Category: Phil Bernstein

Why don’t customers show up on time for meetings?

 

Over the past week, I’ve spent nearly 90 minutes waiting for clients who weren’t at their offices or stores when we arrived.

• One forgot about the meeting and stayed home from work.
• One wrote 10:00 on his calendar when we thought it was at 9:30.
• One told us he had been waiting for us at the appointed day and time — a week earlier.

The account executives who had arranged the meetings were frustrated and embarrassed. They’d all been in touch with their clients in the days leading up the the appointment — some by email, some by phone.

All had, at my request, called the clients on the phone the day before or the day of to confirm the meeting.

It wasn’t enough.

Sales Skills:
It’s Time to Bring Back a 19th Century Tool

Those of us who remember selling in the 90’s or earlier were taught to send handwritten thank-you notes after meetings. I learned through experience that a handwritten note before a meeting increased the odds that the meeting took place.

It’s time to bring the handwritten note back.

The format is simple: one sentence that includes the date, time, and location of the meeting. It goes into an envelope with a stamp.

Email is an ineffective way to confirm a meeting. Your prospects get dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of emails every day. They can’t read them all, and they don’t.

A phone message left with a gatekeeper has a 50/50 chance of being delivered.

As for voice mail… don’t get me started. An increasing number of otherwise-responsible businesspeople don’t bother listening to theirs.

The handwritten note beats email because it’ll be the only one your client gets that day. Unlike voice mail or email, your note will be noticed… and opened.

It gets past the gatekeeper and lands right on your prospect’s desk.

Three Tips To Get Maximum Power From Your Note

1. Send the note at least two days before the meeting. Even in town, it’ll take that long for the Postal Service to deliver it.

2. Always include a business card — in case your client has a conflict, the card gives her an easy way to contact you to reschedule.

3. Handwriting the address and putting a real stamp on the envelope makes it look more personal, and increases the chance it’ll get opened quickly.

It’s harder than ever to get your prospect’s attention and time these days. The handwritten note may be a 19th-century technology, but it’ll make a meeting happen in the 21st century.

 

[reminder]

In Montana, I once sent a television salesperson to a doctor’s office for a white coat.

 We were working on a proposal for a doctor who wanted to market a procedure she had developed. I’d written a script in which the doctor would deliver the message herself on camera, and wanted to show her how the ad might look.

For that, we decided to produce a version of the commercial in advance of the presentation — a “spec ad”.

Of course, we couldn’t ask the doctor to appear in the spec — that would’ve spoiled the surprise. So the AE went to the doctor’s office and borrowed a lab coat.

 

Sales Skills: The Power of the Spec Ad

Spec ads are a very powerful way to move an advertising prospect toward a buying decision.

Why do they work so well? One of the best explanations comes from an old radio sales training recording by Jim Williams*:

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.

The principle is the same in the Age of the Smartphone as it was when we operated on tape: use radio to sell radio. Use TV to sell TV.

[bctt tweet=”Technology has changed. Human nature hasn’t. Spec ads should be in your sales arsenal.”]

In the demo we produced for the Montana medical clinic, the AE played the role of the doctor. It was not award-winning work — the station Production Department was very busy with paying clients, so they banged ours out quickly.

When we presented, production quality didn’t matter. The doctor immediately imagined herself in front of the camera. She went back to her office to make sure she had the money for the campaign, and signed the contract the same day.

Spec ads work for the same reason that test drives work on the car lot: customers are beginning to experience “ownership” of the product. You are putting them, mentally, behind the wheel.

You can’t make a commercial in advance for every proposal — production departments are busy and frequently undermanned. Pick your spots carefully, make them count, and take your Production Director to lunch every now and then.

Deployed properly, spec ads will move your prospects one step closer… a BIG step closer… to buying. Use ’em.

[reminder]

* 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.

 

 

 

Not long ago, I took a “no” from a client who should have said “yes”.

I didn’t react well.

That weekend, I spent a lot of time stewing about the effort I’d put in, the difficulty of communicating with the decision-maker through a third party, and my firm belief that if he’d had the guts to try what I’d recommended, it would have been a profitable investment for him.

What snapped me out of my snit was an old (from 2008) post from Seth Godin called “Two Ways to Deal With No” . Godin lays out the choices this way:

You could contact the organization that turned you down and explain that they had made a terrible mistake, the wrong choice and a grave error…

or

You could be more gracious than if you’d won the work. You could send a thank you note for the time invested, you could sing the praises of the vendor chosen in your stead and you could congratulate the buyer, “based on the criteria you set out, it’s clear that you made exactly the right choice for your organization right now.”

The full post, which you can read in its entirety here, has much to ponder.

I’ll add a thought of my own — advice I’ve given many times when I’ve conducted sales training, and which I managed to forget during my bout of resentment:

[bctt tweet=”A no isn’t the customer’s fault. There’s always something you could’ve done differently.”]

Don’t blame the customer for not buying. It’s a losing strategy, and most of the time you’re wrong. In the course of the sales process, you have choices in how you present your ideas. There’s always a way you could have done it differently.

If the choices you made didn’t result in a sale, your mental energy is more profitably invested in thinking about what adjustments you’ll make in your presentation the next time you get a chance.

Godin’s second option will go a long way toward ensuring that the chance will come again.

[reminder]