277 Getting Ghosted, and Taking an Easy Order Share the Same Problem

You are listening to the art of sales. Everyone sells every day. And this is your source for conversational. Real-world sales and prospecting methods that you are comfortable using and that get results. You'll help people buy instead of pushing them into being sold. Here's your host, Art Subject. A member of my coaching program asked me about a problem he was having with someone whom he thought was a good prospect but had gone silent. He said the prospect had originally contacted his company about information on his product. He contacted the prospect. They had a good conversation by his description and he put together a detailed proposal for the prospect. But then nothing. So he was confused as to why the prospect wasn't responding much less buying. After we worked on a situation, which I'll go through with you here in a minute, I thought more about it and similar cases and realized that the real problem here often exists when someone does buy from you also. Especially when someone buys quickly when they just contact you in place and order. In fact, this can be very dangerous for your business existence. Now, you might be wondering, have I totally lost it? What am I talking about? Alright, let me explain. The problem in the first case where you get ghosted and potentially in the second instance where a customer buys quickly is that we don't know why they are buying or not buying. The implications of the problem in the first case are evident they get silent and you never hear from them. After all, if you really knew why they would be interested in buying and everything surrounding that, you would be able to develop it. You'd be able to dig deeper, attaching numbers to the cost of inaction or the value of taking action now. Therefore, inspiring them to do something. You would learn who the other decision-makers and influencers are. You'd be able to make an on-target recommendation about why your solution is the perfect fit for what they want based on what they told you. You'd get commitment on the next steps and the time frame. And all of this prevents someone from going silent and moves you toward the sale. So, you don't deal with someone ghosting you. That's like putting up a fence after your dog ran away. You want to prevent it from ever happening. And everything I just mentioned is what I worked on with the sales rep. Okay, so let's deal with the second situation that most people never think about or take action on. And that is understanding why someone buys from you, especially the easiest sales. The reason this happens is obvious and you've probably experienced it. Hey, in a profession where we have to work our asses off and go through lots of nose in order to get a yes, a quick easy sales welcome relief, like offering a stranded person in the searing hot desert and icy cold glass of water. It's taken no questions asked. We're grateful to get them. In fact, with the easy sales, sales reps often become order takers. They're afraid of screwing it up. So what's the danger you might ask? Well, if you have customers who buy from you and you note nothing about them, except their name and address, how loyal of a customer is that really? It's pretty easy for them to go somewhere else, right? Also, do you think that they might be buying other things that you also sell from someone else? Why is that? Well, because either they don't know you sell those things or they get them from someone who is asking for their business. Who does know why they buy? And do you feel that customer looks at you as a pure vendor or as a trusted partner who can advise them on their business in your area of expertise? And who does a customer try to get better prices from? Exactly. Those they consider to be simply vendors. Okay, so if you're agreeing with what I've said so far and you feel this is something you and or your team should be doing, I've got some specific actions for you to take and messaging to use with both new customers and existing customers. So let's look at two situations where you can use the messaging that I'm going to share. The first is with the easy first sales. These are the people who contact you out of the blue and they simply want to buy or place an order. Again, the tendency is to just take the order and run and be happy with the sale. But think about what's going on in their world. There was a lot going on with them that caused them to reach this point of buying. Them buying is just the tip of the iceberg, which is all that you see or hear. What you don't know is what's below the water level and that's what we want to find out. Now the examples I'm going to give you of course will be generic and depending on what you sell might apply perfectly or might need some or a lot of tweaking on your part. So listen to these and think of how you can adapt and use them in your own conversations. So the approach here is to first let them know that you're going to help them that they're in the right place and you're going to take care of them say things like great. I'll be happy to help you with that or you're talking to the right person or I will handle everything for you on this. Now this puts them at ease especially if they might have already been bounced around in your organization from person to person before they finally reached you were having to go through that was dreaded voicemail prompts. By the way this applies to both an incoming call that you answer from an excited buyer or following up on an inquiry which might have come in online where you then initiate a phone call. Alright so next in the process here we can reaffirm their decision because after all everyone likes to be told how smart they are right. For example hey you're making a great choice or that's one of our most popular items or all my other customers who picked that design absolutely love it. Alright so where are we now we have someone at ease and then in a positive more relaxed frame of mind when they're here it's going to be easier to get them to open up about their reason for buying this is where we want to finesse our questioning. So we're not interrogating but rather getting someone to actually continue selling themselves while providing us with great information that likely could help them even more. So you want to transition use something like curious what prompted the decision to go with this or hey we really appreciate you calling how did you happen to find us. Or this system is used in a lot of different applications how are you going to be using it. Now what's happening here they're talking about their favorite subject themselves it's like their mind now is playing a movie and they are explaining it to