Ever walked out of a sales meeting thinking that went well only for the prospect to effectively ghost you. There’s no reply to emails, calls are ignored, and you’re wondering what went wrong.
Now, here’s the reality, ghosting doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t interested.
More often than not, it happens because there was no clear next step.
You wrapped up the meeting with, oh, you know, great to meet. Let’s keep talking, but there’s nothing defined as to what’s going to happen next.
So here’s what I always recommend people that I coach in sales do.
Set an upfront contract before the meeting, send out an agenda as to what is going to be covered and how long this meeting is going to take, so that you have an idea as to how much time has been allocated, and everybody agrees to that time, because the number of times I’ve been caught in the past where I thought we had maybe an hour, and the prospect said, after about half an hour, oh, look, I’ve got to go to the next meeting.
So when the meeting actually starts, we want to reiterate once again:
- Why are we here?
- What is the purpose of this particular meeting?
- How long do we have?
- Once again, get clarity – what we’re going to cover, go through the agenda items again and what success looks like.
- What is the possible next step going to be? And most importantly, if the next step is nowhere, give them permission to say no.
The beauty of this framework is it keeps everybody on track, including you.
You know how much time you’ve got. You know what the next steps are. And in our world, next steps generally work out into one of three things.
- Another contact that we need to talk to to move this deal forward
- A calendar entry, which means that we have set a time for the next meeting
- Cash, which means that we’ve actually got a deal.
- And what are the steps to getting that deal forward.
I teach all of this in my advanced sales growth mastery programs, so if you’d like some help improving your conversion rate, so that you close more business for every meeting that you have, rather than meeting setting up in a talk fest, contact me.
Reply to this email or call me on +61 414 913 334
