• dialogue with me,
• discover ways to partner,
• just chat about places to stay.

And the use and quality of Skype has made it all as simple and cheap as calling a friend in a different city.

IF WE TRUST EACH OTHER, WHY AREN’T WE CLOSING MORE?

With automatic ‘trust’ built in – we’re sort of family once we are connected – our conversations seem to flow smoothly: we’ve used Facebook, the net, and Twitter to discover who the other is, have determined whether and how we want to connect, what we can offer each other, and how to prepare. An off-handed comment about the person’s upcoming wedding, or a congratulatory mention of their new business venture compounds the trust.

Gone are the days of cold calling, running around the country to network, speaking at events for free just to collect business cards. I bet some folks out there don’t even remember when those were the only ways to get leads, other than the phone book.

So why aren’t we closing more?

Not only are we not closing more, we’re closing less.

What is going on?

What’s going on is that our relationships, communication, trust, and friendliness are not helping others reach the sorts of decisions necessary to close a deal.

CHANGE, SYSTEMS, AND BUY-IN

Before we look at what’s happening, let’s change the discussion for a moment to look at what needs to happen for any purchase to occur.

In order for someone to buy something other than a small personal item, there are several steps that must take place to get the necessary buy-in to move forward. The appropriate buy-in must be acquired from the right people and groups; the rules must be changed to allow for a new set of ‘givens’; vendors and business partners must agree; job descriptions must match up with the new jobs.

We tend to forget that all purchases are change management problems. And, because a problem is not an isolated event and has been maintained by the people and policies, rules and politics of the existent environment, there are systemic things that touch the solution that would be affected if a new solution were to enter.

So a new piece of software would seriously affect users, techies, internal consultants, and trainers; training for one group would affect all of the people who touch that group.

And systems prefer to maintain the status quo, even if it means maintaining failure. After all, it has been ‘good enough’ until now, and everything has bought-in to maintaining it as it is. In fact, our buyers would rather maintain their status quo regardless of what it is costing them, and regardless of the efficacy of our solution: no matter how much they will save with a new solution, it costs more overall to bring in something new.

Remember: If the buyer felt pain, or was ready to change, they would have done so already.

So until or unless the status quo will accept the addition of something new, and has the capability to manage in such a way that an addition will not create too much unregulated disruption, it will do nothing.

WHAT IT TAKES TO CLOSE A DEAL

Currently, our relationships through social networking haven’t included the agenda to help the Other recognize and manage the different sorts of buy-in necessary to change. But that doesn’t mean we can’t include that.

I was at a client site recently listening in on a sales call with a prospect who my client had been chatting with for months. It was a lovely call. Laughter, in-jokes, obvious rapport. They were introduced on LinkedIn; they tweeted each other daily. Yet nothing was going anywhere. I wrote a note in front of him, which he repeated:

We’ve been chatting for a while now. And the more I get to know you, the more I see the possibility of our working together somehow. What would you need to know about my solution to know if it would fit, and if your colleagues would be willing to consider adding something new to what they are already doing so well?

The conversation shifted. The man was happy to answer: We’re starting to go through the process of an M&A, and won’t be able to take on anything new for about a year. Can we revisit this in 6 months? At that time there will be new people on board (I might even be gone!), and I don’t know what the hierarchy will be, but we can discuss it.

There could be no buy in, no decision team, and most likely no purchase. Does that make you want to continue being ‘friends’ or end the ‘friendship’? Do you want to ask for a referral? How much time do you want to spend being ‘friendly’ vs closing a sale? And how will you know when/if it’s time to pull the plug, or ask the hard questions?

We’re in a new era. There are no rules – we’re making them up as we go along. So ask yourself:

• What do you want to get out of social media?
• How will you know that one person over another is a prospect?
• At what point is connecting enough, or do you want to connect only with potential prospects or partners?

