On Tuesday night we had a rollicking online seminar talking about selling. May I share some thoughts from that today?
Firstly, I have long thought that we talk too much in sales meetings. Maybe we do it to cover how nervous we feel. Maybe we do it because we think if we bury our prospect in detail, in all the features that our great product (or service) offers, we can convince them to buy from us. The biggest mistake we all make, I think, is that we talk too much, which leaves no time for listening.
By now you know that I have been on insulin since 1971. That means that I am chemically deranged much of the time. Too much insulin creates two challenges. Firstly, it makes you so light headed that you can’t think straight. Secondly, it makes you angry. Neither of these is very good in social situations. I suspect that if somebody were to check, there would be a disproportionate number of diabetics instigating motor accidents and murders.
So I thought that if we were to survey the group to see how attentive they were, it might help prove the point. It did.
As you are telling your victim all your facts, your victim simply isn’t listening most of the time:
- 69% (more than two thirds) of people attending on Tuesday agreed that most of the time they are so worried about money that they’re cannot focus, let alone pay attention to some pushy sales person;
- 26% (one quarter) were having serious relationship issues, and that just sucks the life right out of you;
- 27% (another quarter) had health issues big enough to affect their focus;
- 56% had other issues that got in the way of listening;
- Just 13% felt utterly focused.
Just one in 10 people that you talk to is really paying attention to what you are saying!
If your maths is better than mine, you will notice that the numbers add up to a lot more than 100 percent. That’s because a bunch of folk have more than one set of problems to worry about. (They could tick more than one box.)
It seems that most of us would rather talk about our challenges than listen to your hype. It was a sobering confirmation.
Then I got an e-mail from an old client who was too busy to attend. He thought he had a time management problem because there weren’t enough hours in his day. It occurred to me that there is no point in worrying about listening during sales meetings if you too busy to arrange any.
If you are not actively selling, or somebody in your firm is not actively selling, you don’t have a time management problem. You have a pending closure problem.
Clients are the only source of real revenue for any business. There are more important than anything else. I think that the moment we forget that, it’s only a matter of time before we don’t have a time management problem because when the business closes there is nothing left to do.
On the plus side, however, if you’re not actively selling, then you don’t have to worry about listening either. That’s one thing that you can tick off your list.
And finally, and this is very heartening. It’s not hard to stand out from the crowd. The rest of us do this so poorly that even a tiny improvement improves your sales results.
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As anybody arrives on one of our clients’ marketing sites, it adds them to the constantly moving list. It lists the last hundred or so searchers. The lines in green are enquiries that those sites have generated. (That’s about 100 sites covering services and products ranging from aerial imagery to wallpaper.)
The sites generate about 250 enquiries each day. I won’t bury you in any more detail unless you ask, but don’t let anybody tell you that Google marketing doesn’t work. It does.