Assembling A Customer

Yesterday, I was a panelist at a discussion titled "Why You Can't Close A Sale" -- it was part of the Small Business Expo held by the folks at the St. Louis Small Business Monthly.

After the discussion, one of the attendees approached me and asked me to clarify one of the opinions I shared.

First, the opinion was in response to the question: "What is a common mistake salespeople make when meeting with prospects?"

My response: "They go to the meeting with a different agenda than the prospect's, which creates an adversarial environment and decreases results."

Most salespeople have been taught to have one of two agendas when they go on a sales appointment:

• Some have been taught that the goal is to close the sale.
• Some have been taught that the goal is to either close the sale, or to get the "No" as fast as possible, so they can quickly move on.

The fallacy with both these models is that they are contrary to the prospect's agenda -- to learn what he or she must learn to make a smart choice. (The second model is closer to the prospect's agenda, but the focus on efficiency getting to "No" is not considerate of the prospect's needs, and does not create a relationship you can leverage to increase sales.)

This conflict of agendas creates an adversarial conversation, which makes establishing trust harder, which makes your sales cycles longer, which decreases the time you have for everything else and, ultimately, decreases the number of sales you'll close over the long term.

In the panel discussion, I advised that salespeople go to the appointment with the goal of helping the prospect make the smartest choice he or she can, "even if that choice is to buy from your most hated competitor." Yes, do this as efficiently as possible, but not at the expense of helping the prospect achieve his or her goal as well.

Then I added, "The results are: 1) you'll build great relationships with everyone; 2) you'll easily close the sales that should close; and 3) you'll actually get strong referrals from prospects who don't buy."

Pay close attention to that third point. Imagine how much less time you'll spend prospecting, marketing, networking, etc., if most sales appointments ended with either a closed sale or a referral to another decision maker.

The woman who approached me for clarification said, "I'm trying to imagine how this will work in the long term. Suppose I do as you say and change my goal to helping my prospects make smart choices, instead of trying to close sales. And suppose I get good at it and am closing 20 percent of my sales appointments.

"What would I do then to increase the percentage of sales appointments that close?"

Earlier in the discussion I talked about treating sales as an assembly line, where you engineer a system that produces customers. Once you've got the assembly line humming, you can change the processes on the line to change the outcome.

In the scenario this woman described, what she would do is add a step in her assembly line that said, "Determine the key differences between prospects who are suited to buying from us, and prospects who aren't." To make that determination, she could keep detailed notes on the differences between the prospects with whom she meets.

Once she identifies the key differences, she can move backwards through her customer assembly line and make changes that will increase the percentage of "perfect prospects" with whom she sets appointments, and decrease the opposite.

Ultimately, if you want total control over your sales results, you must treat sales as an engineering problem. Create your customer assembly line. Make sure everything that happens on that line is geared toward creating great relationships with the people who are most perfectly suited to buying, and with the people who can influence those buyers.

Once you've done that, you'll have what every salesperson and business owner wants even more than customers.

You'll have total control over a process that assembles customers.

And in the current economic crisis, I can't imagine many things a business owner would want more than control over his company's customer assembly process.

Gill E. Wagner, Sage of Selling
President of Honest Selling
Founder of the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association

Comments

[Andrew]

Wow.

It's commonsense that salespeople are rewarded for showing genuine interest in their prospect's needs - even when that need isn't in their best interest.

The old sales adage ABC (Always Be Closing) created huge amounts of frustration for me early in my sales career; when I asked for help the message I got was close, close, close. "But If all I do is close, close, close then when do I actually help prospects? I never got an answer to that question.

Great article Gill, thanks.