The capability is in front of us. The choice is our as to what we want to do with it. We just have to remember that being friendly, evoking trusting ‘relationships’, having hundreds or thousands of friends, doesn’t make you a better seller.

What would you need to learn differently to add a new skill set to what you’re doing online, to help you help your ‘friends’ make their best decisions?

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Learn about Buying Facilitation®: Peruse this blog for articles on change management, the buying decision path, how buyers buy, and how to add Buying Facilitation® to your sales process.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Registration is now open! Check it out Check it out here!

Learn Buying Facilitation® | Implement Buying Facilitation® | License Buying Facilitation®

How does social networking help make the sale? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

How many of you know the exact percentage of sales you close? Many companies labor under the misconception that they close 17 or 20% of their leads, but they are counting from those who agreed to an appointment.

But that’s not a real number – unless you believe that the leads who don’t want an appointment will never buy from you. If there are any real prospects in those who won’t take an appointment, then you must start counting from 1.

How many calls do you make to get that appointment? And how many good prospects do you lose because they may have a need but don’t want an appointment? or don’t know they need you and won’t speak?

Only 3% of your leads will make an appointment – usually those who are

• already considering adding your type of solution,
• already down the path of choosing a solution (or helping their own folks do a work-around so they can do their own fix),
• speaking with your competition and are doing comparison shopping.

Prospects won’t want to see you just because you have a great solution unless already seeking a vendor.

DO YOU WANT TO MAKE A SALE, OR AN APPOINTMENT?

Prospecting by attempting to get an appointment gives you a double sale: first you sell the appointment, then the solution. For the record, 3% of cold leads take an appointment, but 40% of all leads could potentially benefit from your solution – and you’re not getting past your request for an appointment. Let’s look at the numbers:

100 prospects - 3 will agree to an appointment. It takes approximately 2-10 calls and emails, and 2-3 months of calling and leaving messages, (not to mention the time lost) before these 3 will agree.

• Of the 3, one quarter will cancel prior to the meeting, leaving 2.75.
• 2.25 will meet with you anywhere from 2-7 times.
• 75% will express real interest and possibly get to pricing, leaving 1.68.
• Of the 1.68, 38% will close, or .64%.

.64% leads out of 100 close when you use our first contact to get an appointment.

How much are you spending to close one sale? And how many extra sales folks do you need to hire just to make up for the wastage?

By starting your relationship with a request to meet around your solution, you are ignoring what’s going on in the buyer system/environment, and what would need to happen for them to consider making a purchase. Buyers have to go through some sort of change management before they can bring in a new solution – they must do this with you or without you and the time it takes them is the length of the sales cycle. They don’t know all this when you call for an appointment.

Remember that buyers:

1. don’t know how to buy without creating major political/relational disruption, and the disruption might be bigger than the problem;
2. don’t know how to get the proper internal buy-in from all the folks who will touch the solution;
3. don’t know if they can fix the problem themselves with their internal folks;
4. are confused about options, choices, possibilities, outcomes, change;
5. seem to be ”good enough for now’ because they have some sort of work-around that manages the problem ‘well-enough’ to be functioning.

FACILITATE EXCELLENCE BEFORE FOCUSING ON SOLUTION PLACEMENT

When your first focus is to be a change agent to facilitate a prospect’s search for Excellence, you will not only be asked to come in for a visit, but they will have the entire Buying Decision Team there to meet with you.

By using Buying Facilitation®, you can begin the call by helping buyers begin to decide how or if a solution such as yours can offer them Excellence. Listen how we approached this with Wachovia small business bankers: Our opening question was:

How are you currently adding new financial resources for those times when your usual bank can’t give you what you need?

Using that question and additional Facilitative Questions, the ‘hit’ rate went from 10% agreement for an appointment (and eventually 2 closed sales after 11 months of follow up), to 37% request for an appointment and 1/2 of those closing within 2 months.

