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Selling Techniques – Don’t
waste the prospect’s time!
© 2007 David Peterson
When prospecting through your list of suspects you may have to
engage 100 people or more before you find a solid prospect.
That is a lot of people but it is also a reality of many
businesses. This reality includes home-based businesses, MLM
networking businesses, and general product sales.
So if your goal is to hit 100
suspects in a row how do you go about staying sane in the
process? How do you stay sane and also keep the suspects and
possibly prospects harmlessly moving about their day?
You stay sane by remembering
the golden rule: Don’t waste your future prospect’s
time.
In the sales process of open,
probe, pitch, and close you are required to start asking
questions right after your opening statement.
Those open ended probing
questions are used by you to determine if the prospect has the
needs that your product can fill. Those probing questions are
open ended to keep your prospect from just answering a yes or
a no. They are open ended so you can get your prospect in a
conversation.
To keep yourself sane during
your 100 calls you have to quickly determine if you have a
suspect or a prospect. The easiest way to do this is to only
ask probing questions to those people that will give you the
“time of day.” I like to call these people that will give
you the time of day – happy customers. They may not actually
buy your product but they will at least give you the chance to
open, probe, pitch, and close.
A good rule of thumb is out of
100 calls that you will make today maybe 10 prospects will
give you the time of day to speak to them at that moment in
time. Of those 10 maybe two will eventually buy from you. That
is a 2% close rate but it is a 20% close rate of actual
prospects. The other 90 people were not prospects at all, they
were suspects.
Whatever your close rate is
(you should know this number) you have to spend your time
talking to people who want to talk to you.
Don’t throw away your list of
the other 90 people. Just don’t waste your time or theirs by
time trying to get them engaged into your sales process today.
With that group of suspects just try to close for future
contact.
Here is a good example of
closing a suspect for future contact:
Mr. Jones it doesn’t sound
like you would be a good fit for my network business at this
moment; however would you mind if I periodically send you
out informal information?
Why didn’t the other 90
people want to talk to you today? It could be a variety of
reasons; none of them have anything to do with you or your
product.
Life is happening to your
prospect today.
Here is a short list of why
they don’t want to participate in your sales process today:
- Their car didn’t start.
- Their dog died.
- Their boss is stressing them
out.
- Their bank account is
overdrawn.
- Their project is past due.
- Their co-workers are
annoying them.
- Their baby is crying in the
background.
You get the picture; it’s not
you causing them not to get engage into your sales
conversation… its life.
You may have the perfect
product for all of the situations above but at THIS moment in
time it may not be an appropriate time to talk.
Don’t waste your time or
their time with a pitch. Recognize that you have the perfect
product for their situation and close for future contact.
Take the other 10 people that
will give you the time of day and begin your open ending
probing questions. Move this group from the suspect stage to
the legitimate prospect stage.
Now if you can’t get any of
the 100 people to talk to you then you have an opening
statement problem. It really is you and not life causing that
problem.
If you spend your time talking
to the 10 people that will want to talk to you then you will
begin to enjoy sales. You will gain confidence that people
really want and need your product. You will actually begin to
close sales.
If you spend your time forcing
probing questions on people who really can’t spend the time
with you today then I will give your business a 1 in 1,000
chance of succeeding. Your failure will probably come from you
giving up, not from the number of actual prospects there are
for your particular product.
Sincerely,
David
Peterson
Author
of:
Been There - Done That
David
Peterson's Search Engine Optimization Guide
Please
send all correspondence to: questions@usreference.com
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