Three members of the law firm were on time for our presentation, but the managing partner showed up 20 minutes late.
Once we got underway, he kept checking his smartphone, reading and sending texts. Midway through the meeting his phone rang. He answered it, and without even a glance at me he got up and left the room. His assistant signaled me to keep going, so I continued.
A few minutes later the managing partner came back in, sat down, and resumed texting. I did my best to conceal my growing frustration with his rude behavior.
Eventually we got to the part where it was time to ask for a commitment.
That’s when when he dropped the bomb:
“I’m not sure when I can take a look at this,” he said. “My wife is out of town, and she was in a car wreck this morning. She’s in the hospital; we’re hoping she’ll be released tomorrow. As soon as this meeting’s over, I’ve got a six-hour drive to go see her.”
He showed us some pictures of his wife’s car she had emailed to him – the entire front end smashed in, and the air bags deployed.
At that moment, all my irritation went away, replaced by a strong sense of guilt. He hadn’t been disrespecting us – the fact that he showed up for the meeting at all was a powerful sign of how strongly he believed in keeping his commitment to me and the station.
Under the circumstances, his lateness and divided attention were more than understandable.
Here’s the Sales Lesson
We don’t know what we don’t know.
When we sit down with a customer, we may not have any idea what else is going on in their world. They may have just been chewed out by their boss; a family member may be ill or injured.
The advertising plan we’re offering may be the most important thing on our mind… but there might be a much bigger problem on their mind.
How to Deal With a Sales Call Going South
If a client’s not reacting the way you expected them to, here are some steps you can take:
Double check at the beginning: “It’s been a couple of weeks since we last talked. Has anything changed since then?” This simple question, which I’ve learned (the hard way) to ask before every presentation, can prevent much heartache.
Slow down. Rather than plunging headlong into whatever you prepared in advance, check in with the client first. “Are you ready to hear my idea?” and “Am I on the right track with this?” give them a chance to express concerns before you get in too deep.
Use the direct approach — ask what’s going on. “You seem a little preoccupied today. Is something going on?” or “Is this still a good day to do this?” invite them to share a hidden issue.
Offer to come back another time. This is a tough one for us, since we may have put in hours of preparation in the days leading up to the appointment. But occasionally it’s necessary.
Sometimes your client is just not in the right frame of mind to process your proposal. They’ll be grateful if you conduct a strategic retreat, and your professionalism will pay off later.
Dave Trott recently recounted the launch of world’s first underground railway — and the “mechanical staircase” that would bring people up and down. It was 1911 in London.
Today everyone knows what an escalator is. You’ve probably ridden one in the last few days. But in 1911 this was a scary new concept for most people…and they didn’t want to ride it.
The railway operators posted signs promising that the ride would be safe, but nobody believed the signs.
So the authorities decided to show people how safe it was.
William ‘Bumper’ Harris was an employee who’d lost a leg in an accident.
He was told to come to Earls Court station and ride up and down on the escalator.
Just that, ride up and down, nothing else.
People at the bottom would see a one-legged man with crutches nonchalantly hop onto the escalator and ride it to the top.
Then he’d turn around, and people at the top would see a one-legged man with crutches nonchalantly hop onto the other escalator and ride it to the bottom.
‘Bumper’ Harris just did that all day.
When frightened passengers saw him do it they were reassured and ashamed.
Reassured that if a one-legged man could do it anyone could.
And ashamed that they were ever frightened in the first place.
So they stopped worrying and hopped on.
After a day of ‘Bumper’ riding up and down, everyone was using the escalator as if it was the most normal thing.
And once that happened, the problem disappeared.”
When you call on a new prospect — one who’s never used your medium before — you’re selling an escalator. The client is wondering:
If I advertise with you, what’s it going to look like? What’s it going to sound like?
How do I know it’s going to work?
You can answer those questions with words… or you can show ’em.
Photo by Africa Studio
If they’re wondering whether it’ll work, the best thing to show them is a success story — the story of someone like them who’s advertised with you (or your company) and made money.
Your prospect won’t be the first advertiser your station’s ever had — it’s been on the air a long time. Even if you’ve only been there a few months, your station’s got a track record.
There are lots of happy advertisers — “Bumpers” — getting good results right now.
A Good Idea: tell the stories.
Better: Let your clients tell the stories, with letters or emails.
Best: Let your clients tell the story on video.
Your production department may be able to do the recording and editing, but it’s not necessary. All you need is a smartphone, and you’re a videographer.
