Archives for May 2018

What you think you heard may not be what the prospect thought they said. This leads to a lot of mis-communication and mis-communication leads to a lot of wasted time effort and ultimately heartache. The prospect says they want to get started right away and you interpret that to mean they want to start this week. What they actually meant was this quarter which is anytime in the next 3 months. You forecast a sale and mobilize the troops only to have things be “delayed” and management to get impatient with you. There is a simple fix. For important information all you have to do is confirm what you think you heard. It might sound like “So Mary I hear you saying that you want to start this week. Is that correct?” In this case she would say, “No, I want to get started before the end of August”. Your forecast is accurately noted as this project starting sometime in August and your credibility remains intact. This is a very simple concept and will keep you out of a lot of trouble.

I’ll say it again closing is not the most important sales skill to develop. What good is someone who can close but who can’t prospect? What good is a closing skill if there is nothing in your pipeline to close? If I set you up with 5 appointments next week and all of them had a compelling reason to buy. They all had enough money to fix the problem and they were decision makers and they had agreed to make a buying decision based on what you had to tell them, how many could you close? The answer most groups give me is that they could close all 5, or they could at least close 4 of them. I get that answer even from novices who don’t know how to close for an order. What this thought experiment proves that anyone can close if the prospect is set up properly. It turns out that prospecting, qualifying and discussing money are far more important skills to have than the ability to close. If you have to start somewhere, work on those top of the pipeline skills first and closing will take care of itself.

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Prospect’s know immediately when you drop into sell mode. As soon as they recognize that you are selling they get defensive, deny the existence of problems and actively try to extricate themselves from the sales interaction. So what triggers the sales shield? Anything that appears to be aggressive will do it. Asking direct probing questions will do it. Asking leading questions will do it. In fact, anything that sounds like a traditional feature and benefit sales pitch will do it. The optimal sales approach is to be consultative. This means you must break the traditional buyer-seller relationship and establish an open trusting relationship where the prospect trusts you enough to share what is really bothering them and what they are really going to do about it and what they might really like to spend to get it done. This is not easy since they come to the interaction from a position of distrust. That is due to the hundreds of salespeople they have interacted with in the past. It is a gradual process but one that needs to begin from the very first interaction you have with the prospect.

If you don’t have an accurate description of your ideal prospect on the tip of your tongue, you are unlikely to ever find one. And, more unfortunately, your clients and referral sources are not likely to ever refer you to one. It is vitally important that you describe in writing what your ideal prospect looks like. The ideal client is the one that gets the most value from your services, is willing to pay the price to get them, and they are large enough to have an impact on the growth of your company. You should describe your ideal prospect by the pain they are in or at least the problems they would have that make them the ideal prospect. Just because your best clients are all service firms in the Fortune 1000, does not mean that all such firms are ideal prospects for you. You are a labor attorney then maybe your ideal prospect is all fortune 1000 firms who have Non-Union Employees and are trying to avoid being unionized. That narrows the field and much more importantly allows your clients and other referral sources to be able to identify prospects for you while in general conversation with their clients or acquaintances. Being able to succinctly describe the pain your prospects might have makes you much more effective in networking situations and when working trade shows. Demographics are important when describing target clients but not as important as identifying the pain that they might be in.

Personal pain is the most powerful motivator in sales. Yes, it is possible to make sales based solely on the problems the company is experiencing. I call this corporate “pain”. These are issues like lack of efficiency, not enough sales, too much waste, air chillers on their last legs, leaky valves, etc. Good salespeople know enough to explore those further to discover another level of pain. Such as, lack of efficiency is causing waste in the product stream, which leads to higher cost and hence lost profit or worse, lost sales. Or, not enough top line growth is putting pressure on the stock price and profitability of the company. However, the optimal salesperson focuses on connecting the business problem to a human problem. The human problem ideally will cause pain in the people who make the decision. In the example of low efficiency leading to lost sales, the optimal salesperson will not stop there. She will ask questions to determine how this will affect the person who has the authority to make the decision to buy her product. She might discover that the VP of operations is worried that he might be replaced if he doesn’t correct the problem. Or the new VP of operations might view this situation as a chance to prove to management that they made the right decision to hire him to run the plant. Or maybe his bonus depends on reducing waste. Notice that if these are all personal emotional connections to the business problem. The salesperson who uncovers these motivators will have discovered truly compelling reasons for the project to move forward. An added bonus is that the prospect will be more bonded to the salesperson with whom he shares these emotions and be more likely to share others. The relationship will deepen and the probability of winning the business at the right price will be dramatically increased.