Do you give good conversation?
Jerry L. Kennedy | TLT Selling Points April 2009
The formula: Talk less. Listen more. Increase profits.
The trick to having great conversations with your prospects is simply listening.
In the February TLT we discussed the need to present your product or service in a way that is appealing to prospects. This month, we’ll take a look at the crucial step in the sales process just before developing and presenting your solutions-based proposal—the interview.
Sometimes, this step is referred to as “qualifying the prospect” or “finding the need,” among others. The basic idea is the same, though. This is the step in the sales process where you gather the information that will help you create your proposal and solve the prospect’s problem, thus clearing a path to the sale.
So how do you get the information that you need from your prospect through the interview process? How do you enable your prospect to open up and share his or her situation in a way that tells you how to prepare your proposal? The secret is to improve your conversation skills.
Good conversation skills can make or break a salesperson’s career. For example, have you ever been on the receiving end of a selling situation where the discussion was completely one-sided? It might have been the pushy retail clerk you encountered while shopping for a new TV or the dreaded telemarketer wanting to do the “our product is great and here are 10 reasons you should buy it” data dump.
How did that encounter make you feel? Would you say that you were really engaged in the process? Probably not. Unfortunately, developing good conversation skills is one of the first casualties overlooked when entering into the selling profession. Many make the mistake of thinking that being a great salesperson means being a great orator. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In Dale Carnegie’s book
How to Win Friends and Influence People, the author states that the mark of a good conversationalist is the ability to be a great listener. I agree. The trick to having great conversations with your prospects, conversations that will provide you with all the information you need to build great proposals and presentations, is simply listening.
You’ve heard the old adage that you have two ears and one mouth so that you can listen twice as much as you speak. I would encourage you to strive to listen
four or more times as much as you speak. In order to do that, of course, you have to be really good at asking the right questions to get your prospects talking. In other words, you need to become a master of open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are those questions that require a response from the other party that gets them engaged in conversation.
Conversely, closed-ended questions elicit a yes or no answer or ask the prospect to select one of a list of choices. For example, a closed-ended question would be, “Have you purchased widgets before?” whereas an open-ended question would be, “When you’ve purchased widgets in the past, what did you like about the ones you bought?” This type of question allows the prospect to share past experiences with the product or service you are presenting and will give you vital clues as to how to help them buy from you.
Also, don’t be afraid of losing control of the conversation either—there is no such thing as an unimportant statement or piece of information as long as it is coming from the prospect’s mouth.
In other words, forget your preconceived ideas and pre-packaged solutions and
listen to your prospects. You just might be surprised how willing they are to help you create the perfect proposal!
Editor’s Note: If you’d like to hear more on this subject, you can check out the author’s podcast series at http://podcast.salesmanagement20.com.
Jerry Kennedy, CLS, is owner of Inside Out Business Solutions, a sales and customer service training organization. You can reach him at jkennedy@inside-out-solutions.com.