For a little extra money, you can improve the video quality with an inexpensive tripod and an external microphone . If you work in radio or TV, you might be able to borrow a mic from the production department or the newsroom. I travel with this one.
I’ve got dozens of advertiser testimonials from all over the country in my library — car dealers, attorneys, doctors, home improvement contractors, and more — talking about how broadcast and digital advertising, using the right creative and high frequency, has helped them grow their business.
These videos are usually two to three minutes in length, and they go a long way in convincing a prospect it’s both safe and beneficial to follow my advice.
I recently put three of them together on a “testimonial reel” — three advertisers I’ve worked with who have gotten great results. It looks like this:
How will the ad look or sound? You can answer that with a spec ad. After a solid needs analysis meeting, write a script and have your production department produce a basic version of the commercial.
What we’re doing is a thing called demonstration selling… it ranges from the tiny nibble of peach at your outdoor farmers market by the peach vendor to the one-ounce tube of shampoo they hang on your doorknob to the showy exhibition of all the uses from slicing and dicing of those famous knives on TV.
When you test drive a car, slip on new shoes and walk about or study the floor plan of an unbuilt home, you are involved in one of the many forms of demonstration selling.
When you enter your client’s office and play a cassette tape as part of your presentation you are doing demonstration selling. The words and sound that come from your tape recorder, regardless of content, are a demonstration of how radio works.
Thoughts come out of a small electric box and into the brain of the listener. That is the essence of radio. You are using radio to sell radio.
The tools have changed since Williams recorded those words. Cassettes are gone, replaced by digital files you can play for your client on an iPhone.
While the technology is different, human nature is not. Show your prospects what’ll happen, and they’re much more likely to get on your escalator.
* A tip of the hat to my friend Rod Schwartz for introducing me to Jim Williams, whose work has held up quite well in the decades since it was recorded. Rod has digitized some of Williams’ material, and you can listen to it here.
Converting a call-in to a sale is harder than it looks.
Photo by Mario Beauregard
During a Breakthrough Prospecting training session not long ago, a radio group Market Manager shared a frustration with me:
“Why aren’t we closing call-ins?” she said. “When they call us, it should be an easy sale, but we don’t get them on the air.”
There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip” — Old English Proverb
Sometimes the best players in the world miss an easy shot.
Like those seemingly routine plays, handling a call-in comes down to getting the fundamentals right. Even the best account executives can get lazy.
When a customer calls in, it’s tempting to just answer the questions they ask.
If they called for rates, or for the price of a sports sponsorship, maybe you should just give them the price and email them a package.
Maybe you had a short phone or email conversation with them, learned a little about what they wanted to do, and sent them a proposal…
…and the client ran with your competitor instead.
What did you miss?
Think about the last complex sale you took from a cold call to a successful close. You had to:
Build rapport and trust with the prospect.
Research the prospect online.
Conduct a thorough needs analysis.
Learn who the decision-makers were and what the decision-making process was.
Customize a proposal that met the prospect’s needs and desires.
Handle objections, and adjust the proposal based on client feedback.
Work through the process and move the sale to a close.
When a prospect calls your office out of the blue, it may feel like you’re already 2/3 of the way to a sale already. It’s tempting to skip some of the steps. After all, they called you — do you really have to do all this work?
Only if you want the money.
If you haven’t followed all the steps you’d follow if you’d called them, you’re taking a huge risk. You may not know:
What prompted them to call you.
What problems, they’re trying to solve by advertising.
The implications of those problems.
How much money they’re prepared to invest to solve those problems — it may be a lot more than the “budget” they gave you on the phone.
What other options they have for solving the problems, and who else they’re talking to.
Who the stakeholders are, and how the decision will be made.
In a particularly vexing scenario, the client calls for information, gets the information, and then disappears. What’s going on there?
According to James Muir, author of The Perfect Close, the client is convinced that further interactions will not have value.
The primary cause of a prospect going silent is that the sales agent has not been adding enough value throughout the sales process. Often, the salesperson has only been providing information about their products and services, and when we fail to provide any form of additional value, buyers assume this is all we’re good for. As a consequence, once they receive all the information about our solution that they need, they have no reason to continue engaging with us.
In this scenario, typically the final piece of information a prospect receives before going silent is our proposal – the price. Thus having received what they perceive to be the last useful piece of information from the salesperson, they cease communicating because they have no further use for us.
How do you deal with this?
Pretend you called them. Handle a call-in the way you would if you’ve developed the prospect from scratch.
Insist on a meeting — in person if at all possible.
Do your online research in advance of the meeting. My book Breakthrough Prospecting offers a method for that.
