Steven Covey popularised the phrase, start with the end in mind.
Something that’s especially important when sitting down with a prospect for the first time. Today we’ll go over how to start a sales meeting with a prospect you’ve never met.
How you establish credibility and position yourself as the authority they should listen to from the word go. Put another way, you have to earn the right to be heard and taken seriously.
Transcript
Steven Covey popularised the phrase, start with the end in mind.
Something that’s especially important when sitting down with a prospect for the first time.
I’m Rashid Kotwal.
Today we’ll go over how to start a sales meeting with a prospect you’ve never met. How you establish your credibility and position yourself as the authority they should listen to from the word go.
Put another way, you have to earn the right to be heard and taken seriously.
After the usual pleasantries it is important to frame the meeting so your prospect knows what to expect.
Say something along the lines of, “As we have an hour together, what I’d like to do is start by telling you a little about me, then I’ll ask about you and we’ll discuss your challenges and how we could help solve them. If appropriate I’ll then present a solution and way forward”.
So in today’s video we’ll only cover the first part of the earn the right.
You start with your background then list 3 of your major achievements and round it up with Your philosophy.
So here’s our example which you can model.
Starting with background.
My wife, Barbara Sauter and I started our consulting & coaching practice from scratch back in 2000. And like any small business we’ve experienced first-hand the challenges involved in running a profitable business. i.e. getting clients, marketing, sales, delivery and managing staff.
And while we had over 20 years corporate experience in sales and management, we soon realised that running a small business took a very different skill set.
We knew we had to invest in ourselves. We knew we had to learn. So we engaged coaches and mentors to help us develop the skill sets that we needed. It was a pretty long drawn and expensive process I can tell you.
But it’s that education combined with the experience of now having grown businesses in over 45 different industries that our clients find invaluable and unique.
So moving onto achievements:
I’ll give you three examples of how we’ve helped organisations grow…
The first is a dental equipment manufacturer who was doing around $3M/year in sales at the time. We worked with them on their sales processes, team development and the MD’s leadership skills. Within about 5 years the business achieved the $11.5M mark.
Our second example is a financial planning firm. When we started working with them they didn’t have a defined market that they targeted. Over the years they’ve evolved into attracting very high net worth, time poor clients who appreciate and are happy to pay for independent specialist advice. They are now in the enviable position of being able to reject business they don’t feel is a good fit.
And number three is a leadership coach who helps large private schools improve student learning outcomes. We worked with him and his clients to better structure and package his solutions resulting in tripling the value of the product that he sold from $25,000 to $75,000 and increased engagement time from 1 to 3 years.
Our philosophy is very simple. We have 3 basic rules. We have to believe we provide value to you and your business. You will do what we tell you to do, within reason. And we like you!
Only now that you’ve covered that should you move onto the next part of the meeting which is asking questions.
If you’d like to know more about our sales process, we have stacks of material on this as well as articles on having a business mindset, strategy, marketing and selling on our blog. You can find it at revealedresources.com.
While you’re there, download our free guide on how to attract high value clients.
Till next time, this is Rashid Kotwal.
