Ignore the voice you hear that says to advance sales quickly (Photo by Don Fulano)
If you’re involved in sales in any way, shape, or form, I’m sure you feel constant pressure to close deals—and close them quickly. You probably feel it from managers who tell you the prospect will slip away if you let them sit. The worst culprit, however, is the voice inside your head that says you need to act quickly.
But if you’re involved in selling professional services and you try to put a long-term sale into a short-term cycle, you will, as Charles H. Green says, shoot yourself in the foot. You will destroy any chance you had at winning over that prospect.
“Short-term selling comes from a mismatch between the pace of a client’s decision-making, and our desired pace of the client’s decision-making. Typically, of course, we want the pace to be faster than that which the client appears to desire,” writes Green in his article, Don’t Be a Short-Term Seller. “Our unfortunate response is to attack the client’s pace as too slow. The client’s equally unfortunate (but entirely predictable) response is to dig in their heels and push back. Paradox. Stalemate. Short-termism kills another deal.”
You will similarly lose prospects and leads if your sales conversations center on you, your firm, and your services, says Jill Konrath, author of the new book SNAP Selling, in her podcast interview, How to Get Prospects to Sit Up, Pay Attention, and Buy Your Services.
Prospects, who are busier than ever, don’t want to hear about those things.
“The most typical [mistake] I see is the gracious call where the person calls a prospect and leaves a message in which they introduce themselves and say they’d love to meet with them to explain what they can do. But those messages are deleted in a nanosecond because they have no meaning to the prospect,” Konrath says. “A SNAP seller starts entirely with the client in mind. They try to get inside their head and understand the business issues and challenges they’re facing, the goals they’re trying to reach, they problems they’ll have if they remain status quo, and why they won’t change.”
Similar tactics apply if you want to grow your client relationship. If you want to retain that client and continue to have them buy from you, try doing joint account planning in which you solicit the client’s ideas in your plans for them, writes Andrew Sobel in his article, How to Grow Client Relationships—and Grow Your Business, Part 2. Doing so sends a powerful message that you put their concerns and challenges first.
Other suggestions from Sobel include making targeted investments, creating a new relationship environment, and bringing new players into the relationship.
The main ingredient in client relationships is trust—without it you have nothing, but with it you can have clients for life. If it’s new prospects you’re trying to win over, webinars are a great way to begin developing that trust. They allow you to showcase your expertise and personality, and they allow you to interact with people—basically give a taste of what it’s like to work with you.
To have a successful webinar, however, you must make sure your target audience knows about it. Take a page from Kendra Lee’s playbook and put notices about it on all the social media networks possible. No one market segment prefers one particular network, so you need to hit them all, she says in her article, 6 Ways to Increase Attendance at Your Webinars.
“Once your content is perfected, [webinars] are a numbers game,” writes Lee.” The more interested people from your target market that you can attract to your event, the greater the number of leads. Social networking can get your message out, bringing participants and leads to you.”
