Sales Intelligentsia

First Contact

Your first contact with a prospect has one goal whether that contact is over the phone, via e-mail or in person. That goal is to set up an appointment to make your sales presentation. This should be your overriding goal when first meeting someone. In my opinion, if you are contacting this person in the hope of doing business with them, an appointment should be your only objective. You should not start selling, talking about your product or experiences, drop too many names or brag about your accomplishments, rattling on nervously. Nor should you send out a brochure when asked. This is typically a polite way to end the conversation. You should:
• Be concise and brief. Don’t waste time. Get to the point.
• Speak in terms of their interests, their concerns, their desires.
• Use your one sentence, benefit-oriented description of what you have to offer.
• Tell them where you got their name, giving a specific personal reference whenever possible. If you got them from a list you can say that your research identified them as someone with a specific need for your services.
• Ask for a meeting to show them how you can help them.
• Offer them a choice of two specific dates and times. If they cannot make either have another specific time ready.
• Always offer actual times. Don’t say: What works for you? Control the situation.
• If they’re not interested at all, don’t push. Ask again for the opportunity to show them your product and if they firmly state their lack of interest thank them and go on to a prospect who is interested.

Your Personal Investment

You cannot sell without making a personal investment in the process. This personal investment is your bread and butter product, the stock in trade of every salesperson. You’re not selling widgets or expertise, you’re selling yourself as a human being. People buy your services because of who you are rather than what you are. It’s personal.
So what is a personal investment and why is it so vital? It’s vital because it shows your prospective customer that you are committed enough to your business to put your reputation on the line, everyday, on every job and for them, personally. A personal investment is your focused, attentive, respectful participation in what you’re selling and doing for your customers. 90% of the time, if they believe that you are committed they will hire you or buy your product. If they sense even a slight wavering in your commitment, you’ll lose them.

Their Personal Investment

The reason all of this is so important is that your customer is making an investment in you. They’re investing time, energy and cold, hard cash in someone who until recently was a stranger. They’re taking a risk and most of us are risk averse, especially when it comes to our jobs and our livelihoods. A big part of selling is risk aversion for both parties, creating a balance that reassures each side that they are safe and are making the right choice.
There is another aspect to the personal investment being made by your customers. You should constantly be aware of the degree of investment they are making as you go through the selling process. Each time you speak, interact and spend time together their investment grows. At some point it becomes large enough that it affects their thinking because they want something from their investment. They want a return and pulling out will leave them empty-handed.
This desire to realize something for the investment the buyer has made in time and energy is a powerful selling tool, particularly when you’re making that important first contact. Let’s look at an example:
Joan sells industrial equipment as an independent sales rep. She is not a beginner, she is very aware of what she is doing each step of the way as she contacts a prospective customer, sets up an appointment and meets them, beginning the sales process. She cold calls the owners and presidents of small manufacturing firms all over the country. Before she picks up the phone she does a lot of homework. She knows their names, their company’s products and customers and the machines they have now. She knows mutual business acquaintances and she participates in industry conferences and trade shows. All of this has one goal: To make her first contact a profitable one for both her and her prospect.
When she started out her cold calls were more like frosty calls. She knew little about the business and no one had any idea who she was. She seldom got through to her prospects and suffered enough personal rejection to consider a different career. First contact was so difficult that after a day of people saying no that she experienced cold fear just thinking of picking up the phone to call a stranger.
Around her she saw other reps making really good money without the level of stress she was experiencing. In fact they seemed to know everyone or at least have common ground with everyone they called. She began to realize that her first contacts would be a lot easier if she could find her own common ground with her prospects. Using the tools and concepts we’ve looked at in these first chapters she began to get to know her ‘typical’ prospect, to understand what motivated them and, equally important, what turned them off. It was this negative input that really helped her achieve success.
Joan found out that the company managers she called were very busy and had little patience with salespeople who didn’t understand their business. They weren’t intentionally rude and abrupt, they simply didn’t feel that it was their job to teach a young salesperson the ropes. Their rejection of her was based on their situation and had little to do with her personally. They simply did not want to invest time in her.
Once she understood that she had to bring something valuable to the relationship right from the start, she changed her approach and changed her success rate as a result. What she brought was a willingness to get answers for people, to convey their interests and concerns to the designers who made the machines she sold and she always used personal references. These personal references were hard to come by at first but as she developed satisfied customer relationships she simply asked them to recommend her.

Joan’s initial failure could have resulted in her giving up sales. Instead she used it as an opportunity to learn, an essential skill for anyone who sells and an essential part of sales. Gathering information is one of the primary skills of selling and is particularly important before making first contact.

Prospecting Tools: One Sentence Description

A caller in the script will quickly describe their business in one sentence: “We help companies like yours evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing budget.” Can you describe what you do, in a benefit-oriented manner, in one sentence? For my money, developing a great one-sentence description of your business is better than a flashy brochure or expensive ad. And even if you need those brochures and ads, your one sentence description can serve as the hook they use to pull in customers. Best of all it costs nothing to come up with one.
It will be a challenge to boil what you do down to a few words, especially because you are so personally involved in every aspect of what you do. Ask friends and customers how they would describe your business. You may be surprised at what you hear. Look for action and benefit oriented words that convey a sense of real world effectiveness. In my example those words are Help, Companies Like Yours, Evaluate, Effectiveness and Budget (almost the whole sentence is action words!). They promise results and address key issues like budgets and expert assistance.
Once you’ve developed a simple description try it out on people when they ask what you do. Mess around with the wording until it rolls easily off the tongue at the drop of a hat. Keep it simple and use it all the time. It’s free!