About this time of year, 43 years ago, I was sitting in my classroom at Goldsworth Middle School in Woking. The teacher was asking us to audition for parts in the Christmas carol service. The format was simple: come up to the front of the class and read a passage. Then the class would vote for whoever they thought did the best reading. The winner would take part in the carol service as the representative of our class.
Many hands went up to volunteer, all of them belonging to boys. Read More
Do I really mean that? Well maybe not everything should be done backwards. But it is certainly worth setting out at the beginning of the meetings, the expectations you have for the end of the meeting!
OK – here is a familiar scenario to anyone who has been in sales. Have you ever been in the situation where you talk to your prospect. You do pretty much everything right and then you struggle to pin them down to a start date, or a date to sign? This, by the way, has nothing to do with the prospect creating objections. We will assume they are happy with everything but they are just reluctant to actually commit. It’s very frustrating and, short of just ringing them to ‘check on progress’ or ‘see if it has been signed off yet’ there is not much you can do.
When you begin your discussion, start straight away by asking about the date of installation, or use or application. So in other words – the date they need your product or service to be in their possession, doing it’s thing.
This means you can use this date as a starting point and work backwards. You can explain your turnaround times and included details of important stages such as production, delivery and testing (depending on what you do of course). After all, that’s exactly what you would do if you were managing a project. And in many ways, selling is exactly that – project management.
Once you have done this, the prospect has a clear picture of time frames and you can guide them that they need to make a decision by a certain date in order to achieve their desired outcome. This gives them clarity and it gives you a genuine reason to chase them if, for any reason, they start to slip beyond the dates you have discussed.
Happy selling!
Come and have a chat about how we can grow your sales. Here’s a link to my calendar
Check out more of Tadpole Training’s blogs
Are you giving good follow up?
I ask because you don’t have to be a sales expert to use this very simple strategy to increase your sales.
If you take a look at this chart* then you will see that the majority of sales are not closed on the first, second, third or even fourth contact with the customer – rather they are closed somewhere between the fifth and the twelfth. Although this statistic will, of course, vary between sectors and markets, it’s not a bad average to be working with.
So what counts as follow up? Well the main choices are: Read More
Effective Follow up Strategies to stop your leads going cold
We’ve all been there – you get a great enquiry from an interested customer, you’ve talked, asked and answered questions, they are absolutely hooked and then….. you never hear from them again.
If you sit there just waiting, you are guilty of ‘failing to follow up’ and it’s one of the most common reasons why you don’t make more sales. So let’s have a look at some practical tips to boost your success rate with follow up: Read More
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