My perfect sales system: what I’d do differently now

What does the perfect sales system look like?

Would it be all shiny and automated? Would it have analytics built in with beautiful reporting? Would leads fall from the sky and convert into sales without you lifting a finger? Would you be sitting on a beach sipping a my tie while your bank account grows?

The perfect sales system is a myth. However, there are some pretty cool bells and whistles you can install to make your sales a lot easier. If I was going to go back four years and rebuild my sales system from scratch, I know exactly what I would put in place to make my life easier and to make leads close into sales faster.

If everything in your business is manual and you're keeping a lot of things in your head, it's really easy to drop the ball and miss the opportunity to close projects that you could close or close 'em faster. So in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through my version of a perfect sales system. If I was going to start from scratch,

I'm Lex Roman, I help creatives make smarter marketing bets, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show.

I want to start this episode with a little bit of a caveat. I find that early stage business owners over index on tools and automations and they set up a lot of really complicated workflows that they don't yet need, and unfortunately in the early days of your business, you really have to put in a lot of legwork and a lot of manual things, conversations, emails, connections with people, one-on-one, there's no substitute for that.

You cannot automate that until you have done that work because you don't really know what those channels are, what those messages should be, who those people are, and so there's a danger of automating too fast. I just want you to be aware of that as you go through this episode because there is a lot of automation in this episode and it's really more appropriate for a business owner that's been around for at least a couple years or your clients, you know what messages they need to hear, you know how projects run and you want to remove some of the manual labor.

It's time to automate some things and you know exactly what those things are that you need to automate. Before we get into how I would set up the system, I want to run down the toolkit that I'm going to present in this episode. I've got five tools that I'm going to recommend, although they're all interchangeable and you can use whatever you prefer. Tool choice is so personal and you should decide what's right for you and what's right for your budget.

The five tools we're going to talk about in this perfect sales system are Google Workspace, MailerLite, HoneyBook, Calendly, and Zoom. Google Workspace is an email provider. You can set up a custom email for your business domain. You can also run Google Drive there and you can actually use it as a meeting software. If you're not a fan of Zoom, you can use Google Meet.

MailerLite is my mailing list tool of choice. I really like their segmentations. I think it's a pretty clean and easy to use ui. You can do automations and it's free up to a thousand subscribers.

HoneyBook is my favorite CRM for small business. It's what I used when I was doing one-on-one work and it's something that I recommend to a lot of my clients. A lot of what we're going to talk about today centers around HoneyBook.

Calendly is my favorite tool. I've loved Calendly for years. I think it's so robust in terms of scheduling and as someone who has a pretty complicated schedule, it makes it so easy for me to make sure that the correct meaning times are available when people are trying to book. And I'm a big fan of Calendly because they were founded here in my hometown of Atlanta. But if you're not a fan of having extra tools, you can actually use HoneyBook to solve scheduling too and not install Calendly at all.

And lastly, Zoom. I'm not that big a fan of Zoom, but I have found that they are the most reliable video conferencing tool. I would definitely recommend paying and prioritizing solid video conferencing software if your business is remotely working with your clients.

Part one of my perfect sales system is to set up an email list tool and to send all pathways through the email list.

What I love about email lists is that you can both embrace your buyers and your browsers. So buyers are people that are ready to work with you, they want to move fast, they're interested in services, they're ready to reach out, and browsers are people who have maybe just discovered you, they think you're interesting, maybe something that you said caught their eye and they just want to stay in touch with you. The email list solves both, and here's how.

If you get people on your email list, they'll be sure to stay in touch with you and you have the best chance of getting seen there over other channels that rely on more algorithmic approaches like social media. When I started my business, I had different calls to action in different places, but I've now centralized them all to go to the email list and I would go back and do that over where I'm prioritizing the email list over things like viewing my services page over viewing the contact page. The reason is that if someone is in buy mode, as long as I make it easy to find services, work with me, contact, they'll find it. So I don't need to send them there as long as it's easy for them to figure out where my website is, as long as it's easy for them to locate that page.

