Click on this link for an excellent reminder from Seth Godin about choosing customers:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/11/choose-your-customers-choose-your-future.html
Many times salespeople become "POW Prospectors". We have all seen the movie where the hero is made a prisoner of war and stuffed into the bamboo cage and is given slop to eat by his captors. And he thinks "this is slop...but I have not eaten in a long time...and I don't know when I will eat again...so he eats the slop."
Salespeople do the same thing when they decide to work on an opportunity that is either not qualified or not in their sandbox. It sounds like this: "this opportunity is slop...but I have not closed anything in a long time...and I don't know when I will have another shot at a piece of business...so they work on the slop."
Remember - a full pipeline tends to provide courage and clarity...particularly about choosing your prospects and customers.
In LA this week on business and needed some gas for my rental car so into the first station I came to...where I was expecting to pay at the pump...only to find out while this station had pay at the pump it was not located on the pump (where it always is located) and that they don't take credit cards...only debit cards.
Not finding this convenient, I drove away and bought gas at another station.
How convenient do you make it for people to do business with you? Unless your relationship with a client is 100% safe, you should be asking your clients that question...before it is too late...and they drive away to another station.
By the way, they wanted a .45 administrative fee for me to use a debit card.
So here is the scene - my 6 year old daughter Madison is selling coupon books as a fund raiser and she shows the book her grandmother after dinner. Grandma (who will certainly eventually buy) is going through the book page by page and wondering how many of the coupons she will use as she doesn't get out all that much.
After a few minutes, Madison simply asks "are you gonna pay for this or not?" Classic. It was a humorous reminder that every sales call must end with a clear call to action. You need to put something out there that the prospect could say "no" in their response. Risk it. I would argue that opportunties never get stalled. They are either moving forward (the relationship is getting better and deeper) or it is moving backwards (the prospect is headed in a different direction but they are not telling you that).
Have the guts to find out which direction you are headed. I know a 6 year old who can help you.
Check out this article by Dave Kurlan:
Do you have salespeople with happy ears? Do you have happy ears?
That is defined as a tendency for salespeople to hear what they want to hear from prospects instead of understanding what the prospect is really saying. For example, when the prospect says "we are always open to new ways of doing business" the salesperson thinks they hear "change is no problem."
No, I am not talking about the literary classic by Charles Dickens (and no, I am not referring to the Cliff Notes version either).
I am referring to the NFL Sunday Ticket that I ordered for the first time this season on DirecTV that allows me to watch all of the NFL games in HD. It includes a mix channel where I can watch 8 games at the same time and a Red Zone Channel that constantly cuts to live games when a team enters the red zone.
What does this have to do with selling and managing clients? Your competition is any company of anything who raises your clients expectations. If you are an accounting firm and your client has a dazzling experience with their IT vendor then expectations (while indirectly) have been raised for you. For me, DirecTV has raised my expectations for all of the other companies I do business with. Fairly or unfairly, my expectations of Marriott, Delta, AT&T and Avis have been raised.
How about you? When is the last time you did something to raise your client's expectations?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say...Fools talk because they have to say something."
... Plato
I will revise the quote (all due respect to Plato) to put it into a selling context:
"Wise sales people talk because they are asking questions...Foolish sales people talk because they have not prepared any questions."
Remember, a prospect who is listening (i.e. to you doing all the talking) is really not a prospect.
Most of you know of my love for the iPhone...for my money one of the best technology purchases I have made in quite some time. Not only do I love it, but so does my daughter Madison.
Last Sunday I began to regret my decision to have her sit with us in church when she started to get just a tad restless...until I gave her my iPhone (sound muted of course) to play her favorite game - Flight Controller - where your job is to land planes at an airport hoping to avoid crashing them which ends your game.
Just some quick observations:
I typically ask a group of salespeople this question:
"Who is your strongest competition?"
The answers vary...typically the answers include the names of the firms they compete against and occasionally the answer will even be "myself."
My thought - your strongest competition is the status quo - the tendency for your prospect to do nothing, to bury their head in the sand and hope things get better. Of course, as we all know, hope is not a strategy. How does waiting help your prospect solve their problem? (I assume here you started the selling process because they actually said they had a problem to solve vs. you begging them for an appointment or running numbers just to see what you could do for them).