You’ve finally got that meeting with a potentially high value prospect. You’re sipping your coffee while making the usual opening rapport
building small talk.
Then your prospect leans forward and says, “Tell me more about you and what you do”.
You launch into your presentation. How wonderful your company is, how great the products are. All the features and benefits, ad nauseam.
Your prospect sits back, listens, smiles and maybe asks some questions. You think it’s all going swimmingly well.
Meeting over, you never hear from them again.
So what went wrong?
Let’s start with your mindset. What was it? Was it one of curiosity? That you needed to find out more about your prospect, his situation, what drove him, what would make him personally look and feel good? Or were you there to pitch your product?
And most importantly, who was in control? You or him?
When meeting a prospect you have to a mindset that you are in control of the agenda and structure of the meeting.
You set the tone right up front. Here’s a video we created on how to start a sales conversation with a high value prospect
Now I’m assuming you’ve done your homework and know quite a lot about your prospect’s background, and easily available general material on them and their possible situation.
Your job is to probe and tease out the real problems and dissatisfactions your prospect is experiencing and the implications of these not being fixed.
Then focus on the payoff they’ll experience once the issues have been solved.
I’m not going to go over the specific questions here. We’ve written a number of articles covering them which you can find on our website.
Our clients get in-depth coaching and training in this methodology.
Back to the “tell me more about what you do” question.
Don’t fall into the trap of going into your process. What you do and how you do it.
Instead focus on results.
Use your clients as case studies. Third party proof that shows you get results for others in similar positions to your prospect.
So smile and say you’ll answer their question, but first let me tell you about some clients just like you who were experiencing similar issues.
Take three clients similar to your prospect. Describe each, the issues they faced and most importantly, the outcomes you helped them achieve.
Numbers speak. Be as specific as possible. If you helped them put $X on the bottom line, talk about percentage increase as well. If it’s savings, how much.
The key is to use case studies which are similar to your prospect or they won’t relate. If you deal with SMEs don’t talk about what you did with a large corporate or vice versa.
There’s obviously far more to having effective selling conversations. I have a cheat sheet which outlines the basic steps. If you’d like it, drop me a line.
And if you want to significantly improve your closing rate, join the ranks of clients who’ve done so via our coaching programs.
