Insthinktive Influencing
Build Rapport with your prospects ?rst
When you call a prospect do you launch straight in for the sale? Go straight for the killer opening statement that will cause them to respond with Wes IWe been waiting for you all
of my life? Most do. And they get lousy results and therefore learn to hate it, and bemoan it as a fruitless exercise.
You can never get to your prospects Why, it you are effectively pushing a solution on them. Remember people hate being sold to but they love to buy.
You need to shift your mindset from the push to the pull in a sense. Your job is to ultimately help them achieve a result that makes their lives better in some way.
As insthinktive coaches we really appreciate the art of the question and the power of the question. As a salesman selling for 25 + years.. I also realise that the power is always in the question. The ability to engage someone because you are displaying an interest. Because you are trying to engage them in a conversation.
Having a strong value statement (elevator pitch is the cruder description) gains attention, but the question will open people up to the conversation.
Once you have established some rapport or some degree of relationship you can start to gather contact information, which you can then use to keep them informed of you and your solution. Give them tips give them advice, give to receive. Over time you will foster a relationship that will get you results.
We talked earlier about ?nding out the customers Why. The way to the Why is by building trust. Trust fosters relationships and relationships build businesses. Your marketing is about building relationships. Not the traditional push model of sell, sell sell.
The traditional approach is limited and more often than not push results in push back..No you want to pull prospects in to your pipeline by establishing trust.
And it works. It’s proven, and you will see the bene?t of this more strategic approach.
After all the facts are that prospects take on average 6 to 7 touches (interactions with them) to convert them to a sale. The push approach is very limiting based on this fact.
How to increase your sales.
As someone who has been in business for 25 years and been working with many diverse types of business owner. The one common complaint we hear is ? hate sales and sales pitches?
Marketing and sales can be quite daunting and I don’t think it’s helped by the hoards of gurus out there, who seem to make it more complicated, and hence more intimidating.
Your ability to take the complexity and make it simple is critical. You don’t have to have grand plans, and multiple strategies to be successful. Doing one or two things well. And by that I mean executing them with clarity and consistency. You can achieve great results.
Go back to the simple core of selling, which is getting prospects attention and gaining their trust. In order to do this you need to understanding how, when and why they buy.
And then mirror your message to their needs.
A great example of this is a client of ours who supply call answering / recording and phone systems to large businesses. They have quickly crystallised what the clients Whys are. More sales, more control, more efficiencies, better reporting, better customer service
and accountability.
They also realised that their prospects buy at two separate times in the calendar year. October and January, in other words at the start of their new business years when they have budgets available and they have more freedom to invest.
By ramping up their marketing and sales activities around those two periods in the year, they were able to get better results for less spend, as they didn? need to spend all year round.
Simple, but not easy…..
Next session; You need to understand how they buy.
