Episode 350: Mastering Human Connection to Close Sales Efficiently

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:01:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. Today’s guest is Mark Gambale, CEO of Close With One, a company that transforms sales teams with innovative close frameworks. Mark has worked with top industry names like Amazon, Apple, bd, and Gartner, helping them reduce sales cycles and close more deals. His proprietary Close With One system has helped businesses scale rapidly and achieve impressive sales growth.

0:01:33 – (Brynne Tillman): With experience across SaaS, MedTech, and Consulting, Mark is here to share his insights on driving sales success. Welcome to the show, Mark.

0:01:43 – (Mark Gambale): Great to be here, Brynne. Thank you for inviting me.

0:01:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, thrilled. I love this concept of Close with One, so I cannot wait to dive into that today. But before I do, we ask all of our guests the same first question: What does making social sales mean to you?

0:02:03 – (Mark Gambale): The way I think about it is sales being social is where someone opts into speaking with you rather than feeling like, oh, I don’t know if I really want to join another one of these calls. So keeping things social means that there’s this expectation of a good conversation rather than immediately being on one side versus the other. It’s really hard to do that where it feels like you’ve welcomed someone into your home or your office and you’re actually excited to just meet with them.

0:02:39 – (Mark Gambale): It can be really hard to do in this era where people are maybe so excited and then sometimes feel like they’re pushed to have a conversation. Like, how many calls or interactions do you need to have a day? It’s hard for sales because there are expectations and statistics that they need to meet to show that they’re doing a great job and also hit their numbers.

0:03:08 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So that. I love that. That’s great. So now we’re going to dive into this Close with One framework. A little bit I wanted to talk a little bit about, like, how do you close Just big general. And then we’ll get into some, some weeds a little bit. But generally, how do you close deals in fewer calls? How do you really close in a, like a one-call deal unless you’re selling a very low dollar amount product or service?

0:03:39 – (Mark Gambale): I’ll give you a great example. Last week I was using my outbound campaign to try to get someone to have a conversation. And as soon as the person joined, they said, I get a lot of these call requests, I don’t really like them. And I decided for some reason, I don’t even know to join the call. And I realized that he was already kind of there was a wall between him and me or he and I where it’s like, I don’t know if I want to go around this wall and meet with you.

0:04:14 – (Mark Gambale): And so rather than going into what am I all about? I asked him, what are you about and where do you want to get to in a year or less and what does that really mean to you? And it was amazing how there was this shift of, wow, I’m not being pitched at the moment. I get a chance to be me and relax a little bit. I mean, how many times have you been on a sales pitch where it’s like, oh, let me show you my slides, or here are my slides. And there’s this immediate push into something that can really offset someone on a high ticket, big ticket B2B SaaS conversation that immediately goes from how is the weather? To here are my slides.

0:05:06 – (Mark Gambale): I liken it to an icebreaker, where in the icebreaker people can kind of relax a little bit and then maybe get to know each other and feel like there’s some sort of exchange happening. And the concept of close with one is when you serve the other person so well in the early parts of that conversation and even through the call, they feel like, wow, you’ve started to fill my bucket by listening to me. I like this.

0:05:40 – (Mark Gambale): Maybe they’ll start to say, the more you fill the bucket, it starts to tip where you’ve put dividends and dividends and dividends into them. Then they’ll raise the question, well, who are you? What are you about? I know we, I signed up for this conversation and now I feel comfortable to permit you to sell me and to open up who you are and what it’s about. And it’s that permission-based conversation that by the end of the first call they already like you so much that if you said at the end of the conversation, how’s Tuesday at 2 work for you?

0:06:19 – (Mark Gambale): They’re already saying and feeling like, I like this person. You did already close me. And yes, there’s no pricing on the table, there’s even no contract, but they already want to go. And this one person that raised their hand and said, I want to work with you didn’t even ask for pricing at all.

