Have you told the client what they’re supposed to do next?

At the conclusion of a needs analysis meeting, I often ask the client to email me something.

Usually it’s an example of advertising they’re doing elsewhere. Sometimes it’s a copy of a brochure or flyer.

I do this for two reasons:

The obvious reason: I want to see or hear their existing advertising.

The under-the-surface reason: It’s a test.

The act of sending the email is often more important than what’s in the email. If the client does what I ask them to do, they’re interested and engaged.

I’ve occasionally received emails while I’m in the car on the way to the next appointment — that means the client’s excited and eager to see what I come up with.

Sometimes it takes a day or two, and a reminder call from the AE, to get the material. Not to worry — the client’s interested but busy.

Sometimes it never comes at all.  If they can’t be bothered to send a simple email, it usually means they’re not particularly interested in the process.

What Should The Client Do Next?

We often talk about a call-to-action in advertising…giving the target viewer or listener a specific action to take.

What’s often lost is that there should always be a similar instruction in every sales interaction. Each step of the way, you want the client to do something that brings them closer to making a purchase.

Before each call or meeting, ask yourself two questions:

1. What, exactly, do I want the client to do when this conversation is over? This is Plan A.

2. If they’re not willing to do that, what’s Plan B? What else could I have them do?

If you’re presenting a proposal, Plan A is likely to be closing the sale — a binding signature on an order. 

What if they’re not willing to sign?

Plan B could be the client telling you what specific changes to the offering are needed, what additional information if necessary…

…but that’s not enough. 

If you’re going to re-work the proposal, what’s the client going to do?

Anthony Iannarino, author of the forthcoming book The Lost Art Of Closing, puts it this way:

Your prospective client tells you they’ll get back to you with a time for a follow up meeting. You agree, deciding it’s okay to wait for them to call or email you. You have lost control of the process. You are now working on your client’s timeline, and that means it’s going to take you longer to win their business—should they get back to you—and you are going to postpone the time it takes  to provide them with the best results to win.

In an acceptable Plan B scenario, the client must agree to take an action as well. Ideally, it’s an agreement for a follow-up appointment at which, if you make their requested changes, they will agree to buy.

Keep in mind: “Why don’t you call me some time next week?” is not an appointment. An appointment has a date, time, and location, and it goes on both of your calendars.

Without that commitment, you’ve got nothing.

Years ago in my radio sales days, I made a cold call to the owner of an office supply business. I asked for a meeting, and the prospect asked me to send information instead.

I pushed for a meeting and got nowhere. So I wrapped up the call this way:

Me: Can I ask you a question?

Client: Sure.

Me: If I send you information, are you going to read it?

Him: (pause) Probably not.

Me: Then why should I send it to you?

Him: Then don’t send it!

Me: I won’t!

Him: Fine!

I may have hung up on him. He may have hung up on me. It may have been simultaneous.

But I knew what I needed to know — if he couldn’t commit to reading my information, he wasn’t a prospect.

Sales is a series of commitments on both sides. Decide an action, and a Plan B action for your prospect to take, and insist on a commitment.

[reminder]

How do you handle a rude customer? Some of the worst advice I’ve ever seen on this topic showed up in an unexpected place recently.

I’m a regular reader of Geoffrey James’ “Sales Source” column in Inc. Magazine. I agree with his advice sometimes, and disagree at other times. When I disagree, it is usually with the belief that his point of view has some merit.

Not this time.

In James’ column How To Handle a Rude Prospect he tells the story of a customer who’d stopped responding to emails.

Because I’m something of an expert of sales emails, my business manager asked my advice. He framed the question as follows: “how can we get him to reply to our emails so we can set up the meeting and win him as a new customer?”

However, I framed the question differently: “Why would we want to work with a jerk who suddenly stops answering emails?” Either he’s being rude, he’s a procrastinator, or he’s just plain incompetent. Or some combination of all three. Who needs that?

So, rather than suggesting techniques to get a response (which I can almost always get), I sent the prospect this short email:

John,

I just wanted you to know that since you’re not answering our emails I’ve concluded that you’re not the kind of person with whom I’d be comfortable working.

Geoffrey

 

Here’s the problem with this tactic: it requires the ability to read the prospect’s mind — the mind of a person James had never met. Otherwise, he was just guessing at the reason for the silence.

Perhaps James guessed correctly: the prospect was being rude, a procrastinator, or incompetent. 

But it’s also possible something else was going on in the client’s world that made it difficult or impossible to respond.

• A major reorganization at the office.
• An unexpected project dumped in his lap from above.
• A death or serious illness in his family.

Any of these things  — or something else entirely — could have moved a meeting with James’ company from the top of the priority list to the very bottom. 

Rather than try to find out what it was, James responded to perceived rudeness with genuine rudeness, and burned the whole bridge down.

He’s fine with that.

Bottom line: you don’t want to ‘win’ a customer who will be rude or abusive. Therefore, you should immediately and irrevocably cut off contact with a prospect the moment that prospect acts in a rude or inconsiderate manner.”

James and his company had plenty of other options. It was a great opportunity to use Chris Lytle’s extremely effective “Quick Question” email.

They could even have stopped calling for a while, concentrated on more immediate opportunities, and then tried again three months down the road. 

Instead, James went out of his way to turn a maybe-prospect into an enemy. 

Before we burn down bridges and ruin everyone’s day, just a quick moment to wonder, “what if there was something misunderstood?”

It’s a lot easier to ask than it is to go to all the trouble of breaking things.” — Seth Godin

A while back I made a presentation to the partner of a law firm. The guy spent the entire meeting glancing at me and texting on his phone. His evident rudeness ticked me off, but I held my tongue.

There was something I didn’t know, and when I found out what it was my irritation turned to gratitude and respect. You can read about what I learned here.

