By Stuart Chant “On the Road with Stuart Chant, Helping you Become the Best you can be”
We’ve all been there. You arrive for an appointment and the prospect that had promised you thirty minutes of their undivided attention now only has ten. You have a decision to make: Do you reappoint and risk never getting face to face with them again or do you go ahead?
You decide to go ahead. You know you can’t skip rapport so you spend some time on preliminary pleasantries. However, with an eye on the clock you skip to stating the purpose and agenda as quickly as possible. Logically, there is no way you can conduct a full discovery and summary so you move to presenting the features and benefits of your product. You hit the client with all of the bells and whistles, you throw everything at them. You tell them how other clients have used your product/solution and how it has helped them. You use the last 5 minutes to state every benefit you can think of. You sell a good product, you are sure that something will resonate.
The client says “Thanks that was great, let me think about it”
You ask when should I get back to you? The client says “Give me a call on Friday”
You call on Friday and find out that the client always takes Friday off. You follow up over the next few weeks and come to find out your prospect is always in meetings.
Welcome to the club. You’ve just committed the first cardinal sin of the lone sales person
The Lone sales person is the guy that forgets everything he has ever learnt when their manager isn’t watching.
All of the training you have had, all of the books you have read say “never skip discovery”. You did the best thing you could in the situation, right?
Wrong: If you have ten minutes use the time to build rapport. Find out something about them and at the end of ten minutes you may discover that the client can make room for you on their calendar.
Business leaders are tired of sales people showing up without having done their research and worse not using the time to focus on their needs. When a client reduces the amount of time they have available for you they are saying “I agreed to this meeting a week ago, when it seemed a long way off, now it is here and I don’t want to do it because it could be a waste of time”
If you take that ten minutes and follow a professional process you will prove that the client should give you a lot more time.
