22 August 2008 6 Comments

A Sales Conundrum: Do We Need a Sales Meeting to Sell Nowadays?

If there’s one thing I know about selling professional services – it’s that my chances of making a sale go up exponentially if I can meet my prospect face to face. In fact in my 20+ years in business and over £20m of consulting projects sold – I’ve only ever sold one engagement (and a very small one at that) without at least one face to face client meeting.

Yet in my life as a buyer of services, I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to meet salespeople face to face. Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s that I’m increasingly used to being “in control” in other aspects of business life – especially on the internet. For whatever reason, I basically don’t want to be sold to. And I am confident enough in my knowledge of most service areas that I don’t need the “help” a salesperson to guide me.

In fact, when I recently bought some marketing information services, I selected a supplier I’d never met – but one that was prepared to provide me with all the information I requested over email. The other potential supplier insisted on trying to set up a meeting. Despite my requests for them just to tell me what I needed to know, they insisted they would need to meet me face to face to properly explain what they had to offer. As a result, I simply put off the meeting to a much later date (that will never happen) and went with the first supplier.

So should a salesperson push for a meeting with a potential client or not? There’s no easy answer to this conundrum. Obviously, the simpler, easier to specify the service is, the more possible it is to buy without a face-to-face meeting.

But the key determinant of whether a meeting will progress a sales is the attitude of the buyer. Is the buyer the sort of person who will resent a push for a meeting – or will (perhaps despite some initial resistance) it work in your favour? An experienced expert buyer is more likely to be able to buy without a meeting – but might not necessarily want to do so.

It takes skillful reading of the buyer – knowing when to push and when to back off – to navigate through this. One thing I can tell you though – don’t try to push me for a meeting.

Ian

Postscript It’s now May 2011, nearly three years after I wrote this post, and this trend has continued. In fact, it’s accelerated.

Back then, I’d only ever sold one project without meeting the client face to face. Today, almost all my coaching clients sign up after talking to me on the phone rather than meeting face to face.

Part of the change is that people are increasingly used to buying without meeting people. And part of the change, I think, is that because people do so much research on the web in advance of calling a business. In may case, theyll see my blog posts, videos, podcasts and a host of other material I’ve produced. They’ll get to see if I know my stuff – and they’ll get a feel for who I am and if they can work with me. If they can’t – they don’t call and they don’t waste their time or mine.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With:
14 August 2008 4 Comments

Sales: It’s the Small Steps that Count

The element of sales most visible to outsiders is the “big win”. The “rainmaker” seemingly works some magic in a presentation, or big meeting and returns home with the sale in the bag.

This often leads to a belief that the crucial element of the sale was that final event. When people look at what the salesperson did, and what skills they have; they focus on the final event. When they then try to reproduce that performance themselves or train and foster it in others they focus again on that final event – on big presentations and “closing”.

Of course, what they miss is all the small things the salesperson did over time to make the sale happen. The initial persistence in sending useful material to the potential client to eventually gain a meeting. The ongoing networking at client associations that meant the salesperson was well known and trusted by the key decision-makers. The connections the salesperson made to thrid parties who were able to help and advise the client in related areas. The careful listening to differing client perspectives – and the meeting the salesperson organised to help them reach consensus on their needs. None of these steps individually was enough to guarantee the sale – but added together they put the salesperson into a position where the final presentation was simply to confirm what had already been decided.

Effective salespeople seem to instinctively know that they need to repeatedly go the extra mile and plug away at these small steps – day after day, week after week, month after month. It’s not glamorous – but over time it’s effective.

If you want to reproduce effective sales behaviour it’s these seemingly little things you need your team to be able to do. And it’s often these things which are the hardest. Presentation and closing skills are so much sexier – and often easier for trainers to focus on than the real sales drivers – the persistent plugging away at all the small steps.

Ian

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: ,
12 August 2008 4 Comments

Interactive Document Creation: Papershow Trial

Over the last few weeks I’ve been trialling a product called the Papershow from Oxford (the chaps that make those nice Black & Red notebooks so beloved of we consultants).

The product is basically a fancy pen with clever paper and a USB key for your PC. When you write or draw on the paper, it is reproduced on your screen in the Papershow application.

So basically you can use it like an ordinary pad of paper for collaboarative design, sketching, writing, etc. But obviously as you write, everything is copied to your PC and/or beamed onto a big screen. You can also change colours, delete previous actions, draw rectangles, ellipses, arrows, etc.

You can also print out existing presentations on to the Papershow paper and import them into the application. This allows you to annotate the presentations live – an the annotations appear in exactly the right place on the screen. There’s a brief demo below:

I can imagine this sort of application being really great for people who need to collaborate on the design of something – perhaps a user interface, or a graphic for an ad campaign. You could also use it to capture meeting minutes or actions electronically without the pain of typing.

I’ve used similar technologies before – but this is far simpler. What I’d used previously required seperate synchronisation/docking and/or the transmission of the data over the mobile phone network: it was fiddly and often failed. This just works with no fuss.

I believe the retail price will be around £140 – so well within the budget of any small business. And because the application runs from the USB key provided, you can run it on anyone’s PC.

I must admit, I don’t see an immediate use in my business. When I’m with clients I do a lot of sketching, scribbling and pencil-selling but to be honest, I would feel the presence of technology to be a barrier between me and my client. I want them either looking at the paper I’m drawing on, or looking at me – rather than a computer screen. But for people invoved in creating graphical products in teams – user interfaces, websites, brochures etc. I can imagine it would be a great help. You can discuss, collaboratively design; and even hand the pen over to “users” who don’t know how to use your graphics programs – yet they can still add to the outputs easily by using the normal human activity of drawing.

Ian

PS – for more information about the product go to Papershow

Filed Under: News Tagged With:
6 August 2008 8 Comments

Sales Tips from Angelina Jolie

One of the featured resources on Rainmaker Resources is David Maister’s series of podcasts. In his Business Masterclass episode “Cultivate the Habits of Friendship” he shares a lovely anecdote about building relationships that bears repeating:

The actress Angelina Jolie was interviewed on television and asked if she had to like the characters she was portraying in order to act them well. Her answer was brilliant. She said something like: “You can’t love everything about everyone. But there must be something there. The key is to find that one small slice of overlap between you and them, and focus intensely on that overlap, ignoring everything else.” I don’t know about acting, but that sounds like a perfect recipe for human relationships to me.

The reality of relationships is that everyone is different, and everyone is flawed. There will be things we like, and things we dislike (in differing proportions) about everyone.

Although it’s often said that you get 30 seconds to make a good impression – and that’s great advice for how we should present ourselves – we absolutely must not treat others in this way. Yes, our time is precious. Yes, we cannot have deep relationships with everyone and we must be selective. But we must not make that selection based on the first 30 seconds. We must take time and make an effort to establish a relationship with people before making that selection. In my life, the scouser who looked so much like a “scally” at our first meeting I feared for my hub-caps is my oldest friend; and the irascible Scot who everyone else steered clear of was the guy who gave me some of the most insightful advice on sales I’ve ever had.

Angelina’s method of focusing on the areas of overlap and ignoring the rest is a great way of starting relationship and of beginning to find out enough about people to know whether to continue the relationship rater than making a snap decision. And – as Skip Anderson points out in his Selling to Consumers podcast it’s a great way to begin to establish rapport with potential customers.

Ian

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: , ,