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Weekend: 10AM - 5PM
Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Work Hours
Monday to Friday: 7AM - 7PM
Weekend: 10AM - 5PM
I have a very important question to ask you. It is a question everyone of your prospects and customers asks when they see your caller ID show up on their phone, when you call for an appointment or when you send them an email. It’s the same question you ask every time someone wants a piece of your time.
But I’m getting cold feet asking you that question is. So before we go ‘there’ let’s do a very important thought experiment. I promise that you’ll make money if you think on this.
Take a piece of paper and divide it into three columns
Written – emails, mailings, brochure drop offs, social media postings
Phone – cold calls, Skype, IM, follow up calls, any cell phone or land line conversations
Meetings – appointments, presentations, any face-to-face encounter
Now write down the subjects you’ve communicated in those categories with your prospects and customers over the past few days or weeks. Be brief but think about the questions below and flesh them out in your columns. Ask yourself some things about these communications:
That is the scourge of today’s world. Everyone is too busy to see salespeople. We know that. We know how full our plates are.
Everyone of us has cringed when a certain phone number pops up on our cell phone. OMG -we think, this guy always wastes my time. Or, darn, this is going to be an hour long gab fest. Ok, let it go to voice mail. I’ll get to it latter.
Getting a person’s attention has become the hardest part of selling today. Voice mail blocks us out. Gatekeepers block us out. People simply don’t have the time to talk anymore. There seems always to be a hotter fire. People are dealing with the urgent instead of the important. And when they have the time they would rather do a hundred things to learn about what we’re selling rather than talk to a salesperson
Well, it’s simple – and it is THE question:
Have you earned the right to talk to that person?
Are you prepared to answer what everyone thinks in every communication?
Simple I said. Yup. But the absolutely most critical area glossed over by virtually everyone?
How do I know? Because customers tell me. Almost every survey done says things like
“Salespeople waste my time.”
“Sure, Joe is a great guy and I enjoy the free lunches but other than that I don’t get much out of meeting with him.”
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and answer the question “Why should I talk to you?”
Are you earning the right to talk to your customer? Of getting some of their time and attention?
If not, why not?
In all seriousness it comes down to one thing:
Sure you would. I would! Why is that?
If Bill called me or wanted to have a meeting with me I would move heaven and earth to make that possible. Nothing would get in the way of having that interaction with the founder of Microsoft. And there are thousands of people that fall into that category – the must talk to people if only they were interested in talking to me. Don’t you have a list of people that you’d talk to no matter what?
So again, why is that? What do they have that we don’t? Why do our prospects, our customers, our contacts blow us off? Why are they too busy to take a call or a meeting with us? Why won’t they move mountains to get us into their offices?
Don’t blow off these questions with trite answers like, well they’re famous or they’re rich. They weren’t always that way. In-fact the vast majority of those people were obscure regular folk struggling like you and me just to make it.
How about we do another thought experiment together and list the attributes of people we would talk to regardless of how inconvenient or even costly it would be. Does your list look like mine?
We all want the success of people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sir Richard Branson. We’d all like the incomes and selling stardom of Zig Ziglar, Joe Girard, and Tom Hopkins, just to name a few. If you don’t perhaps this isn’t the right website for you.
We have to be like the people we admire. You are not going to get the same results of winners without doing what winners do.
We have to become thought leaders in our business and industry. We have to be credible trusted advisers who bring value into every meeting, conversation and correspondence we have.
Frankly, how to do that is beyond the ability of any single blog post. However that is what 180SalesCoaching is for. Inside this site are the articles, coaching and support that turns salespeople into trusted advisers instead of talking brochures. We teach salespeople how to earn the right to talk with customers.
But the process starts with asking and answering for yourself:
Have you earned the right to talk to that person?