Instead of focusing on getting appointments, start with helping the person you’re speaking with – whomever it is, at whatever level of the company they are in (including gatekeepers) - discover how/if they are seeking Excellence in the area your solution supports. Remember they have other obligations, other training vendors, other training priorities; a whole string of people to buy-in, budget agreement, and a change management model.

Don’t use your body as a prospecitng tool. Start off by helping prospects  manage their change and buying decision issues so they can invite you in. Buying Facilitation® will teach you how to do that, and get the members on the Buying Decision Team together so when you do make your visit, they will all be there waiting for you.

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Learn how to make cold calls to begin the buying decision journey. Read an article on cold calling. Check out my Learning Accelerators.

Buy the MP3′s of Sharon Drew making live phone prospecting and qualifying calls.

Read: Buying Facilitaition®: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions – read two sample chapters

Learn Buying Facilitation® | Implement Buying Facilitation® | License Buying Facilitation®

Do you want to make a sale? or an appointment? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Do you believe that to close a sale you must ‘get in front of prospects?’  Why? Really. Have you ever asked yourself why? Do you tell yourself that you MUST have that eye contact? That ‘face-to-face’ juice? Do you tell yourself that if you’re not in the field, you’re not selling?

In 1937, Dale Carnegie advocated it. What else are you using from a 1937 playbook?

Untold billions of dollars have been misspent following this industry-wide belief: planes, hotels, time. And? The industry still has a 7% average close rate.

Here is a rule: Don’t use your body as a prospecting tool.

Here is a secret: your sterling personality, your great outfit, your Rolex watch and Prada shoes don’t close an account. Nor does your great insight or knowledge of the buyer, their need, your industry, or your solution. Nor does that great rapport you create over lunch. Otherwise, you would be closing a lot more sales. Amazing how much push-back I get from an industry with such a low success rate.

The problem is that the reason buyers finally choose you is not because you’re smart or well dressed or because they like you. The seller who buyers meet after you is just as smart and well-dressed and adorable. It’s industry standard!

Buyers buy you only when they have put together their entire Buying Decision Team – a process that is far more complex than ‘understanding need’ or having a problem, and is not knowable when the seller meets the buyer - and then, once formed, when the Buying Decision Team has determined that:

1. they can’t fix the problem with a known, internal, or familiar solution;
2. all of the internal factors that need to buy-in to change are ready, willing, and able to bring in something new that will undoubtedly upset the status quo in some way.

SO WHAT WORKS BETTER?

Those of you who are familiar with my work know what I’m going to say: Until or unless a buyer has managed all of their initially mysterious and unknowable off-line, behind-the-scenes issues that have little to do with their problem, and everything to do with a decision to bring in some sort of agreeable solution, they will not buy. They cannot: the risk to relationships, to initiatives, to personnel, to partnerships, is just too great.

For some unknown reason, sales treats an Identified Problem (need) as if it were an isolated event, rather than one small piece in a sea of tangled policy,politics, and relationship issues that make up any system or culture.

Sales does a great job at needs analysis, and asking somewhat relevant questions, but all in service to solution placement – never discovering the real, behind-the-scenes issues that created and maintain the problem. And trying to ‘uncover’ and ‘understand’ these idiosyncratic issues is impossible, not to mention irrelevant, as outsiders just can’t be ‘in’ there to make the necessary changes.

Enter the telephone. It is possible to use the telephone as a very very effective and cheap prospecting tool. With it, you can help buyers begin the process of figuring out how they are going to buy.

WACHOVIA AND SMALL BUSINESS BANKERS

When I was working with Wachovia, the small business bankers went from using the phone to make appointments (they made 10 appointments for every 100 appointment-getting calls, and then followed the 10 for 11 months, and closed 2 for a 2% closing rate that took far, far too long), to asking:

How are you currently adding new banking resource to the ones you’re already using for those time when your current bank can’t give you what you need?

