The Pedestal Group

I’m trying really hard not to let this be a rant and to turn a bad experience into something positive. As you’ve guessed, I met with another sales rep today. I can tell you how long he’s lived in his house, his attitude on big box stores vs. “local” businesses (which is a whole other discussion and can be really interesting but I digress), he has a dog with a big tail, he needs glasses because his are broken, etc. If he knows how to pronounce my last name I’d be shocked. Let alone anything else. Give me a break!

So what can we learn from him? Give yourself an agenda for any sales meeting you have with a prospect. What do you need to know about the person before you walk out of the meeting? At a minimum, know how to pronounce their name. Write it down on your notes phonetically. That way in the future you will use it properly.

After that, give yourself a list of 4-9 things you want to know about them before they leave. If you have 30 minutes for the meeting, plan on getting the answer to one about every 3-6 minutes. That means the person gets time to talk about their answer. Think about that. If you want to know the goals for our marketing plan, that is going to be a longer answer than 30 seconds. YOU WILL NEED TO SHUT UP FOR THE WHOLE TIME. (sorry – rant sneaking in) So let’s say that answer is 2.5 minutes. You get 30 seconds to ask your question. We’ve already used up 2 minute doing the name thing. You have now used 5 minutes of 30. If you know your presentation on your tool / service / widget will take 10 minutes (and you should know because you should PRACTICE and have information AT HAND to provide), then you know you have a total of 20 for fact finding. You’ve used five. You are a quarter of the way through your fact finding time and you have two pieces of information. See why you need a plan?

So set yourself an agenda to help keep yourself on track. At the end of a meeting you have to have answers to those questions you gave yourself so if you are getting toward the 10-minute-left mark, you know to STOP TALKING. You can’t get answers unless you stop talking.

A little bit more rant – don’t look at the person’s business card and ask a question about something on it in a negative. If I have my twitter address on my business card, I bet there’s a reason. Asking “do you like that twitter?” almost sounds like “is your baby that ugly?”. Obviously I like it or I wouldn’t put in on my BUSINESS CARD. Sheesh.

I attended the KNOW quarterly luncheon today.  It is an incredible group of women committed to business growth and networking from the greater Akron area.  Our speaker today was Karen Hough from Improvedge. She did a wonderful job of bringing home a concept I was taught as “she who speaks first, buys”.  It is always good to go back to basics so I wanted to discuss that concept some more.

I learned “she who speaks first, buys” when I started in IT and the company believed we were all part of the sales team so we all needed to learn sales techniques.  And in IT, you are absolutely selling your solution to a problem because generally the user has no way of knowing if you are right or wrong.  ”She who speaks first, buys” is all about making your case and then getting out of the way.  Generally, we want to fill that silence.  It is so much better when people are talking because you have a chance at knowing what they are thinking and what’s going on.  Karen made the point today that the power in an interaction is in the silence and that is so true.

Not sure?  Years ago I was the chair of a team sent to research a solution for a problem we were having as an organization.  There were two cheap solutions that would have required hours and hours of maintenance and support, or there was a more expensive option that would actually solve more than the initial problem and just work.  The team was completely behind the more expensive solution but were scared to death to present to BOB, our VP (Bob was definitely an all-caps kinda guy).  Bob was never unreasonable, but he did have lots of pressures on him that we may or may not know about and he expected people to be consummate professionals.  In this particular organization, most of us were young and inexperienced so we didn’t necessarily know how to be who he wanted us to be.  But, I was the chair so I got to present.

We sat in the conference room and I presented our proposal. I hit all the points that were important to Bob as well as why we felt they were important. And then, I sat down and kept my mouth shut.  I had told the team they couldn’t talk after I finished the proposal.  I looked at Bob and he looked at me and my friend looked at her watch.  A minute and 30 seconds later, Bob asked a question.  We got what we wanted.  Later he told me I had handled it well and was surprised I could sit that quiet for that long. But I knew if I kept speaking, I was the only one buying the proposal – and I was already sold!

So in the end, the lesson is, present and then be quiet.  You have no idea what the person is thinking so stop trying to guess. While you’re trying to read their face and are freaking out that your price is too high, they are trying to decide how to tell their boss they don’t want to go with his college buddy because they want to buy your product or service.  Same uncomfortable expression on the face, but totally different reasons!

Write it down, carry it with you, use it everywhere.  But I will caution you – if you teach it to your children, they will learn it and use it. Thank goodness the dog doesn’t understand…..

Or someone else will! I know we all try and I recommend to clients all the time to review your procedures to make sure it is easy, but here’s one we should all check out.  I needed to contact a vendor based on an email he sent me.  Here’s his phone number (a little bigger than it is in his signature so you can see): 

Now I am not going to tell you I was super-careful when I dialed or anything, but quickly looking at this information I dialed 880…. NOT 330.  So now I’m dealing with a vendor for one of my clients and I couldn’t even read the phone number quickly! Are you kidding?

So I ask you – beg you – plead with you!  If you are a sales person, be sure it is easy to contact you in multiple ways.  A friend of mine recently pointed out that you should have your email address in your signature so if people are using a cell phone, they can click on your email address. Or, if the email is forwarded and that person has you in their address book, the email address still comes through.  You should also spell out your web address rather than just have links so it is easy to click on it.  And while cutsie fonts are fun for party invitations, get them off your email signature.  It doesn’t help anyone if they can’t call you because the font is so flowery they can’t tell an 8 from a 3.

What ways can you think of to make it easy for your client?