Conduct a thorough needs analysis at that meeting, so you know exactly what they’re trying to accomplish and why.
Customize a proposal that meets their needs exactly.
Insist on the opportunity to present the proposal rather than just sending it.
Following these steps takes more time and more effort. But it increases the odds your shot will go through the net, and the points will go on the board.
[reminder]What’s the most unusual call-in you ever received?[/reminder]
“A bed with a single nail sticking up will penetrate you the second you lie down. But a thousand nails can’t penetrate anything. The pressure of each nail is completely diffused by all the others around it.” — Bill Schley
Photo by Полина Выдумчик
If you spend any time watching television or listening to the radio, you won’t have to wait long to encounter a “laundry list” commercial — a 30- or 60-second recitation of claims:
A law firm lists every single area of practice, in the hope that one of them will interest a potential client.
A restaurant attempts to cram the entire menu into the commercial.
A dental practice wants the public to know that “we do it all!” — so checkups, implants, and laser treatments all get a mention.
When I meet an advertiser who’s running a campaign like this, I’ll ask how this “bed of nails” approach is working. In almost all occasions, it’s not working. The sales message is lost in the clutter.
[shareable]The best way to penetrate your target’s mind with a sales message is to pick a single nail.[/shareable]
For six years during my radio sales days, my biggest client was a Portland auto dealer. I wrote all of the commercials for all seven of his stores. And for most of the time during our relationship, we fought about the copy.
The dealer wanted lots of information in each commercial. He wanted a used car offer, and a new car offer, a mention of his service department, and, of course, the friendly staff.
I wanted one offer and a call to action.
Photo by ashumsky
For six years, the auto dealer fought to put more into the copy, and I fought to take details out. One day he got fed up with me and said, “Why don’t you just have the announcer talk faster?”
I said, “Joe, with our software I can make the announcer talk faster by pressing a button. But I can’t make the audience listen any faster.”
When you write a script for radio, television, or online video, think of each detail as if it’s a tennis ball.
If you toss one ball to a listener or viewer, they can probably catch it.
But if you fling a whole bucket of balls at your audience, they’ll miss ’em all.
Photo by WavebreakMediaMicro
When too much stuff flies at their heads, their minds shut down. It’s too much work.
Advertising’s the same way. Your targets are busy, tired, and distracted. They don’t have the energy or desire to wade through a bunch of details to find the one that matters to them. Too much detail makes the mind shut down.
Want an example of one-tennis-ball marketing? Think of McDonald’s.
As a restaurant, you may love it or hate it. But as a marketing company, McDonald’s has a brilliant, long-term track record of success. They know how to motivate a customer to get off the couch, drive past Burger King, Wendy’s and Taco Bell, and spend their money with them.
McDonald’s has a lot on their menu. Big Macs. Quarter Pounders. Chicken McNuggets. Egg McMuffins. Fries. Coffee.
But when you see a McDonald’s ad, it won’t be about the Bic Mac and the Quarter Pounder and the Chicken McNuggets and the Egg McNuggets.
It’ll be 30 seconds about a single product. One thought per commercial. Like this:
“The narrower you focus, the wider your message goes.”
“The more features you show, the less you are seen. The more details you provide, the more vaguely you communicate…
By capturing undisputed leadership in a single important benefit, you are most likely to be noticed, remembered, and associated with a series of other great benefits, made all the more credible because you have reached prominence in one meaningful specialty.”
Your goal, as an advertiser, as a business, is to determine what your one thing is…
Try to be as specific as possible. Think about your business, your company, and what separates you from the competition. For some of you reading this, the answer is obvious. Your company has some distinct advantage that makes you the better choice. For most reading this, the answer isn’t so obvious. You will struggle trying to pinpoint your ‘one thing.’
Answering these types of question should help you:
What do we do that no one else in our category does?
What can we claim that no one else can claim (or hasn’t yet)?
What special skill do we possess?
What piece of equipment do we have that no one else in our competitive landscape has?
What line do we carry exclusively in our market?
What’s our singular focus?
What’s our special offer?
What major designation have we achieved that none of our competitors have?
Simply put, why should someone come see you vs. anyone else in your competitive landscape?”
With so many things on their minds and so many distractions, your target won’t search the bed for the nail they’re interested in. Pick a single nail, and start pounding.
Sometimes a good sales book can explain what you just went through.
Photo by lunamarina
Last year, I was part of a group that met with a local bank.
The bank had three branches. We met with two people: the President of one of the branches, and his financial officer. They told us they were in charge of all the bank’s marketing, and we took them at their word.
