My business, quite simply, is about teaching professional B2B sales people how to get meetings with new target prospects. There, it can’t be any plainer than that.
Meeting new clients or customers is often considered the holy grail of sales talent. Understanding your product, or being a wiz at the tech side while important, are skills almost anyone can grasp through rote learning. Being a rain-maker, or being the person who time and again gets in front of new clients is something else.
While some businesses don’t actively seek new clients, they are few and far between. Most organizations are on a constant hunt to discover new opportunities, and doing that almost always involves meeting a new person, the target prospect.
Sales professionals pride themselves on their ability to help or add value. They work hard at understanding and mastering their offering such that they’re able to inform and hold the attention of clients. A good sales person will know their stuff, and without equivocation, be able to communicate facts and nuance with relative ease. Give a sales person the slightest provocation, and they’ll expound on their depth and scope of knowledge. You would think this isn’t a bad thing? Think again.
In most worlds, an initial connection with a new client, or target prospect, happens on the phone. Getting a prospect to pick up the phone in the first place, and not hang up, is not such an easy thing, but that’s a conversation for another time. Once on the phone, following this logic, the objective is to schedule a meeting.
Most salespeople will speak to some sort of offer. It might be as simple as a new product or feature, or complex like new legislation affecting a prospect’s business that perhaps they weren’t aware of. But without fail, when sales people taste that initial spark of interest, when they actually get a live and engaged prospect on the other end of the phone who will listen, they regurgitate - pretty much nonstop. They continue with zealous discussion about how much and what they know. If the client asks for more information, they answer with enthusiasm, unabated. The prospect wants to talk more, no problem. So what’s wrong with that?
Meeting in person, most would agree, provides a tangible benefit and advantage when getting to know someone. The in-person meeting is head and tales more valuable than merely talking on the phone, there’s just no way getting around that. It just is…
If you’re asking for a face to face meeting, then you probably intend to justify the meeting by providing or sharing information, no? Think of it as charades. Charades, for the uninitiated is a game where a team thinks of a book title, a famous person's name, or perhaps a saying to pantomime to the other team. The first person to guess the word or phrase with the fewest clues gets a point. Once the subject is guessed, that round is over, no need to continue.
So, much like charades, the game becomes howlittle you can share before the prospect agrees to meet. Simply put, each time you “inform” or “share” with a prospect, you give them one more reason to decline the meeting. Why? Because each time you provide information that you intended to share in a face to face meeting, you undermine the value of meeting at all. Simple, yes?
Not as simple as you might think. Time and again I coach professional sales people that constantly talk themselves out of meetings. They get a live prospect on the line, and instead of limiting the discussion and divulging information, they continue to talk and wax poetic, rambling on and on, answering each and every question the prospect has instead of shutting up. Think about it; each time you offer a reason for meeting, or expand on or get sucked into discussing the very reason you wanted to meet, you move yourself further and further away from a meeting.
Want to fix this and get more meetings? Next time, when a prospect asks for more information, try this:
1) Explain that the purpose of the meeting is to dive deeper into the subject.
2) Don’t be so available. Let the prospect know that you don’t have time right there and
then to provide the kind of explanation required.
3) Let them know that the questions they posed require further investigation or fact
finding on your end, and that you will provide the kind of comprehensive answer
they seek when you meet.
4) Are the answers to their questions so simple? Be resolute that only through further
conversation (and again, remember that you don’t have time just then to provide the
time necessary) can you address the subject adequately.
5) Maybe you don’t know? Be prepared to acknowledge that you might not know
the answer to the question. The opposite of what you might think, actually
conceding that you don’t know something can underpin your credibility and
sincerity. Suggest that when you meet you’ll have the information.
So, what’s the bottom line here? Less is more; learn to shut-up when prospects attempt to engage you in a conversation that you want to have in person, and stop talking yourself out of meetings.