One of David Sandler’s rules is “people buy emotionally and justify their decisions intellectually,” which means that if our salespeople are tense, nervous or hold another negative emotion when they’re interacting with their prospects, they could end a sale before it begins by triggering tension in their prospect.
Our salespeople could be tense if they believe “sales is a battle,” “we’ve got to win the business” or other macho nonsense that doesn’t belong in sales today.
When humans are having fun they tend to be more relaxed and confident, two attributes that create rapport with a potential client.
To help our salespeople have more fun we first coach them to take a mindset of “having a purposeful conversation” with a prospect. “Purposeful conversation” differs from “sales call” in that the latter puts pressure on our salesperson to “sell something.”
Second, we get our salespeople to be purposeful by making pre-call planning a non-negotiable behavior. Because salespeople often avoid pre-call planning because they think “I’ve got this,” strip the pre-call plan down to the following three elements.
- What are the 3-4 “mountain tops” they need to reach during the call? – depending on which meeting this is in the sale (first, third, tenth) these mountain tops relate back to our sales process and could range from uncovering two or more problems that the prospect wants to solve, to how much the prospect is willing/able to invest in uncovering the cast of characters who will select a vendor.
- What are the questions our salesperson wants to ask to reach the mountain tops? – these might already live in our playbook.
- What questions does our salesperson expect to get asked by their prospect? – there are only four types of questions that a prospect asks. By prepping in advance our salesperson is more likely to handle the question in a credibility-enhancing manner instead of mumbling something that damages their rapport with the prospect.
With just those three questions answered, our salespeople will have the confidence to let the conversation flow with their prospect because they will know where they want the conversation to go (the 3-4- mountain tops) and how they can guide the conversation to get there (questions they want to ask and how they will address any potential bumps along the way (questions prospect will ask them).
Pre-call planning isn’t the most glamorous of sales activities; however, it is a key support tool for us to use with our salespeople so they can focus on their prospect instead of robotically following a script.
Until next time… go lead.
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