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Sell On The First Call
Author: Dave Donelson, President, Enterprise Learning Center
One of the concepts I’ve been preaching and practicing for years is also one that is very often misunderstood: I believe you should present a specific idea-based proposal to every prospect on your very first call on them.
This suggestion invariably sends traditional consultive sellers into convulsions and they say things like, “How can you make a proposal without ascertaining the need??“Won’t the prospect think you’re arrogant to come in with a proposal the very first time you meet them??“What if your proposal is wrong??
This response comes from a lack of understanding of my method. You’ll notice that I want to make a proposal on the first call—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that call will be the first time you’ve visited the prospect’s business. Nor does it mean that you haven’t done a needs analysis. In fact, the time and effort you put into needs analysis (before the first call) will dwarf that of a typical consultive seller who goes into the first call with questionnaire in hand. And your needs analysis will be more accurate, which will mean a more accurately targeted proposal.
The typical consultive sales process begins with a “needs analysis? call during which you query the prospect about themselves so that you can then come back on the second call with a good proposal. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the intentions of that approach, but in my experience it’s seldom worked out the way it’s supposed to. There are several reasons why this is true.
The Truth About Consultive Selling
For one thing, few prospects will give you the time to answer your questions unless they’re already interested in your product. So you’ve eliminated a large group of prospects who won’t give you the first appointment. I’ll grant that pre-qualifying prospects this way may be a good time management method, but I can’t help but believe that the “not interested?prospects could be a very valuable source of new business. And that number’s growing every day because the “needs analysis?approach is hugely over-worked and more and more prospects refuse to invest their time in it.
Prospects are bombarded with offers to study their financial needs, manufacturing systems, advertising plans, and insurance programs. “It’s a valuable study without any obligation to buy?is an offer they’ve heard so many times that they’ve become immune to the pitch.
What can be even more discouraging is that, in many cases, the same prospect has undergone the consultive needs analysis multiple times with the same company because there’s such high turnover in its sales force. And they’ve gotten nothing in return except another proposal to buy which looks suspiciously like the last proposal they got from that company’s previous salesperson. In other words, fewer and fewer prospects are falling for the “needs analysis?gambit.
But what about those that do let you in the door to answer your questions? While generalizations can be dangerous, I don’t believe that they’re going to give you the best, most accurate information on which to base your proposal. They wouldn’t be seeing you unless they already had some pre-conceived notion of what they would like to buy from you. This, in turn, will tend to color the answers they give to your needs analysis questions. Not that the prospect would lie to you, necessarily. It’s just that when someone already knows the answer, they tend to interpret the question to fit it. And their interpretation of your question may not be the same as yours, with some possible confusion over the answer as a result.
And that’s assuming they’re fully cooperative to begin with. Most consultive selling questionnaires can be boiled down to one question: What’s your budget? That’s where the real problems arise. Asking a prospect about their budget automatically limits the size of your proposal—it has to fit within that budget. And, if the prospect under-spends on your type of product or service (which many do knowingly or not), those limits leave money on the table and do a disservice to the client.
In addition, this question will often generate useless answers because most people are pretty sensitive about giving out financial information to perfect strangers. Here are the types of common responses to the budget question ranked by frequency of response:
1. Under-stated purposefully to squeeze your prices
2. Under-stated purposefully to keep you from making a big proposal
3. Under-stated accidentally because the prospect doesn’t know
4. It’s none of your business
5. Doesn’t have a budget
6. Accurately answered
The Alternative Approach
A better way to gain the information you need to make a good proposal is to do some research on your own before you even make your first appointment. The sources of information are huge—starting with market data from the US Census Bureau’s web site (www.census.gov) and loads of information about target demos from the prospect’s industry trade publications like Automotive News, Progressive Grocer, or Nation’s Restaurant News.
You should also invest a little time in sizing up the prospect’s business. Take a walk through his store. Count the cars in the parking lot. Chat with the clerks. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll learn a tremendous amount of useful information.
With a small investment of your time in research, you can pretty accurately estimate the prospect’s potential spending and develop a proposal you can deliver with confidence on your first call.
Every Sales Call Is A Transaction
When you make your first call without a proposal, all the prospect knows is that you’re there to get something from him (information and time) and he’ll get something in return (a proposal) sometime in the future. You should look on every sales call as a transaction in which items of value change hands. Even if a sale doesn’t occur, information changes hands—and that’s an item of value. In a solid transaction, items of equal perceived value are exchanged in a two-way process. On the consultive sell first call, the prospect gets nothing of value in return for his or her time and cooperation.
In the creative selling system first call, though, the seller “pays? for the prospect’s time with an idea. And ideas are valuable. What you get for your payment is information about the prospect. That information comes in the form of responses to your proposal—not as answers to your direct questions. Since the responses are spontaneous and voluntary, they’re generally more accurate than answers to questions. For the same reasons, the prospect will often give you a greater amount of information because they’re not limited by the specific subject of your question.
So think about it for a moment. Who will make a better first impression, the salesperson who asks the prospect to supply the information or the one who has done some homework first? The one who meets the prospect with a questionnaire or the one who offers an idea based on the time they’ve invested on the prospect’s behalf?
Copyright 2000 Donelson Sales Development Associates, Inc.
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To learn more about Creative Selling, visit www.elconline.com, the Internet’s only site offering live on-line sales and management training. And watch for Dave Donelson’s new book, Creative Selling: The Foolproof System to Unleash Your Sales Potential, available in your favorite bookstore.
Dave Donelson has worked with clients in fields as diverse as manufacturing, broadcasting and cable, publishing, construction, retailing, packaged goods, consumer services, and specialty line insurance.
His career includes local TV station management and ownership, national sales representative management, structural steel fabrication and construction management, and the creation and operation of his consulting firm, Sales Development Associates and the Enterprise Learning Center.
Dave’s client roster has included nearly one out of seven US commercial television stations. In addition, he has consulted on a variety of projects with companies and governmental agencies in the Middle East, Africa, South and Central America, and Europe. He is a frequent speaker on Creativity in Sales and Management.
He can be contacted at (914) 949-7483 or via email to davedonelson@elconline.com
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