you. So your main job now is to let them take the line that you're releasing here and run with it while you continue prompting them to share more. You're not just questioning for the sake of talking though you're questioning with the intent of uncovering the pain that will be eased or avoided the problem that will be solved or the gain that they will enjoy. This is second nature for many people but it's foreign for some people who only care about talking about themselves really suck at this part however great sales pros hopefully you do this intuitively they make it all about the other person. So when we hear answers we should then become genuinely even more curious say saying things like oh tell me more how interesting can you explain that. How so how's that affecting you or the organization ultimately you'd like them also to attach numbers to the cost of the pain or the gain that they're going to get. As a result of buying from you for example so what was that costing you or wow sounds like this will save you a lot of time right. Or this should really help you bring in more new business I would imagine and their answers here will dictate the direction of the conversation. It's possible that you uncover a much greater need than the one they thought they were filling with this one purchase and when you question in this way you are able to upsell and cross sell without it seeming like do you want fries with that. It's truly consultated and you're helping someone who will be thankful in the end and this is not being pushy it is you fulfilling your obligation as a professional to service your at your greatest capability. Now the other way you can implement this is with your current customers most companies have customers who buy from them many times perhaps over many years yet they have no idea why as a result they're missing out on more sales and more opportunities to help their customers. In other cases they lose customers who go elsewhere because they just viewed that company as a vendor that did not take interest in them so therefore it was easy to leave when maybe they found a better price or maybe somebody who prospected them. So what you can do here is engage them in a process similar to what we just covered to get them talking about their why and what is going on in their world as a relates to the purchase of your product or service and the use of your product or service this can happen as an outreach that you initiate or as a transition on one of their regular order calls to you. If you're initiating a contact you always first want to call with something a potential interest and value for them not to just ask questions since that could be viewed as all about you and by the way many account managers or customer experience managers as some are called today make these calls on a regular basis but often they don't take the next step that I'm going to detail here they're more reactive in nature kind of like they just want to make sure everything's okay want to see if you need anything and that's a that's a mistake because they're missing a big opportunity. So this call could begin with something like hey Mike are subject here with quality technology hope you're having a great Thursday maybe a little small talk would ensue here. Hey a couple reasons for calling today first I want to be sure you had seen that update that was sent out for your system and that you downloaded the file. Okay great now second I was thinking that we might have dropped the ball a bit with you. You've been a great customer with the XYZ system for a couple of years now but we really haven't had a conversation about how you're using it and we'll take the blame for that. You see there's probably some other information or services that I could share with you based on your operation and requirements that could be of value like it is for our other customers and if we can just take a few minutes like to ask you a few questions and there's nothing wrong with apologizing here usually they appreciate that you're taking the interest in them and being sure to position it in terms of the possible value for them. And that doesn't make it seem like you're just trying to sell them something. Also, unregular inbound order calls with frequent customers or even customer service calls you can and should do the same thing with a similar transition to get them into a conversation. I've worked with a number of customer service teams who were able to turn order and service calls into more meaningful conversations resulting in the customers buying more and therefore feeling like they're being helped more. Now one important point here all of this is not to be confused with overselling something that's when someone's already sold and the salesperson just keeps talking about how great that product or service is I've seen cases where the buyer then became skeptical about why the salesperson needed to talk so much and then got cold feet and decided not to buy. I call that buying it back by the salesperson no this is not presenting more it is questioning more it's taking more interest and then if there's a fit recommending something else that can help the customer even more and when you help them more they become more loyal to you and you're viewed as less of a vendor and more of a partner. Okay, I've covered a lot today and really just scratch the service regarding the sales process to get even more examples of great questions you can use simply do a search at our shows site the art of sales dot com go to the episodes page there's a tab at the top episodes page and then you'll find a search box there so type in what you're looking for could be questions or whatever and you'll find a number of shows. That will help you and give you more examples and if you want to take this further if you'd like an entire book that takes you through my seven step sales process. I'd like to send that to you it's called how to place the successful sales and prospecting call. All I ask is that you just help with the shipping it's a whopping $4.95 you can get that at free sales book dot com and this offer is for shipping to US addresses only. The shipping overseas is exorbitant but we do have an international option there as well to get the electronic files. All right, hey, you know what time it is. That's right is time for the quote of the day today's quote comes from Brian Tracy. Brian said approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her solve a problem or achieve a goal not of selling a product or service. And that is exactly what we talked about here today. Hey, thank you so much for investing your valuable sales time with me today until next time go on and make it your best sales day ever. I'm Art Subject.