It's in my top navigation, it's in my LinkedIn contact info so they're not digging around the internet for where those things are. As long as that's true, I still want to send them to the email list because if they're ready to buy and they're on the email list, they're going to reply and start a conversation and if they're not ready to buy and they're on the email list, they're going to get to know me and it's going to give me an opportunity to send success stories about how I work with my clients, explanations of what my services and offers are, and thought leadership that shifts mindset and helps people get more ready to work with me and understand whether or not I'm the right person for them to work with. I think I have a strong bias for email. I think it's the best way to stay in touch with everyone in your network.

I would also include clients and partners on there. This is something that I did luckily relatively early in my business, but making sure that everyone is in your communication list on your email provider with Mailerlite, this is really easy to set up whether or not you have a website. So you can go in, you can make a free account, you're going to set up an embeddable form, or if you don't have a website, you can use their website builder. They actually have a landing page builder and you can make a one page website within mailer light that includes your newsletter subscribe form. What I would do is go set up a really basic form. I like to keep it really simple and do the styling on my website. So in Mailerlite, I just keep it to the field and the button and I add the message around why people should subscribe onto my website, make an email list segment for your newsletter and then make sure that all paths are leading to this form.

So that means links in bio. If you have social media profiles on your website, if you're doing a podcast or YouTube like I am, you want to make sure that that path is really clear and that way, no matter where people come into your business, they're going right into the email list. I've noticed that as I've corrected this now in my business, more people are getting on the email list, they're staying in touch with me longer, whereas before I was maybe prioritizing different calls to action. People forget about you right after they meet you, and so this strategy keeps more of those people in your orbit for longer.

Part two is having a contact form that connects to A CRM.

I ended up installing HoneyBook maybe a couple years into my business, and this is a tool that I wish I had discovered sooner because I noticed that I was dropping the ball on leads.

People would email me or they would submit the contact form on my website, and then if I sent them a note back and I didn't hear from them, I forgot to follow up with them and I realized I needed to visualize the pipeline of where people were. Had they just submitted an inquiry, did I get back to them and they didn't book a call. Had they booked a call and I was waiting to have that call Had I sent a proposal. As soon as I installed HoneyBook, I loaded up all the active inquiries. I realized that I had six open inquiries who had not gotten back to me. I bulk emailed them using Honey Book's tool and I booked a project off of that action, and in that moment, HoneyBook had paid for itself because I had forgotten about these leads. They had been invisible to me in my email inbox.

With HoneyBook, you can set up a contact form. Their contact forms are super nice. It's one of my favorite features of HoneyBook. You can customize it to include any screening questions that you might have, like budget or project size. I always like to include a field that says, how can I be of service or how can I help?

Because sometimes people use the contact form not for a project booking, but they have a different reason to reach out and I want to get as much context as possible without making it too cumbersome to fill out that initial step. In HoneyBook, you get notified right away when someone submits an inquiry. They have an app for mobile, so you can get a push notification and then you'll also get an email about it. They make it really easy for you to reply, and you can even stash email templates in there so you can have canned replies handy anytime an inquiry is submitted.

I would also go back in and make sure that there's an automation set up, so every time someone submits the contact form, they get an automated email from me laying out what to expect next. It's great to do this right after someone has taken an action, especially with email, because they're expecting to hear from you. They'll look at their inbox, they'll see your message, and they're more likely to click and open it, which indicates to their email service provider that you're not spam.

It makes it more likely that you won't end up in the spam or promotions tab when you do actually hand write a custom reply back to their inquiry.

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Part three of my perfect sales system is to set up Calendly for appointment bookings.

Calendly, again, hands down is one of my favorite tools for appointment bookings because they have such sophisticated settings about when you're available, how much buffer time, how many times people can book that session. I've just never had issues where I had to reschedule a bunch of meetings, and that is why I love Calendly so much.

