In sales and marketing we are always being told to start with a strong sales pitch or promotion and unsurprisingly it undermines your credibility and ensures you’re ignored.
Today more than ever, we need to start doing things differently and that first contact should start with a conversation that opens up a channel of trust between customer and seller.
Your job in the early stages is to discover whether there is a real fit for what you do, not to close down a meeting or sale at your earliest convenience. Instead spend time establishing whether an opportunity actually exists before moving on, especially when you consider that statistically most sales are lost right at the beginning.
It’s possible to side step the gut wrenching rejection of sales and marketing campaigns that achieve little to no return from all your hard effort and time invested by doing away with unworthy strategies. These are the true root cause of why prospects and customers are turning you out, or stone walling you.
Stop chasing down prospects that are not a good fit for what you do, instead get down to the truth of whether a business opportunity really does exists. It’s a probability outcome like all things, so learn to stack the odds in your favour and spend time where your time is worthwhile spent. Need alone does not reveal the capability and motivation to proceed further with you as a supplier, so decisions are complex.
Don’t parry objections like they are some kind of obstacle to a sale, instead see them as being valid issues. Explore and understand them and provide credible ways of addressing them. Always be honest and open in your approach and respond in exactly the same way that you opened the conversation up in the very beginning.
Stay away from old school defensive get out ploys that try and justify the price of your product or service and pump up your business credibility as they only aid in creating more sales pressure when you’re not addressing problems or desires that your customers need to resolve or fulfil now.
Realise that because of these changes prospecting and cold calling is becoming less effective, so you need to find other ways that allow you to reach your audience more effectively and use prospecting and cold calling appropriately.
When asked more people have made bad buying decisions based on a cold call than anything else.
Take a look at this blog post called “The Biggest Lie In Sales” which outlines some of the actual statistics.
I struggled with these concepts myself at first but I knew somewhere deep down they were right as the buyer in me was crying out in agreement. When I cast my mind back to those times in my career where things really worked well for me it was where I was given the space to be myself, to be natural and to understand my buyers and how I could help them.
When you pull back from the constant selling barrage and start helping prospects and customers to buy, things start to change.
If you found this post interest you’ll love this guide the: 14 Secrets To Sales And Marketing Integration That Maximise Business Development
You might also find this post interesting from Sharon-Drew Morgen on Why Sales Fails.
Written by business development consultant Nic Windley who also advises businesses in the capacity of a marketing consultant and sales consultant to generate more leads and convert more sales.
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