Your first meeting. What to do, what to ask and how to LISTEN
So, you secured your first meeting with a potential prospect. What should you do? The traditional sales approach is to prepare a powerpoint slide, walk on in to a meeting and present. Make sure you include all your customers company logo’s and 50 slides about why you are the best in the world.
This type of approach is balony and here is why:
- Your prospect see’s this from every sales person who pitches to them
- The prospect does not care about your company
- Another boring meeting with powerpoint will not increase your chances of a sales
Take this analogy. If a sales person was selling you an air conditioning unit for your house would you like it if the sales person:
- Spoke about how great their company was, how excellent their product is. or
- Spoke about the value your house will get if you install such a product
The latter is a more compelling pitch. Here is some hard truth:
Your prospect does not care about your business, team, previous customers or your combined experience. They only care about the results your will bring them that will add value to their business.
A first meeting should consist of:
- You gaining more information about their business
- Finding out if you can help them (Yes! thats not an automatic “we can help everyone we meet” that most companies have)
- Finding out if this opportunity is worth your time
- Demonstrate you add value
How do you add value? You must demonstrate:
- How past customers did things prior to working with your firm
- The problems they encountered in their operations
- The business ramifications of these problems
- The specific value and business outcomes they’ve realized as a result of your relationship
You must ask questions and aim to find out:
- Whether the prospect has a problem, what it is and if you can help
- Their strategy, plan and what they are doing in the next 12 months
- How they make decisions
- Whether you can provide unique business value
The next post will cover questions in more depth, a very important post! Stay tuned.
A Unique in is a unique method that grabs your prospects attention and gets you in a companies door immediately.
The biggest myth in sales is your value as a sales person is derived from your knowledge product or services. That statement is so powerful, read it again.
This post follow on from the previous
What happens the day after the buzz? You’ve built your product, created your services now what? For most people this is where things start to get chaotic. If you thought building a product was hard, welcome to the hardest part of your business, selling your product. Why do I say hardest? I say hardest because most businesses fail due to lack of sales direction. A lack of a plan and a lack of a sales strategy contribute to this. I have seen countless companies fall into this trap.
There is a mis-conception in selling, particularly from those with traditional sales training. Traditional sales training teaches you to “know your product” that your product knowledge is the most important tool in sales. This may work very well if the product happens to be exactly what a potential customer is looking for, they have already made a decision and want to know the details about what they are about to buy. However, this is less than 1% of all cases. To illustrate this, here are the types of sales people we see today:
I got cold called yet again today and I felt sorry for the salesperson. There is a big belief in the sales industry out there about cold-calling techniques that is completely wrong. That believe is that you need to emphasise your product with your elevator pitch. The truth though is that cold calling is about demonstrating that you have great potential to bring value to the person on the other end, show your knowledge and have a real conversation. Forget scripted robotic phone conversations, think friend to friend chats. Chats that are informal, relaxed and open. Here is how the call went today:
Interesting Article, I wonder if this is the next big area?