As a side note, I will just say that HoneyBook does have a built-in scheduler that you can use. I've just found it's a little simplistic for what I've needed and the HoneyBook does integrate with Calendly still, so you can use Calendly and HoneyBook and it works out just fine. In Calendly, what I would set up is five different event types, a discovery call, a coffee chat, a kickoff, a wrap up, and a help desk.

The first two call types discovery call and copy chat are for those initial conversations. The difference between them is really about buyer intent, so discovery call is more like I'm ready to work with you on a project, a copy chat is a little bit more, let's get to know each other. I found that copy chats are actually a great gateway into discovery calls.

People who are on the fence may not want to move into a buy mode right away, but they often are pretty close to buy mode, but you never know and sometimes it just helps for people to get on the phone with you. So I love the coffee chat. It just takes a lot of the pressure off. Discovery calls are also important for people who do show high intent and they're like, yes, I'd like to work with you. How do we get started?

Those people are going to want a more sales oriented call. The difference in session type also helps me when I'm looking at my calendar, if you've booked a meeting three weeks out, I'm more aware of your intent booking the meeting if the session types are different, and I'm reminded of what mode you are in before we meet so that I come to the meeting appropriately prepared.

So once a project is booked, I'm running a kickoff call to make sure that we have everything we need to get started and we're on the same page about how the project is going to go, and I'm booking a wrap up so we know exactly when the project is ending and I can hand off anything that you need to have in your possession. Those two call types are very specific to my business. You're going to want to think about how you run projects and what makes sense for how you're going to lay this out in your business.

I used to do one week marketing plans with a kickoff call on a Monday and a Friday wrap up call. When I was doing websites, I would do one or two week projects and same thing. The call structure was always beginning and end, and then occasionally I like to do additional calls with clients. It kind of depends on the project and that is what the help desk call type is for. Usually this is a discretionary event type.

In my past business, I actually used to offer hourly help desk calls and people would just pay per call. What's great about Calendly in that case is that you can hook up stripe and people can pay right in the event, so you don't have to do a whole proposal invoice flow for something that's like a low hundreds cost. I also would turn on Calendly automations. I really like their automated reminders that the call is coming up.

I like to add an additional one an hour before the call, which is not the default mode in Calendly. By default, they notify you 24 hours before the call. I like to also do an hour. This helps prevent no shows, especially for people that are pre-project booking and after something like a discovery call or a coffee chat, I like to have an automated email go out. You can do this either through Calendly or HoneyBook.

It's easiest I think, through Calendly where 30 minutes to an hour after the call happens, they'll get some kind of confirmation that just articulates next step. Sometimes I think to myself, oh, I'm going to manually handle all of this communication and I just, if I was going to go back in my business, I would've put some of these things in place sooner because if everything hinges on your behavior, then everything can be blocked by your behavior.

Removing those things from your brain, removing them from your hands, and making sure that a system is in place to at least communicate some of the baseline of what's happening to move some of these things forward, it ensures the projects are moving towards booking faster. It ensures the projects are completed faster, and that means your business is making more money.

Part four of my perfect sales system is to use HoneyBook to automate the entire booking process.

By booking process, I mean from proposal to paid invoice, and this is again where HoneyBook shines. They have a really nice proposal template feature where you can set up an interactive proposal, articulate everything that they're getting and include links to pay for the project to start moving. I'm blown away honestly in 2023 that when I engage service providers, I still get contracts that I need to manually sign invoices that I need to manually figure out how to pay for.

To me, it's just like a no brainer to make this a one step process for you and your clients. It really does not cost a lot of money to do this, and it will save you so much time in chasing people down. For signatures and deposits in HoneyBook, this is called a smart file. So you set up your templates of how you like to do your packages, and then you can always customize them per client, add a little personalized note or remove, add different things that they've bought in their package and then load up the deposit that they need to pay. You can actually do a payment plan here and also keep their card on file and automatically bill them so you don't have to do manual invoicing. Again, a huge win for not having to chase down money, and then in my case, I always like to have them book that kickoff call right away because I don't use HoneyBook scheduler.

