You must engage with prospects and get them to communicate needs (Photo by Ian Britton)
According to educationist Edgar Dale, we remember:
- 10% of what we read
- 20% of what we hear
- 30% of what we see
- 50% of what we see and hear
- 70% of what we say
- 90% of what we say and do
If we were to look at this hierarchy and map it to the typical sales process, we’d see that as sellers, we generally stop at the fourth item—what we see and hear. We send prospects sell sheets outlining our services (the prospect reads them), we engage in initial discussions (the prospect hears what we have to say), we present our proposals both verbally and physically (the prospect sees and hears our solution).
And that’s where it usually ends.
In our Selling Consulting Services online training program, instructors Mike Schultz and John Doerr drive home the importance of engaging with the prospect throughout the sales process to get the prospect to go beyond seeing and hearing your solution and actually experience it.
Modern-day selling is not about going in and pitching the prospect with the best dog-and-pony show you can deliver. You must:
- Engage the prospect in a give-and-take discussion
- Get the prospect to communicate his needs and desires
- Get the prospect to articulate the impact of solving the need or reaching his goal
The more you engage the prospect—get him to really feel the pain and see what it would look like if he made a change in this area—the easier it will be to sell him your solution. Your job is to facilitate this.
How to Get the Prospect Talking and Doing
Follow these three steps, and you’ll be well on your way to getting the prospect more engaged in the sales process and selling himself on your solution.
1. Approach the sales conversation as a discussion. You need to get the prospect talking more. As a rule of thumb, talk only 30% of the time (that’s right, you want to do less than half of the talking). Prospects don’t like to feel like they are being sold to. They like to feel that they are being heard.
2. Use questions to get the prospect talking. Prepare probing questions ahead of time to help uncover needs and the impact of using your services. If you know the needs your solution meets and how it helps your clients succeed, you can develop targeted questions to help the prospect articulate those needs.
For example, your solution may help improve profitability as well as productivity. The prospect may be focused only on the productivity piece. To get the prospect to see the full set of benefits and value, ask leading questions about how this affects the bottom line and what the employees could do if more of their time were freed up.
3. Ask the prospect to go back and do something before your next conversation. For example, if they don’t know the answer to some of your probing questions off hand, ask them to go back and think about the current loss of productivity, look at expenses in a particular area, calculate their current close rate, etc. Get them involved in the process.
Remember, what you’re trying to do is to get the prospect to explicitly describe his needs and desires and how he’d benefit from solving them. This elevates his needs to the top of the priority list (he is more likely to remember the need and feel it more intensely), and it creates buy-in for the solution early on because he helped to craft it.
In the wise words of Confucius, “I see and I forget, I hear and I remember, I do and I understand.”
Get your prospects to say and do, and not only will they be more likely to remember and understand your solution, but they’ll be more likely to buy it.
