The Desert of Arizona
Sunrise 45 Degrees
If you don’t know what you’re doing when you’re selling, it can get frustrating when you propose X as a certain course of action to a prospective client only to receive a bunch of reasons the client doesn’t want to do X.
The problem, of course, is that you set yourself up to fail with an approach like this.
There’s a much smarter way to go about things than the “What’s the problem? Oh, well then you need THIS” approach. That problem/solution process puts the control of everything into the hands of your prospect. Once you propose your solution, they have all the control.
This is what vendors do in Vendorland. You don’t want to live there or even visit.
Plus, it seems to encourage an instant stream of objections and reasons why your proposal WON’T work. Giving up control like this is not what a true advisor would do. If the prospect was prepared to make smart decisions in this area, he wouldn’t need you as an advisor. So clearly, he needs some help.
Here’s a different approach to consider:
Create a proprietary “framework of success” that makes the selling effortless. It also creates a natural vacuum to help generate the sale.
Let me explain this:
For example… if you’re a business consultant, you know that in order for a business to be successful, it must:
- Generate leads
- Build trust, credibility, etc.
- Close the sale
- Offer more things to those customers/clients
- Generate referrals etc.
So if you were going to draw that out, you’d have five circles on a piece of paper, one for each area. You could add more detail by listing various metrics that could be used to measure the success of each part of the system, or you could add more qualitative criteria as well (decrease the frustration of the sales team etc.).
As a smart consultant, you might give this little framework of yours a name. Give it a personality. Start talking about the results that this approach can generate for clients. Think of it as a product… because it is!
And then, the next time you meet a prospect, you have a framework that you can overlay onto their world to see how they measure up. People like to be measured. I don’t know why, they were trained that way, I guess.
So you assess how well or how poorly they match up to your framework. (This provides you with an opportunity to offer a PAID DIAGNOSTIC, which is the step of the sales process MOST service providers give away for free. It is also the step with great potential to SET YOU APART. Sadly, most service providers screw this up in an effort to “get the business.”)
The other benefit of this is that, over time, you build up the framework into a real ASSET. It’s kind of like the magic black box that your clients get access to when they hire you. It’s “your approach” to generating a result. And they only get it when they hire YOU. Since you’ve taken the time to get it out of your head and into a form where others can look at it, it can be very powerful.
By walking them through the trouble areas that YOU see, you are effectively “pre-selling” the projects you will propose. When you wrap a real and believable REASON around these things, however, it creates a very different feeling for the prospect. You are perceived as an ADVISOR, not a salesperson.
Instead of just saying, “we should do X,” you have basically built a device that creates what you might call a “sales vacuum.”
This is not a “cash sucking” type of sales vacuum. This is far more gentle and elegant. It simply shows your prospect the areas of the framework that require investment IF he truly wants to maximize the chances of generating the desired result.
“Do you want to generate that result, Mr. Client?”
It SHOWS them that if they want a specific result, then this framework has been shown to deliver it. And based on your expert opinion, they will need to address these highlighted problem areas.
What you are doing with this approach is creating a sales system FULL of helpful constraints. Your framework is a complete set of boundaries. It limits the decisions of your prospect so they are far simpler to make.
And a framework like this provides a REASON WHY that serves as a foundation for all of your proposals. When you say, “Let’s do X,” you can relate it back to one of the core areas of your framework and show why it makes sense as a course of action.
Once there is conceptual agreement with your prospective client that your framework has value, then you’ve created a natural path to the sale.