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.
In a situation where I have made contact with the decision maker, I have provided samples and prices but it needs to go to the prospects' quality control department. Assuming that I have not been able to preschedule an in-person appointment or specific call back date for results, I end up wasting a tremendous amount of time to get one of three answers:
a. No thanks.
b. QC still not done.
c. Yes, I'd like to plan an order.
I repeatedly call back and leave voice mail requests for an answer with no response. Any ideas of how I can be more effective in this scenario? Many salespeople simply keep returning physically to the customer to try to get an answer, but I don't think this is any more effective than phone calls.
Let's look at the situation from the customer's point of view. He probably has more important things to do than test your product. Your project has become a low-on-the-to-do-list item. He'll get to it when he gets to it.
Why isn't it any big deal to him? Because you haven't made it one. In your proposal to him, you haven't hit any sufficiently sensitive and intense hot buttons to motivate him to push the project out of the mode of standard operating procedures.
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Let's say you've shown him that you can save him 3% on one component of his product. Yawn. That's nice, but you aren't going to unleash any torrents of energy devoted to pushing your deal through. And, really, from his perspective, does it make any difference if he decides to buy it today, or he decides to buy it next month? Probably not. So, your deal continually gets pushed down the ever growing and changing list of things he has to do.
So, the problem is that your customer isn't motivated to push your project ahead of other things he has to do. And the reason he isn't motivated is because you haven�t given him a reason to be motivated.
The place to address this issue is not after you have made the proposal, it is before. Do two things. First, in your information collecting, concentrate on finding the prospect�s hot button. Find some things that the prospect is already passionate about. Then when you make your proposal, show how your product helps him reach those goals and helps him achieve the things he is already passionate about.
The issue is motivation, and you don't interject motivation, you discover it. Discover what he's already motivated about, and link your product to it.
Second, give him some reason to act by a certain date. Maybe you have a special price promotion, or some service that he would value, etc. There should be something the customer gains by acting by some date. So your proposal should be X if he orders before some date, and Y if he orders after. That gives him a reason to push your project up the to-do list. Then, when you call and get voice mail and leave a message, you can remind him of what is at stake if he makes the decision by that date.
If you are able to put either or both of these pieces into play, you'll find that most of the frustration with projects that linger forever is eliminated by preventing it on the front end of the sales process.
Good luck.
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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:
- The Impenetrable Account... How do you sell to an account that is in the hands of a competitor? It's a great question, reflecting one of the most perplexing and frustrating situations every sales person faces. In this article Dave expalins how to get an account away from your competition.... {Read More}
- Developing Account Strategies... Our objective is to equip you with an understanding of the principles and processes you'll need in order to develop effective account strategies. First, let's define our terms. Strategy means a series of steps designed to bring your prospect or customer from where they are now to where you want them to be. It's the long-term view. Realistically, it's a planned series of sales calls in which each sales call has a distinctive set of purposes, a distinctive piece of education, a person or set of people to speak with, and a distinctive agreement that you'd like to attain. The purpose, the timing, the organization, and the sequence of that series of sales calls is the strategy. It's the long-term perspective, the big picture, of what you want to do and how you want to do it.....[ {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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