Every month I receive a variety of questions from salespeople and their managers. These come from a variety of sources - my live seminars, the monthly phone seminars, questions that are sent into my newsletter, and issues that arise in the course of my consulting work. Out of all of these, I select those that I think have the most universal application, and respond to them here.
How much time should you expect from a customer for an appointment?
This is one of those many questions about sales issues for which the answer always begins with "It depends." It depends, first of all, if this is a prospect (someone who has not purchased) or a regular customer (someone who buys regularly). Generally speaking, you can expect more time with a customer than with a prospect.
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It depends, secondly, on the understanding your customer has about the purpose and agenda of the call. For example, if you asked for 60 minutes in order to detail your response to his request for a proposal or a piece of equipment, then you should expect 60 minutes. If you asked for a short period of time to introduce you and your company, then you are probably lucky to get 30 minutes.
It depends, next, on your personal reputation. If you are a seasoned rep who, over the years, has built a reputation that you won't waste your customer's time, and that you are always prepared to share something you think will be of value to the customer, then you should expect more time. If, however, you don't have such a reputation with the customer, then you should expect less time.
It depends, finally, on your objective for the sales call. If you want to check up on the delivery of an order, for example, it probably shouldn't take you more than ten minutes. If you want to get a tour of the facility and meet four of the key people, it could take a couple of hours.
As an overall rule to guide you, the call shouldn't take any longer than it needs to be. Of equal importance to how much time you think the call should take is how much time the customer has to devote to it. As you know, time is the scare commodity of our age, and your customer doesn't have much of it. You need to respect your customer's time constraints. If you ask for an hour of your customer's time, that's 16% of his day. Are you that important? Will you bring him/her enough value to justify that? Never allow your preconceived notions to override your customer's time constraints.
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If you have any comments or questions, email them to me. I do, of course, reserve the right to edit.
Here are a few articles by Dave
that you might be interested in reading:
- Dealing With Your Customer's Time Constraints... This is a real information-age issue. You know how confused and pressured you feel these days. Your customers feel the same way. As pressures brought on by rapid change, growing competition and the need for every organization to become more streamlined and efficient have hit your customers, many of them have reacted by trying to make everyone more productive.... {Read More}
- How Can I Sell More When I Have So Much to Do?... How can I sell more when I have so much to do? You have new products to learn, paperwork to complete, hundreds of customer problems to solve, meetings to attend, inside people to cojole, managers to mollify - and, on top of all this, you are expected to sell something! Let's start by identifying one of those essentials. Think about the sales process - the activities that it takes to make a sale - and certain key activities come to mind.... {Read More}
There are also many other action-packed articles for sales professionals that offer how-to solutions to every day sales problems that you can read online at www.davekahle.com/article.htm.
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