From that first Facilitative Question, approximately 35% of the prospects  invited the bankers to come to meet with them because their bank was regional and couldn’t offer a complete set of resources. Of those, they closed about 15% in 2 months and another percentage over the next 4 months. In other words, from our first contact, we helped buyers figure out how to choose to begin the process of determining if change was needed. And the bankers went from offering product data to actually helping clients determine how to add a new banking resource. And closed a heckof a lot more business in a very short time.

We changed the conversation from a solution-placement activity, to a decision facilitation activity that helped buyers discover how to start getting ready to make changes they would need to make to be excellent.

USE THE PHONE TO ASSIST DISCOVERY

Because buying decisions involve enmassing, and then managing, the entire Buying Decision Team and all of the behind-the-scenes issues that must be involved before they can make the internal shifts necessary to bring in something new without chaos (the activity that all buyers must go through, regardless of the industry or size of the solution), buyers need to do this off-line, and separate from the purchasing process.

The sales model doesn’t handle this.

But Buying Facilitation™ can. Used as a decision facilitation tool to help buyers manage their behind-the-scenes navigation and change management process, it guides buyers through the route they must take anyway. They are going to do this with you or without you. And the time it takes them to uncover their own answers to ensure a seamless change, is the length of the sales cycle.

You do not need your personality or your great clothes to help them achieve this. You can, of course, or you can help them start the process and when they have got many of their answers, and have enmassed the entire Buying Decision Team, THEN you can go visit – and make the sale.

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Hear Sharon Drew discuss Buying Facilitation™.

Make the Phone your Best Friend is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Traditional Sales, spearheaded by Dale Carnegie in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1937, is about the product sale. How to position it, how to make its features, functions, and benefits relevant, and how to discuss it so buyers will recognize a need.

Consultative Sales, spearheaded by Linda Richardson in the 80s, added the customer to the mix. What are their needs? What sort of a solution will be relevant? How can we gather the right data so we can ensure that our product/solution can fit with the needs and be positioned in a way to ensure the prospect understands the fit?

But both Tradtional Sales and Consultative Sales (and Permission Marketing, and Values-based Sales, and Relationship Sales, and Trusted Advisor Sales, and Question-based Sales, etc.) are based on placing a solution. By using questions, relationship management, being trustworthy because we care, etc. we work hard at being the chosen vendor. And yet, looking at the numbers, we still close the same number of sales we’ve always closed: plus/minus 7% from first prospecting call to close. And we waste far too much time with customers who won’t buy, and don’t know the difference before we expend all of that time.

Why aren’t we more successful? Because the sales model only manages the solution placement end of the buying decision. And this is the last thing the buyer does as s/he seeks to find a solution.

Think of a time when you wanted to buy something. Say, a new watch. Did you go into a store to buy one as soon as yours broke or became old? Probably not. First, before you went looking or gathering data, you had to decide what sort of watch you wanted. Do you want the same type of watch? Do you want a watch merely to tell time - or be a status symbol? Do you want a watch to hand down to your son or daughter? Do you want to buy several watches to match your work and play outfits? Do you want a watch made in this country, or one imported from Switzerland? Or do you want to merely fix your watch? And do you need to have your spouse buy-in to your decision (if it’s going to be a large purchase)?

This is a very simple siuation. Not a lot of people need to buy-in to your choice, or work together with you to implement it. But until you figure out the above, it doesn’t matter how wonderful a watch’s marketing is, or its features and functions and benefits. Until you make sure that you’ve met your internal criteria for choice, the information about any particular watch is potentially moot.

BUYERS MUST MANAGE THEIR BEHIND-THE-SCENES DECISION ISSUES

Your buyers have personal, professional, company, and team issues to take into account. They have relationship problems and budget challenges. They must get buy-in from above AND below. Until they do all of these things, not only will they not be ready to choose a solution, they won’t even have the full set of their criteria for choice ready.