I've embedded a Calendly link here and they'll open a window and they'll book their kickoff in Calendly, but this whole onboarding process from proposal to booking, it's all one flow and it's a flow that I can set up one time and then they can just run through it and show up on my calendar and we're ready to go and I don't have to be going back and forth with them, oh, here's the contract. Let me download it. Here's the invoice, here's how you pay it. I don't have to do any of that. All handled within HoneyBook, it's super clean.

It makes me aware when someone's paid, they've booked their kickoff and we're ready to go. Going back to what I was saying about not keeping everything in your head and not making everything hinge on your behavior, one of the things that I notice happens with projects, especially with some of my clients that are doing bigger ticket projects where there's more decision makers involved is that a proposal can lag.

You can have good speed from the discovery call into the proposal stage, and then between proposal and signing, it can be a while, and this is where HoneyBook can help because you can set up an automation, a sequence of reminders to make sure that they know the proposal's still open, that they know where to find it, that they reach out with questions, and you can automate these things so you don't have to think about it. You don't have to think, oh, when was that proposal sent and should I follow up? You can just say, I want to make sure if I have a proposal out that I'm following up every three days or every four days or every five days, because the longer you let those things sit, the more likely those projects are to not happen. So you want to make sure that you are not putting the burden on you every day to wake up and chase down proposals that you are leveraging a system for that.

One cool feature of HoneyBook is that if you're panicked about the idea of automated emails, as I will admit, sometimes I'm not the biggest fan of sending automated emails to clients who are paying me a lot of money. HoneyBook has a toggle where you can say, send to my approval. So it's automated, it's sending you what's going to go out, but it's still asking for your approval so you have an opportunity to personalize or cancel if it's not appropriate to send the reminder.

One thing I did sort of late in my business when I was doing one-on-one was I set up both the onboarding and the offboarding in HoneyBook automation. So this is something I would definitely have a look at. If you've got a lot of things that people need to prepare or if you have a lot of things that you're handing off, you can actually create the entire project timeline in a HoneyBook automation and you can send notes to get your clients prepared for the project.

For example, when I was doing web design, people had to create a whole content guide for me about what they would want on their website, and they had to prepare all their images, their brand assets, et cetera. So I had several emails that were going out before the kickoff to remind them that they needed to submit that content guide. And then after the project, I would make sure to set up what you want your offboarding sequence to be.

So usually you're doing some kind of handoff in the wrap up call and you want to follow up to that to come via email. Then you're probably going to ask for testimonials. Maybe you're going to ask for case study participation. As for me, I've gotten really into offboarding lately. I would definitely make sure to put this in my perfect sales system, prioritize which action I want people to take.

That first email is going to be the handoff. The second email is probably going to be some feedback. Third email, maybe a testimonial, and that fourth email, booking a check-in so that we can reconnect. Reconnecting with your clients is a huge win.

Not going to go too far into that, but treating your clients well in the offboarding is really key to leaving them with a lasting positive impression, and it's also a key to booking repeat work and getting more referrals.

This four part sales system is really focused on the moment people are interested in you. When people discover you and they want to learn more, you want to make sure that that path is frictionless and that the next move that they should take is super obvious for the micro business of less than 10 people. I really liked the toolkit that I shared with you today, but you can also check out other tools like Dubsado, HubSpot, and monday.com.

I've actually been using Airtable recently for my CRM. I did a different episode on that because I no longer do sales calls or proposals, but HoneyBook really saved me when I was doing one-on-one, and I can't recommend enough how important it's to automate things that you notice you're doing over and over again. This perfect sales system pairs really well with a set of visibility activities that makes people aware of your business and invites them to get to know you better.

If you need ideas about what those visibility activities should be, check out the episode I did on 22 Ways to Get leads Without social media. I break down 11 relational and 11 broadcast strategies that you can use to make sure your business is getting out there. It's one of my most popular episodes, so go check that out on the Low Energy Leads playlist.

Until next time, keep your energy low by systematizing what already works.