We spent an hour learning about the bank’s history, challenges, and goals. The two guys we met with were candid about what they were hoping to accomplish; by the end of the meeting we had enough information to put together a pretty darn good plan.
A few days later we presented the plan to the President and the financial officer. They loved everything about it. The next step: they would present the plan at the next bank board meeting.
They were confident that they’d “get the deal done,” and we were confident in their ability to do that.
We were wrong. The plan was never implemented, because the board shot it down.
In our haste to make the sale, we missed the Commitment to Build Consensus. As Iannarino explains,
While you may have been taught that you need to find and work with “the authority,” likely someone with a C-level title, it’s now more likely that the power to decide has been distributed among multiple stakeholders, all of whom have a say in the change initiative. This means that you don’t need “the” decision maker. You need a consensus.”
This was the case with the bank. As it turned out, the leaders of the other two branches controlled the board, meaning they had a say in every advertising decision. Our plan met the needs of the people we’d met…but we hadn’t met the other branch leaders.
Because we hadn’t ever met them, our plan didn’t meet the needs of the others. They killed our idea in the board meeting.
According to Iannarino, closing a large, complex sale requires a total of seven separate commitments on the part of the client:
The Commitment for Time
The Commitment to Explore
The Commitment to Change
The Commitment to Collaborate
The Commitment to Build Consensus
The Commitment to Invest
The Commitment to Review
The Commitment to Resolve Concerns
The Commitment to Decide
The Commitment to Execute
Miss any one of the commitments, and your chance of making the sale drop significantly.
I read The Lost Art of Closing several months after the debacle with the bank. This paragraph explained our big mistake:
In human relationships, fast is slow and slow is fast. If you want to speed up the time it takes you to create an opportunity, win that opportunity, and deliver results to your client, slow down. Do what is necessary to get all the commitments you need leading up to the Commitment to Decide. If you want to slow down the entire sales process, just try skipping over some of the commitments you need, especially the Commitment to Build Consensus.”
The Lost Art of Closing changed the way I approach large sales, and is one of the Two Best Sales Books I Read in 2017.
The book’s title seems to promise a magic phrase that’ll get your prospects to sign every time. Instead, the book carefully lays out a process to effectively and respectfully keep a sale moving forward.
Muir starts by advising you to make sure you have the right mindset — to avoid showing up with “commission breath”. If your intent is in the right place, he then moves to a discussion on how to plan each interaction.
Muir advises writing down two objectives prior to each meeting:
A Sales Objective
A Call Objective
The Perfect Close defines a Sales Objective as “the revenue (or outcome) you anticipate generating by closing this particular opportunity with this customer.”
The objective must relate to a specific product or service that you offer. It needs to be measurable, have a target date by which it will occur, and be realistic for the client to be able to do.
Muir defines the Call Objective as “an advance or commitment that is the desired outcome of this particular sales encounter with this particular person or group.”
In other words — what do you want the client to do as a result of this particular meeting?
Muir discusses the big difference between
A Close — this happens when the customer firmly commits to buy.
An Advance — “a significant action that requires energy by the client — either in the call or right after it — that moves the sale toward a decision.”
A Continuation — “a situation where the sale will continue yet no specific action has been agreed upon by the customer to move the sale forward.”
There’s a huge gap in value between an Advance and a Continuation, and Muir’s book does an excellent job of helping the reader see why this matters. The big distinction:
If the client is not taking an action, it is not an advance. If the action the client takes requires little or no energy, it is not an advance.”
If the client agrees to a follow-up meeting, double-checks with Accounting to determine the budget, and ensures that all decision-makers will show up, it’s an Advance. The client is moving toward a buying decision.
If the client just invites you to give him a call some time next week, it’s a Continuation. The client isn’t moving, and neither is the sale.
Too often we as salespeople accept a series of Continuations. We put out all the effort, the client is passive, and the sale stalls. The Perfect Close is particularly good with advice on how to make sure the sale truly advances.
In the book’s introduction, Muir invites the reader to skip to Chapter 12, where he reveals the two-question technique that forms the basis of the book.
I skipped to Chapter 12. The best advice I can give you is: don’t skip.
When I initially read Chapter 12 by itself, I was disappointed. When I arrived there again after reading the previous chapters, it had much more meaning and value.
The Perfect Close will give you excellent, thought-provoking and actionable advice on how you can keep your sales advancing toward the conclusion you want.
There are no new sales problems. Everything you encounter has been dealt with by someone before.
A good sales book can help you make sense of the things you see on the street. Start one today.
[reminder]What’s the best sales book you read last year?[/reminder]