I recently heard a story that might have taken place  in any company, anywhere around the world. A client of mine in Australia wanted to start up a manufacturing group. He wrote up a very complete proposal and budget for his boss – located in a different country – and sent it off with a request for a decision within three months. He then found a company in Germany that could develop and supply the set-up materials. The sales rep from the German company flew to Australia three times with product prototypes, sales pitches, team intros. These conversations went on for months.

My client had not heard from his boss. Eventually, he flew to visit the boss to discuss the idea with all of the costs and photos of the prototypes in hand. But he and his boss did not get along. And the boss had no interest in a discussion. End of story. Really. End of story.

The cost? Oh, about $50,000 in materials, travel and time. Finally,the German company was just told “No. Sorry. The boss won’t approve.” But it didn’t have to happen.

If the German sales rep had used Buying Facilitation™ on the very first call, my client would have known how to manage his boss and potentially be given the go-ahead BEFORE the manufacturing company sales guy made his first trip to Australia. Or would have known right away that it wasn’t going to fly.

German Seller: What would you have that you haven’t had until now?

Australian Buyer: A new manufacturing division.

GS: What has stopped you from starting up this division unti now?

AS: I have wanted it for some time, but have not approached my boss about it, as he’s not much of a visionary. Besides, we don’t get along so well. He’s out of the country and he pretty much leaves me alone. I suspect we both like it that way and have developed lots of work-arounds to make sure we work together well at arms length. But it makes it difficult to come to agreements.

GS: I hear that until you and your boss figure out a way to decide if a manufacturing group would make sense for your company, it doesn’t make too much sense to have us move forward with a prototype. What would need to happen for you and your boss to be willing to sit down together and figure out what Excellence would look like for the company?

In this way, the seller could actually help the prospect figure out how to possibly heal his relationship with his boss, and possibly move forward. Because until or unless this happens, no sale can take place anyway.

This is the first  job of the buyer: figure out how to recognize, align, and manage all of the internal issues that need to take place so that a problem can be resolved in a way that maintains the congruence of the system. Because until or unless the internal system maintains congruence and integrity, it cannot go forth and choose a solution. And sales – consultative or otherwise – does not manage this.

All sales models manage the solution end of a buying decision. Buying Facilitation™ offers new skills to help buyers figure out how to manage their internal, private, off-line stuff that is keeping them from success, and that sales does not address. Read my new book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. It will give you a new skill set to help the buyer do their first job: manage their internal system. And THEN you can do Consultative Sales.

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Purchasing a solution is the last thing a buyer does is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But you didn’t close the deal.

Later you heard lots of conflicting stories: they already had a preferred vendor, the CXO had a friend in one of the competing companies, their inside folks were going to handle it, they decided to do nothing, you were too expensive, the competition came in lower than cost just to get the deal….

How am I doing here? Did I miss any of the excuses as to why you didn’t close?

But do you know the Real Reason you didn’t close?

WHY DON’T YOU CLOSE ALL YOUR DEALS?

It wasn’t your product, or your presentation, or their need. Your prospect just didn’t know how to choose you. And – another devastating fact – they didn’t need all of the information you gave them in order to decide. Their decision had nothing much to do with your presentation. In fact, you might not even have needed to do one to get the business.

Now that we’ve got the bad news out of the way, let’s look at the good news: you can use your time in front of the prospect to help them decide to choose you – not in terms of either your product or their need, but through a decision making exercise that will help them make the decision to choose you over the competition. You’ll save yourself a heep of time and close the deal.

I was training one of the Big Five – oops. That’s now the Big, um, Three?? Whatever. The highly paid consultants that come from Harvard and wear expensive watches.

So I was training these senior partners – smart folks all, obviously – and was shown one of their presentations You’ve seen them; they are gorgeous. Big fat bound books of pictures and graphs, charts and projections that cost between $350,000 and $1,000,000. It takes teams of Senior Partners weeks and weeks of full time work to put them together, not to mention all of the human capital getting friends of friends of friends who know someone ‘inside’ to give them the ‘skinny’ on the ‘facts’ that would ‘focus’ the presentation properly.

