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Question: I’m hoping you can help me with this challenge I seem to be facing time and time again. I have a great first meeting with my prospect and when we get together for the second meeting, there are additional decision makers present who seem to poke holes in my presentation and set me back from the progress that I thought I had made, as a result, I never get a clear decision or the business I thought was mine.
Submitted by: Doug Stuart, President of Wood Remedies, a home remodeler based in Maywood, NJ.
Answer: That’s a good one Doug and I hear it quite often. In the future, the first place where I suggest you spend more time is in the Decision step of your selling system. Before going back for a second meeting to make a presentation, there are many questions to ask your prospect. Very often once sales people hear they are invited back to present, they fall into a false sense of security and fail to ask these questions.
When going through the Decision step with a prospect, it is a lot like being a journalist conducting an interview. You must remember to ask who, what, where, when, why, how, who else questions. They may sound like, "Mr. Prospect, typically when I am asked to present a solution to a homeowner, I find that someone else is usually involved in making the decision to move forward at the end of my presentation, I don’t suppose that is the situation here as well is it? If so would you mind sharing who that would be?" Another question is "How do you go about making a decision to buy XYZ at your company?" and "What do you need to see or hear in my presentation to feel 100% comfortable in moving forward with my company at the end of my presentation?" If you miss an opportunity to ask any of these questions then you are not fully qualifying your prospect and they are not qualified to have a presentation made to them. At Sandler, we have an expression, "The admission to a presentation is a decision". We need to have an up-front agreement, that if I agree to present a solution to you, then I will expect a decision at the end of the presentation. The decision can be a NO or it can be a YES, but nothing in between.
One last piece of advice Doug, when new decision makers that you have not met before are at the presentation meeting, be sure to return to the beginning of your selling system at the Bonding and Rapport stage. You need to gain trust first. Most people,who attend my training, before they arrive, do not have strategy for developing trust with another human being. They think talking about sports or commenting about a picture on the wall is bonding. Instead they are discussing the very same stuff the salesperson before them did. There is so much more to it than that. Prospects want to know how much you care, before they care how much you know. Ask questions regarding their pain, before you just jump into your presentation, this way you can get your prospect emotionally involved and differentiate yourself from your competitors, instead of giving another intellectual feature and benefit dog and pony show that your competitors are most likely presenting.
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Danny Wood, an affiliate of the Sandler Sales Institute, is one of New Jersey’s most respected sales force development experts. His work has been recognized by business leaders and corporate managers for providing their people with the aptitude to realize millions of dollars in additional business that would otherwise have never materialized or would have been lost to competitors.
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