Here’s my bottom line: what seems like rudeness may have another explanation. Before you set fire to the relationship, it behooves you to find out.

You don’t know what you don’t know. 

[reminder]What’s your best advice for dealing with a rude client?[/reminder]

 

Some people go hang gliding for thrills. Some climb mountains. I read sales books.

Here are some lessons I picked up from sales books in 2016:

1. A few months ago a roofer in the Southeast rescheduled a meeting three separate times before cancelling it entirely. The AE and Sales Manager I was working with were angry at the client, but this passage offers an alternative explanation:

 Before you can even sell your product, the customer must purchase your selling time, which is comprised of your own time as well as the information you can provide to help the customer move closer to making a decision.

The currency the customer will use to purchase your selling time is her time… For her investment of time, she has to receive something of value from you in return that is equal to or exceeds her perception of the value of her time. That means that in each instance a customer invests in your selling time, you have to provide value in the form of information that will help move the customer at least one step forward in her buying process…

…If you provide something of value in exchange for the time the customer invests with you, then the customer will reward you with additional time to continue to sell to her.  Andy Paul, Amp Up Your Sales: Powerful Strategies That Move Customers to Make Fast, Favorable Decisions

The roofer had met with this salesperson before, and had arrived at a perceived value for another meeting. Each day, in his mind, the roofer made a business decision — there were other, more valuable, ways for him to use his time.

2. Have you ever called someone after hours, planning to leave a voice mail, and found yourself tongue-tied when they answered “live”? It’s because you weren’t prepared for all the ways the call could go.

The concept below sounds almost blindingly obvious, but I’ve made thousands of sales phone calls over the years, and this way of thinking never occurred to me until I read these words:

 Calls can go one of three ways—your prospect answers, a gatekeeper answers, or it rolls to voicemail. Each one requires a different type of response from you. Be prepared no matter which way it goes.” Mark Hunter, High Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Often as you dial the phone, you’re prepared for one of the possibilities. Once you realize that there are three, and only three, it becomes simple to prepare for each call.

3. If you’ve ever pushed a customer to get a “yes”, walked out of the room with the “yes”, told your boss you had a done deal, and never actually consummated the sale, here is a pretty good explanation of what you may have received:

  I’ll let you in on a little secret. There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment. 

A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge.

A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action.

And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract.

The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same, so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used.”– Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Voss, a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI, mixes hair-raising war stories with advice that can apply to anything from kidnapping ransom talks to sales negotiations. It is his position that using manipulative techniques to get a client to say yes will only generate resentment — you may get a “verbal” from the client without ever getting any money.

4. A question I often ask during a needs analysis involves triggers. I ask the advertiser what’s happened in their customer’s world that’s caused the customer to need a product or service.

Jill Konrath has gotten me thinking about events in the advertiser’s world that would cause them to be open to a new advertising opportunity.

 

This trigger event acts as a catalyst, forcing these organizations to reevaluate how they’re doing things. Often, when seen through this new lens, the status quo is deemed insufficient to meet their changing objectives and requirements. At this point, the prospect may not be sure what to do. They just know that something has to change in the not-too-distant future…

If you know what these optimal trigger events are, you can pursue opportunities when you have this higher likelihood of closing an accelerated deal.” Jill Konrath, More Sales Less Time: Surprisingly Simple Strategies for Today’s Crazy-Busy Sellers.

Konrath advises asking your existing clients — in particular, those who’ve started with you in the past 6-12 months — what happened to cause them to change what they’d been doing. If you can find some common threads, you’ll know what kind of prospects to pursue in the future.

5. This last one isn’t a sales book, exactly — it’s Bruce Springsteen‘s autobiography.

Springsteen’s a musician, songwriter, and social commentator… but he’s also a salesman.

He’s gotten geeks like me to pay cash money for every album of new material he puts out, even though it’s all on Spotify. He’s re-sold us the old ones by turning them into box sets with outtakes. He’s convinced me to pay to get into 48 shows, and I’ll pay to get into more if the opportunity presents itself.

But he hasn’t just created a market for his records and his shows. Some of us will hand over money just to be in his vicinity.

Case in point: My wife, the lovely and talented PDXKnitterati, paid $35 and stood in line for hours for the opportunity to spend  – maybe – 10 seconds chatting with him as one of his minions snapped a photo. A woman in line flew to Portland from Chicago for the opportunity to stand for hours so she could spend those 10 seconds chatting with him.

Thousands of people did this, and as near as I can tell they all thought it was a great experience. I’d have done it if I’d been in town that day.

The guy can sell.

There are sales lessons throughout the book, but here’s the passage that’s stuck with me:

 1+1=3:  The primary math of the real world is one plus one equals two. The layman…goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills, and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire.” Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

That’s what the best salespeople do — we figure out a way to make one plus one equal three. 

A “tribute band” called Tramps Like Us is playing at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park in January. Tickets are $20. Face value for tickets to Bruce Springsteen’s last tour was $150, and they were going for well over that on the East Coast secondary market.

I’ve seen Tramps Like Us. They do a good job. Why would people pay $150 or more when they could see and hear roughly the same songs for $20?

Because when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play the songs,  customers believe they get something extra. 1+1 = 3.  

If all you offer to your customer is $3000 worth of commercials  for $3000, they will view you and your company as a commodity — anybody can do that. You’re Tramps Like Us.

The best salespeople… the ones who make careers of this — bring extra value to every interaction. Creative ideas, promotion ideas, business wisdom. Bring the value, and customers will pay $5000 for $3000 worth of commercials plus you.

–

This is my final post of 2016. I’ll be back next week with more advertising, marketing and sales value… and news of a sales book of my own.

Have a happy New Year — and go make one plus one equal three.