‘How many of these do you close?’ I asked. They were embarrassed. Less than 20%. Several highly paid consultants were taken off of paid work in order to create million dollar presentations and they wasted over 80% of their time! And they kept doing this? Why? Because they didn’t know how to do it any other way. And the excuses they had for the prospect not closing were fabulous: John heard from Mary who had a cousin that worked there, that they were going with their old vendors because the new CEO used to work in that vendor’s company 3 years ago.

The basic belief they held, as do all sellers who use Presentations as a route to a closed sale, was that if they could prove to the buyer that they understood the Need, and could address it from every angle to ensure the value proposition was obviously cost effective, and could prove their worth as a prestigious company (Don’t all presentations include the yada yadas that explain the vendor company??), they would be the Chosen Ones.

Yes, with good data understood and presented, the buyer was obviously stupid if they didn’t buy. Right?

WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING?

Here’s what happens. Let’s start with who is in the room.

Who are you presenting to? Always, in my history of working with my own clients around their presentations, always there is at least one person – sometimes more than one – who ‘shows up’ unexpectedly. And my clients never know the relationship this unknown person has to the recognized prospects.

It’s not about their job description or title, it’s about the weight this person’s voice has. If you don’t know one or two people in the room, you have no idea of the relevance of your presentation as you don’t know the filter this unknown person is seeing you through or how they influence the others. Are they in a different department and want to see what is possible for them when moving forward? Will they be moving in to the client’s department and working with you? Are they people with the PEN who sign the checks and give the final ok – and you weren’t aware of them? Are they consultants who help the buyer make decisions? Are they folks from a different department who use a different vendor that they like and want to challenge their colleagues to choose someone else?

And you have no idea of the political weight their opinions carry.

Next. Ask yourself these questions:

• How do you know that each person in the room needs the same information? Is your intent to throw it all at them – like throwing spaghetti on the wall – so something will stick?
• Are you presenting just to position yourself and your product and have no idea how the buyer will hear it? Or how they will weight different aspects of your presentation….in relation to the other vendors who come in with great presentations and good suits?
• How do you know that the prospect will take away what you want them to take away?
• What if only one small bit of your presentation is relevant, and you’re boring them all to tears for an extra 45 minutes?
• What if you have unwittingly omitted the specifics of the sort of buying decisions or unique implementation issues they face?
• What if they haven’t reached internal consensus on what they actually need in order to resolve their Identified Problem, or whether or not to use familiar vendors?
• What if they already made their decision and they are using your material to bring to their preferred vendor?
• What if they are clueless how to move forward and will use your presentation to get them on the road to a solution and have no idea at this moment what that would look like, what it would take, or how long it would take?

If you can’t answer those questions in a way that directly leads to buyers making buying decisions, you must ask yourself why you are doing a presentation.

INFORMATION DOESN’T TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO DECIDE

A client once returned a call days after my call in to him. It took so long because he had gotten an RFP from a big company who had always used a competitor before now, and his team was putting their heads together to figure out the best way to win the business.

“Why aren’t they using their old vendor this time?” I asked. My client had no idea.

Turned out that the prospect was actually planning on using their regular vendor, but needed a second bid! And my client would have wasted weeks of time.

For some reason, sales folks seem to believe that information will teach people how to decide. So you pitch, present, gather data, etc. But you still close an average of less than 10% of your prospects (from first call to close) and it takes about 50% longer than necessary. So all of your truly wonderful, informative, and professional presentations haven’t gotten you much more than frustrated.

If information doesn’t teach people how to decide, what does?

People decide when their criteria have been met. And until the full set of criteria are addressed, no decision to take action will happen. Remember how long it took you to decide to change your hairstyle? Or choose to replace your car? Or move? Or end a relationship? The time it takes to come up with your own answers, based on your own internal, unique, subconscious values and beliefs, is the length of the decision cycle. And until you know how your internal beliefs and choices will line up around a new answer, you will do nothing.

