To Succeed in Sales – Open with Care, Close with Caution

If you expect success at every sales call, you’re not being realistic. Learning to swing with the sales punches is part of what makes a pro sell through the down as well as the up times. “When you go on a sales call,” says sales trainer David Sandler, “expect `Noes’ as part of the game. If you expect to get Yesses, you can’t handle the Noes. Every disappointment and failure I’ve ever gone through scared me. While you’re going through those moments, you can’t say, `Oh, this is a blessing.’ But you don’t give up, you must go through it and make something happen in the process.”

To open a sales call and make something happen in the process, take these basic steps to establish a bond between you and the prospect.

Don’t carry anything on the first call. Don’t take your briefcase. Dress comfortably. Look like a professional who is financially independent and doesn’t need the business. Be calm, relaxed and just break the ice a little. Everything you do should be casual, nonthreatening and businesslike.

Next, think of the sales call as a Broadway play performed by a psychiatrist. You’ve got to be an actor who can slip into many different roles and you’ve got to be a psychiatrist who can see past the intellectual defenses prospects build to protect themselves from the anxiety of making a decision.

The psychiatrist begins with very nurturing questions to establish trust. Salespeople can do the same. People feel vulnerable and have learned not to be up front with salespeople. In general, prospects won’t tell you about their real problems. Psychiatrists learn very early in their training that what the patient brings to them is never the real problem. Patients can only describe symptoms, the psychiatrist must find the causes, not just relieve the symptoms.

The same is true with a prospect. That’s why it takes three or four questions about a specific subject before you can go past a prospect’s natural defenses. Each answer becomes a little more revealing than the previous one.

Don’t be in a hurry to give a presentation. Give the presentation only if the prospect qualifies. Then develop an understanding between you and the prospect as to what it takes to do business. If you do that, your prospect will sense that there’s something different about this sales call because you are very up front and straight with him.

There are five steps to the formula: well, hurt, sick, critical and well. As soon as you talk to a prospect, begin by finding a hurt through reversing questions. Then expand your questions to a group of pains until the prospect is sick. If you continue to work on that sickness with more questions, you will have a prospect on the critical list. Then your selling job becomes easy, because all you have to do is make him well again.

It’s not easy for people to remember intellectual formulas. To help them remember I tell them a story.

Let’s say you go to see your doctor for your annual physical. A complete checkup will probably cost you about $300. Your doctor will ask you to strip down in the examining room. Then he’ll come in and poke at you, hook you up to an EKG, X-ray your chest, then put you on a stress test that can kill you if you’re not a runner. He feeds you chalk, he punches you and pokes you everywhere. And you’re saying to yourself, “This isn’t worth $300. I should be out there making calls. What am I doing here spending an hour and a half with this guy?”

Finally he says, “Okay, the examination is over, get dressed and come into my office.” In his office he has a little light box with your X-ray clipped on it. It’s a picture of you. The doctor looks at this picture while you’re wondering how quickly you can get out of there. You think, “Let’s give him the $300 and get going.” Then he looks closer, turns to you and asks, “Has anybody in your family ever had kidney problems?” You say “No.” Then he looks back at that X-ray again. Now, this time he talks to the X-ray saying, “Now, there is nothing really serious here. I don’t think we want to worry too much about this. We can take our time on this. What are you doing tomorrow morning? I want you to go down to the hospital because I want to check this out. I don’t like what I see.”

You can picture what is going through your mind at that moment. Your mind has just gone from $300 to a blank check. That’s what a good salesperson does. He or she makes price of little consequence to solving and fixing the problem.

When the prospect experiences enough pain, price is never an object. That’s why feature/benefit selling doesn’t work. Prospects will put a price tag on features and benefits, but they don’t put a price tag on wellness when they’re sick. If you discover a prospect who is in pain, he’ll pay anything to get out of it. By starting with nonthreatening questions and moving on to diagnostics, you stand a good chance of uncovering real pain. Offering the cure makes you a hero.

Sales success begins with an internal attitude and ends when you have uncovered a sickness in your prospect and then presented a plan to make him well again. Don’t expect to do this with every call you make. For you to begin the process, there must be a real need to uncover.