The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [103]
Set the buying criteria in your favor.
Find the “smoking gun,” the one thing that undeniably positions you over every one else.
Make sure you hit their pain points.
Include your own pitch for your product or ser vice only after you have covered the education thoroughly.
The biggest mistake I see salespeople make is pitching themselves too early in their free education. You promised an education, so you need to deliver. The beautiful thing about the core story sales approach is that you give them a lot of great, usable information and then the presentation funnels down to where you’ve built rapport and trust. You can then say, “I have a little two-minute section about our company. Would you like to hear it?” If you did a good job with the first part of your presentation, no one will refuse.
I’ve helped companies use the core story/free education strategy a number of ways. Here are some options:
All your salespeople are trained as “speakers” and each one of them can take these education-based sales tools into the field, get their own appointments, and present. Just make darn sure that they can present and that they don’t die out there. Test every single salesperson. You might even want to have a contest for “best presenter” and put some money on the table that a few of the presenters can win. This makes every one practice the material, plus it forces every one to watch each other’s presentations in which they’ll learn many different approaches that their colleagues may have developed.
Your sales rep can just sell the appointment and you can use only your absolute best presenters to present the material. I worked with a company in Norway that perfected this method. It found that one of its presenters was closing three or four times more sales than anyone else. So we worked out a small override for her, and the sales reps all sold clients into her webinars. The sales reps then would follow up on their own clients to close the sale.
Naturally, this can be done in person if the sale is big enough and worth the investment to send live bodies to prospects. If it’s possible, the rep who made that appointment should attend the meeting and then should also be the person responsible for following up after the appointment and closing the sale. Naturally, it’s better if this is all done in one meeting. The speaker does the presentation with a call to action at the end, like a free assessment or audit of their current methods. Right there on the spot, the rep sets this up if possible.
Important note: only one person can present to any client any time. If the rep goes with the speaker—a person clearly great at presenting data and keeping the attention of the prospect—then that rep’s job in that room is to support the efforts of the speaker. I was once in a meeting where the rep started doodling. He had seen the info so many times that he was bored, so he acted that way. How do you think that made the prospect feel about the information? I felt like reaching over and slapping the pen out of the rep’s hand. So make sure that the rep is utterly riveted by the amazing data presented. I’ve also seen cases where two people presented and basically competed for the attention of the client. The client’s head looked like he was center court watching a tennis match—his head bobbing back and forth between the two opponents.
The Web now makes it so that you can use both options: the rep can present over the Web or the rep can make the sale for the prospect to attend the Web seminar, and the company’s best presenter can be the one to do the actual orientation or executive briefing. Check out www. gotomeeting.com, or www.livemeeting.com, or www.vlinklive.com—providers that enable you to present images over the Web while you are also on the phone with the prospect. This is a very cool way to sell. No one has to travel and sometimes it’s easier to get an appointment with prospects if they don’t have to commit to having you in their office. On the other hand, it’s also a lot easier for them to not show up.
So if you