Note that as outsiders, sales folks will never understand the range of internal, unique criteria (outside of the factual problem that requires a solution) that people seek to meet when they make a decision. Would you make any personal purchase until you understood, and met, some sort of criteria? And, if you were a boss needing a solution, would you make a business decision without including the relevant members of the team and ensured their criteria were met? What if you all had different criteria? What if you as boss had one set of criteria that the team needed to buy-in to, and they hadn’t quite gotten there yet? How ready would you be to make a decision of they all weren’t on board?

The conventional sales model doesn’t manage the buyer’s internal, hidden, and unique criteria that hold their Identified Problem in place. After all, if there weren’t some sort of very powerful criteria – say longstanding relationship issues between teams, or incomplete initiatives, etc, the Identified Problem would either not be there, or would have been resolved before now.

Have you asked yourself what has stopped the buyer from resolving that problem until now? You’ll get some pretty interesting answers once you start asking that question – answers about historic failed initiatives, or beloved vendors who weren’t so quality-conscious but still loved by all, etc.

The point is, that behind each ‘problem’ that your product can resolve lie a long list of people, policies, initiatives, thoughts, feelings, history, relationships, that not only created the Identified Problem, but hold it in place. And giving them great product data doesn’t resolve the underlying systems/people/strategic issues that would need to be resolved before a decision can be taken to fix them.

HELP DECISIONS GET MADE AT THE PRESENTATION

You can use your time in front of clients in a far more significant way: you can actually lead them through their decision cycle – and then do a real-time, customized presentation that addresses their specific buying criteria (rather than offering your choice of data that may not be as relevant). So, first get them to decide how they will work together, how they will decide together, then how they will choose a vendor, and lastly the data they need presented to them before they decide.

Here is how it goes: start your presentations by asking the group what they’d like to get out of your time together. Once each of them has spoken, summarize what you’ve heard. It will not all be about fixing the Identified Problem. In fact, you will hear different ‘needs’ from each person in the room. One will want to hear how you’re different. One will want to hear how you price your product. One, a way to make sure you integrate your product with the current set up. Another will want you to prove to them that you can actually make a difference.

You first must get the group into agreement as to their end result:

• What will their environment look like once a product fix is introduced into their environment? Once the Identified Problem has been resolved?
• How will a vendor’s offering help manage the work-around that has been handling the issues that created the current need for resolution?
• How will the folks in the room work together with a vendor once they’ve chosen a vendor? And what criteria do they ALL want a vendor to meet?

In addition, note that some of the important underlying criteria will be missing because some of it can’t be discussed with a stranger, and some of it is subconscious.

Next, ask:

• How would you know that my offering could meet your needs?

Let them all come to an agreement as to how they would choose you. Do what you can to keep a conversation going until there is relative agreement in the room.

Your criteria here is to get them to reach some sort of mutual agreement as to how they want to move forward – with a vendor, with a solution, and, specifically, from their meeting with you (beyond just your product and services). And talk about their outcomes for a fix. If they are not all on the same page, they won’t be able to hear or discuss the information you do end up presenting. I have actually walked out of meetings without presenting anything until the prospects made collaborative decisions, and then I was hired without even doing a presentation just because of the strength of my opening questions.

Now it is time to actually present, and your presentation must conform with the needs they had specified. This means that your presentation materials must have one piece of data on each overhead – a clear representation of one element of your product or service. You will then present only the specific overheads that match the room’s criteria. In other words, your presentation will be customized for each situation and client-driven, not based on what you want to present.

As always, the question is: do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? When it comes to presentations, you have focused on what you want to sell. I’m suggesting that by using half of your time to help your prospects decide how to buy together, your presentation – and your sale – has a greater chance for success.

Presentations: How To Compete When In Front Of A Prospect is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com