0:06:40 – (Brynne Tillman): So how do you bridge from, you know, what are your big dreams? To talk about how your solution can help them meet those dreams?

0:06:54 – (Mark Gambale): I switch from the conversation of where do you want to be personally in a year to where do you want to be in business in a year? And what are those things that you want to overcome? Because they already know a little bit about you. Looked at your profile, and they’ve looked at your company. Maybe they looked at a blog and even watched a video. If they didn’t like any of that, they wouldn’t have clicked. Yes.

0:07:21 – (Mark Gambale): So they. There’s a lot of studies that show that prospects, when they join a call, they’ll consume 80, 85% of your content to kind of pre taste what it’s like to work with you. And when you’re in that conversation, you learn what they’re about personally and you get into the business side, they’ll start telling you where they’re at. Like, hey, I’ve got a lot of leads coming in. I’ve got a lot of booked calls, but I’m struggling with my close rate. Now, usually people won’t admit that they’re struggling with the close rate and they might say, you know what, I really just wish I had more leads.

0:08:02 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, the leads are bad.

0:08:04 – (Mark Gambale): Yeah, but just give me more of those and if you can make higher quality ones, that would be good because I’ll have enough at-bats to close more deals. But when you ask them, hey, how many are you closing? Let’s just say you have 10 or 20 pitches that happen in a week or two or even a month. What if those are even closing? Then that’s where they’ll start to share. You know what, I’m only closing, like maybe 20 or 10. And it doesn’t really matter the number as much as where they want to get to. They all know what is meaningful for them.

0:08:46 – (Mark Gambale): So maybe if it’s just moving it from 20 to 25, they’ll know. What’s that? What is that worth to them from a dollar perspective?

0:08:55 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, great. Thank you. Now, you talked about a couple of mistakes that salespeople make. One of them is they start with the pitch deck right away after, you know, fake nice city sometimes. Right? Like just, you Think you’re building rapport, but you may not necessarily. So what I hear you saying, and actually I experienced with you, is you quickly go into, you know, what do I want to achieve? And it was really fun to have that conversation and I wanted to know what you wanted to achieve.

0:09:23 – (Brynne Tillman): But what are prospects doing that’s wrong? Like, what are the. Miss. So say that again. What are salespeople doing on prospect call? That’s really wrong. Beyond. I just went into my deck. What other things are they doing is really getting in the way that actually being close with one can solve.

0:09:50 – (Mark Gambale): There’s two key things there. It’s a function of. Of need initially. So if a salesperson is showing up with more need than the prospect, they will start feeling like I need to not only show a lot of my slides to prove value, but I’m going to jump into a demo too. Without even asking for permission to say, what is the value in even seeing a demo right now based upon everything that we’ve talked about? Is that really valuable or are we just off base?

0:10:26 – (Mark Gambale): It gives the prospect freedom to say, this is not a fit. Or it might say, you know, I’m really curious about this one thing. If they don’t say what they’re really curious about, it’s okay for a sales rep to say what would be really valuable to show you because I would hate to just blast you through the whole platform, throw all this stuff in your face and miss the one thing that matters. So tell me, what’s the one thing that is important to you? That would be a kind of a wow.

0:10:59 – (Mark Gambale): So giving permission.

0:11:02 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. The line I typically use is at the end of this call, if you get off and say, man, that was a great use of my time. What did we talk about? So sometimes like that becomes the line I use. So I love that. I love that mindset around things. Yeah. So I think this is very interesting approach and it’s a very personal, human approach in this world where everything is becoming less and less human.

0:11:30 – (Brynne Tillman): Tell me a little bit. You’ve worked in major companies, Amazon, Apple, and Gartner. Right. Can you share a real-world example of how a close with one process just really transformed the sales process?

0:11:47 – (Mark Gambale): A good example is I had met a CEO of a MedTech company and I asked him because he had said, hey, I’ve had a hard experience with this other company and I didn’t feel like there was going to be a partnership. And I felt like I was just not well respected for what we do as a Technology perspective. And I asked him, well, what would it feel like to have that respect and for someone to see value in what you’ve created as well as who you are?

