- Pre-call planning:
- Pre-determine your principal call objective. Data gathering and relationship building are necessary but not sufficient. Strong objectives must advance the sale.
- Do your homework in order to minimize fact-gathering questions
- “Before the call, write down at least three potential problems which the buyer may have and which your products or services can solve.”
- Preliminaries
- In large sales, first impressions do not matter all that much.
- Especially with senior people, do not dwell much on nonbusiness areas if at all
- Avoid talking about your products and services until late in the call
- Just establish who you are, why you are there, and gain permission to ask a question.
- Investigating (by asking open-ended or closed-ended questions)
- Situation: Ask a very limited number of fact-finding questions. Just enough to setup/uncover a problem. For instance, “What system/process are you using at present?”
- Problem: “The purpose of Problem Questions is to uncover Implied Needs.”
- Implication: The purpose of Implication Questions is to increase the size of the problem in the customer’s mind. For instance, “If x is happening, could that lead to an even worse y?”
- Need-payoff: Need-payoff questions are positive, solution-centered questions designed to have the customer express an Explicit Need. “How would you find (related benefit) useful?” Note: “The worst point to ask a Need-payoff Question is when the customer raises a need you can’t meet.”
- Demonstrating capability:
- “Make Benefits showing how your product/service meets Explicit Needs which have been expressed.”
- “Benefits… involve showing how you can meet an Explicit Need… Unless the customer first says, ‘I want it,’ you can’t give a Benefit.”
- “In larger sales, Features have a negative effect when used early in the call and a neutral effect when used later.”
- Obtaining commitment
- “Larger sales contain a number of intermediate steps that we call Advances.”
- Use a very limited number of closing questions on only after ___’
- “Sellers who were most effective… would… ask the buyer whether there were any further… concerns that needed to be addressed.”
- “Successful salespeople pull the threads together by summarizing key points [especially benefits] of the discussion before moving to the commitment.”
- Suggest as a next step “the highest realistic commitment that the customer is able to give.”
Other great tidbits:
- “Successful sellers concentrate on objection prevention, not on objection handling.”
- “In a multi-call sale, the most important discussions and deliberations go on when the seller isn’t present.”
- In large sales, costs to the buyer include money, effort, and reputation
- “The most important lessons come from the way you review the calls you make. … Ask … Did I achieve my objectives? What would I do differently?”