Ask, Don’t Tell
I took a couple of sales calls this week. Has this ever happened to you?
On both occasions, I listened patiently while the salesperson talked for several minutes without even giving me an opportunity to respond. During the most recent one, I was definitely going to say no well before she even finished her pitch, and it further amazed me how long her pitch actually was without learning anything about me.
I was particularly poignant about this call being that I already do business with this company. The company that fertilizes my lawn was calling to ask about mosquito control in my yard. As a rule, we try not to spray additional chemicals around the property, So this is not a service that I'm interested in, but it took this young lady three or four minutes before she even asked me a question. Furthermore, that question, "what are you going to do about mosquito control in your yard this year?" was exactly where she should have started. Someone less polite, (or someone less of a glutton for punishment in listening to sales pitches), would have hung up before she got anywhere near that question.
In short, most salespeople, maybe even you, are losing prospects before you even give them a chance to engage with you. I don't know about you, but that seems like a HUGE problem and a waste of time, especially when the solution is so simple.
If you're making a call to make an appointment, then it makes sense to briefly justify why that appointment will be valuable before you make the ask. It's different, however, if you're going to ask for money (a final commitment) instead of a meeting (a commitment to engage).
If you are making a call to make a sale like this telemarketer was, you need to be able to engage in the sales conversation right away. The word "conversation" suggests that there are two people involved, and in most cases, only one of them is anticipating the exchange beforehand. Do you really believe the best way to tackle that is to read a script and essentially play a commercial?
I know there are things you want to tell your prospect. I know there are big differentiators and outcomes you can create that nobody else can. However, if they're not ready to talk about them, then they're not going to hear you when you speak.
I had an idea recently, and I asked some friends of mine to challenge me on it. To my surprise, there weren't actually many holes to poke in the theory. My thought was that the only way you can get real engagement without asking a question was by using blatant hyperbole (not usually the right kind of engagement) or by making a (lucky) assumption and stumbling upon the exact thing that is on your prospect's mind at the time of your call.
It seems like questions are the clear way to move ahead here.
So, how do you ask good questions? There are great books written on the topic, but I'll give you a head start here, as I did a few weeks ago on the Daily Sales Tips Podcast.
Instead of making the value statement about your product or service, ask a question that will start a conversation about the problem it solves. As an example, I'll use the mosquito control example from above. Instead of telling me about the perimeter service, how much it costs, and what it does (yes, she did it in that order), she could have asked, "What are you doing about mosquito control in your yard this summer?" This is an open-ended question that begs a response that you could actually create a conversation with, not one that can be answered with a yes or a no. A question that you already know the answer to.
Create two good questions for every value statement. If you've got five good differentiators, that's ten questions and ten different conversation openers. You could almost create a quarterly prospecting campaign around something like that, or I suppose you could keep trying to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time and hope that somebody has been waiting for your call with their wallet open waiting to buy from you. It occurs to me that you're more likely to create engagement with the former, and even if you don't make that sale, you might just learn something that will help you make the next one. It's really tough to learn from conversations that never materialize.
What do you think? Join the conversation in the Rethink The Way You Sell Community.
Jeff Bajorek
Real. Authentic. Experience.
There’s a big difference between knowing how to sell and being able to. Jeff Bajorek spent over a decade in the field as a top performer. He’s been in your shoes. He knows what it will take. He can help you succeed.
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