0:12:23 – (Mark Gambale): And he said, well, that doesn’t really exist. I would want someone to be a partner with me, love and respect what I’ve done and help us be even better. So I immediately said, okay, well I do see the value what you’ve created and here’s why. And this is what it would look like to work with me. And he looked at me and said that how can you guarantee that? And I put out my hand and I said, here’s the guarantee.

0:12:54 – (Mark Gambale): And it wasn’t that the hand was the guarantee. It’s I covered those other three things that matter to him. I value you. We’re going to work together and I trust both of us working together. And that’s the handshake.

0:13:10 – (Brynne Tillman): And that works fine. Yeah, that’s good.

0:13:13 – (Mark Gambale): It works great. That one led to a global deal that was worth millions of millions of dollars all through human-to-human connection. I can’t even put the dollar value on it right now other than to say that thousands of patients, or at least hundreds, and I don’t know the number because I haven’t been tracking this, went home. People went home cancer-free, not just patients. And being able to impact people’s lives is what this is all about. Whether you’re in tech sales, medtech or even fintech, a salesperson that does this well can take a call from 50 minutes, 60 minutes to 20, even 15 or 9, to say what would be really valuable.

0:14:08 – (Mark Gambale): Sounds like we could probably even end this conversation and do more of a deeper demo next week. Who should really be on that? Everyone’s time matters. It’s. And it’s the prospect’s time that matters the most overall. And if they feel like they’re being served well, then that’s a big deal.

0:14:29 – (Brynne Tillman): So I’m just going to throw out one of the things that we teach, which is, which I love what you’re talking about, but instead of saying who needs to be on this? We go into LinkedIn and build the list of people that we want to be on. And we say, typically, here’s here are the people that are part of the next call. Yeah, are these folks that you could, you know, kind of gather up for, for the next call. And so we give them a list of the people to actually invite and then we’ll say, is there anyone I missed?

0:15:00 – (Brynne Tillman): So just thought I’d share. That’s like my, what’s that I was.

0:15:05 – (Mark Gambale): Gonna say, Brynne, I love that because it gives them permission to bring the right people there and it makes it feel like you’re already considering what they need on their team to join and feel like, yeah, I like this. I do. I want to throw my support behind it. And how many, how many deals end up getting maybe slowed down or paused because that’s not done well.

0:15:29 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So, yeah. And sometimes they don’t even really know who we know who often better than they do. So just finding them on LinkedIn and bringing in those names can make a big difference. So that’s just my little, my little tip in today. So my second to last question is what question did I not ask you that I should have?

0:15:52 – (Mark Gambale): A really big question that I have is why shouldn’t people start with a coach today that looks at each rep and the entire team all together? Like what’s isn’t, what’s the value in actually increasing your close rate today rather than saying, well, we’ll get to it, we have a trainer, we have all these systems in place, we’re going to get there. Well, if you’re going to get there, why aren’t you there now?

0:16:24 – (Mark Gambale): Why aren’t you putting the best resources to help everyone move forward rather than just hoping it’s going to happen? It’s easy to buy a lot of software and hire a lot of reps, but how often does that really bring you to your goal for a month, the quarter, and the year?

0:16:43 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, thank you for all of these insights today. Share where people can get in touch with you, Mark, and what you know they can do if they want to reach out and have a conversation.

0:16:56 – (Mark Gambale): Thank you, brain. I love that question. The easiest thing for everyone is to go to close with one, the number one dot com. Go in there, find my calendar and we can have a conversation from there.

0:17:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Wonderful. Thank you so much. I really believe that you, you’ve brought some great value to our listeners and so I appreciate you investing your time today to help them close with one. And guys, all our listeners, when you are out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social. Bye.

Outro:

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