, but you will receive everything you said you are looking for. I can’t understand how a firm offering a lower price will be able to say the same.

Here’s another example:

• Prospect: I need to see an ROI on your services.

• You: Curious - what does “ROI” mean to you?

• Prospect: If I spend $X with you, I want to receive 2X.

• You: Makes sense. It sounds like none of the intangibles matter then?

• Prospect: What do you mean?

• You: Well if I said we could deliver your financials by the 5th of the month instead of the 15th like your current firm, that doesn’t matter?

• Prospect: Oh no that’s really attractive to me.

• You: And what else is valuable to you?

• Prospect: [starts to list features/benefits they want]

• You: Okay but I’m just confused - in terms of receiving an ROI you were solely focused on the dollars so how much do any of those things matter?

• Prospect: [starts to backtrack, sells themselves on your services]

Notice in these two examples you are not talking through all of your great features/benefits. Instead, you are asking the prospect questions in a way that gets them to talk about the specific features/benefits that are important to them.

And now you can use that information to frame your services as the solution to their problems.

Step 2: Frame your service correctly

Once you hash out what is actually important to the prospect, and you confirm they are a good fit for your firm, it’s time to pitch your services.

And again, we want to avoid feature vomiting.

You don’t need to go over every benefit in scope… that’s what the proposal is for. Instead, talk about the specific benefits in scope that solve the prospect’s problem.

Step 3: Prospects must sell themselves on your services

The biggest lesson I learned while doing sales calls:

I cannot convince anyone of anything. They must convince themselves.

Oftentimes, we feature vomit because we are trying to convince the prospect that the service is value-packed.

But if we aren’t asking questions in the right way to get the prospect to come to their own conclusion that we are the firm they need, then we aren’t holding an effective sales call.

When I learned this and focused on becoming better at asking questions and politely challenging prospects, my close rates skyrocketed.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

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See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

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