I know at least 80% of the people seeing this title are probably rolling their eyes thinking, “Why are we talking about this?” Some will be thinking, “I have my scripts, all I have to do is stick to the script…..” Others will think, “I’m experienced, I’ve made 1000s of calls, I know what to do……”
But customers, at least 72% would prefer not talking to a sales person—ever! Others complain, “All they talk about is their products, they don’t talk about what I want to talk about…..” “They don’t understand my business….. They don’t understand their products……”
For those customers that do see sellers, they are spending much less time with them—only 17% with all sellers.
Finally, time available for selling is, somehow, decreasing. We seem to have less time to make sales calls, or we have to make more calls in a fixed amount of time.
All of this leads to the conclusion that we have to make every minute, every call count. We need to start thinking, “How do we accomplish more with each call?”
If we do any kind of planning, our focus is usually on what we want to accomplish as a result of the call. We design the meeting to achieve our goals.
But what if we started thinking, “What does the customer want to, need to accomplish in the meeting?”
Or taking it further, as we talk to the customer about the meeting, what if we asked them their objectives and what they wanted to accomplish. In that way, we can prepare to help them achieve their goals.
Or even better, we could also share what we would like to accomplish and why it might be important to the customer. In doing this, they might be better prepared. For example, if we are in discovery and looking for certain information, the customer can come to the meeting with that information, or invite the most relevant people to the meeting.
The dynamics of meetings start to change. We begin collaborating, with the customer, in understanding how we get more accomplished in fewer meetings. We look at how we achieve our shared goals most effectively.
The “magic” starts happening, both we and the customer are aligned and purposeful in each meeting. We make more progress and we are progressing together.
As we become aligned in this process, we build deeper relationships, deeper understanding, deeper trust. And we get more done.
One of the things both our customers and we most value is our time. We want to be impactful and efficient in how we use our time.
Some years ago, in my own company, we took a different, more collaborative approach in our planning our sales calls on prospects and clients. They responded very positively, they appreciated the thinking process, in fact, they started reaching out, “Dave what’s our plan for the next call, we were thinking…..”
Before we started doing this, generally it took us 22 calls/meetings to close. After this, it took 9!
By improving what we accomplished in each meeting and with each customer, we not only drove higher win rates, but we freed up time to double our productivity.
Sales call planning is less about following a script, or planning for what we want to achieve. It’s more about making sure both the customer and we are prepared to move forward, together.
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