May 19, 2020

The Ability to Sell a Product or Service Through the Power of Words

Steak dinners suck. I'm not talking about the actual food consumed... I love steak and a nice glass of wine to wash it down... I'm talking about the "steak dinner" sales process.

Let me explain.

Many sales people rely on steak dinners to make sales. This involves taking the prospect to dinner, chatting for 2+ hours, picking up the bill. There is nothing wrong with doing this, it is just not my style. In fact, I hate it.

The steak dinner sales process works mostly for high priced items. One would be insane to sponsor a steak dinner for a $49 / month SaaS product. The lifetime value is not worth the initial cost.

If you only need to sell 10 contracts per year, steak dinners make sense. If you need to sell 500 contracts per year, you better find another sales method.

Make the First Sale Simple

Keeping your initial offer extremely simple is key to selling.

Have you ever seen offers like:

Get the 1st month for only $1 / month!

This is done on purpose, because the business offering "a month for only $1" knows they can up-sell you once you have spent money. If a prospect commits to your initial request, additional products can be added very easily.

What is the Unique Personality?

Every product or service has its own unique personality, its own unique nature. This uniqueness is what sells the product.

Most companies do not understand what their unique personality is, and therefore do not have massive sales.

For Sagenine, our unique personality for selling lawn care software is how we've designed and developed our map to help lawn crews navigate daily mowing routes more efficiently.

This is the unique personality. The map. Sagenine's map integrates with all aspects of running a successful lawn and landscaping company. In my opinion, all field service based businesses should manage their business with Sagenine's map.

Understand Your Customer's Basic Emotional Needs

Good copywriting starts with understanding your customer's emotional needs. Find out the reason your customer buys your product, and you can crush sales with your content.

Most business owners want to sell more goods and services at a nice profit. And, they want to do this without working harder, or increasing their capital expenditures.

But, that's not good enough. Every business owner wants that.

With my 1st SaaS business, I met one of our users at a mastermind event I put on. I asked him how big he wanted to grow, how much money he ultimately wanted to make. His answer surprised me:

I don't want to grow any bigger. I am happy where I am. I have a good crew, and my business is profitable.

At that point, he was already using the software, so my goal wasn't to sell him on the software.

The breakthrough came when he realized that by using the software, he could get bigger (revenues and orders) without adding employees and management headaches.

So, with Sagenine, the key is to demonstrate the opportunities for growth, without adding employees and more headaches. We do this by leveraging the power of the software to give owners and employees more time to do what they're good at:

1) QuickBooks Integration

Sagenine is completely integrated with QuickBooks Online. This saves business owners immense time each month because jobs in the field are tied to the customer invoice. Job tasks and history are seamlessly integrated with QuickBooks, making the invoice generation far less painful than what they're used to.

2) Customer Relationship Management – CRM

Any SaaS business should have a basic CRM built into their software. A CRM is no longer THE product. Now, a CRM is simply a standard feature.

Sagenine's customer management system allows managers to assign techs and crews to accounts based on location, types of jobs they perform, emergencies and much more.

3) Mapping Customer Accounts and Crew Assignment

The map is the most important aspect of Sagenine. Any field service business must use a map if they want to become a profitable, efficient machine.

Why force your employees to memorize a daily route? Especially lawn mowing companies!

Each crew in a lawn mowing business must memorize 5 different routes–if not more. The best, most profitable lawn mowing companies don't require crews to memorize routes, because it's a huge load to train.

With Sagenine's mapping technology, there is no need to memorize a lawn maintenance route. The business owner (or manager) can optimize routes visually and assign a cluster of accounts to one crew for that day. Then, repeat assigning accounts for the rest of the week. Easy.

With Sagenine's map, owners and managers spend almost zero time scheduling out routes and crews. Set it and forget it.

4) Job Time Management

Knowledge is power. So, wouldn't it be great to know the average time each crew takes to complete a job?

This seems like a key business indicator, right?

Couldn't you take on more work, IF you knew how long each crew takes at specific jobs? In other words, if you know that Bill's crew takes 14 minutes to complete an average size yard, then you know if you can add more accounts to that crew's workload.

With Sagenine's mobile app, once a crew reaches an account, the clock starts. Once the crew is finished, the clock stops. This helps management understand the average time to complete each job, each day.

Knowing this information allows lawn care business owners to determine if they can add accounts to their schedule.

Point Out the Negatives Right Up Front

Another key in sales is to share your dirty laundry openly and honestly right up front.

Look, your prospects are much smarter than you think. Don't try to deceive them. Be honest and up-front about possible negative aspects of your product.

For example: Sagenine does not have native invoices built in.

Now, this could be perceived as a negative... not having native invoicing could be a problem. The reason why it's not a problem is because Sagenine is integrated with QuickBooks Online.

Why recreate the wheel? QuickBooks has invoices nailed! They have been perfecting invoicing and accounting for years.

The best solution is to integrate QuickBooks with Sagenine. Let QBs handle accounting and invoicing, and seamlessly integrate the two technologies to create the best user experience.