When professionals strike out on their own, they seem to face their biggest challenges in the areas of sales and marketing. I know that sales has been a difficult area for me. The skills and attributes that make us good at technical and consulting work are not the same skills that are needed for sales.
I have been working with Dan Stalp and Dick Brooks of Sandler Training – Brooks Associates to improve my sales skills. I have already learned a lot from them. For example, I have totally gotten away from the sales call that turns into unpaid consulting.
I don’t know about you, but I find that when I am learning new skills, it is often easier to see the right or wrong behavior in others than it is in myself. Today I observed a conversation that reminded me of a couple of important sales tips.
Like a lot of small business owners, I spend a lot of time working in places like Panera Bread and Starbucks. Sometimes you can’t help overhearing the conversations around you. Today I sat next to a consultant who was telling a prospect about his business planning services.
Telling is exactly the right word. It wasn’t a discussion, it was a lecture. In fact, the thing about the conversation that caught my attention was that every time the prospect tried to talk, the consultant interrupted him so he could finish his “story”.
The consultant also spent lots of time answering objections that he must have anticipated would arise, because the prospect never raised them.
I didn’t time it, but they must have visited for at least an hour and it wasn’t until that last few minutes of the conversation that the prospect said “What I need is this, this, and this”.
When the prospect started to list how he thought the consultant’s solution would solve his problem, the consultant interrupted him again!
The point of this post isn’t to pick on this consultant. I’m sure I’ve done all of these things at one time or another. I hope I will learn from what I witnessed and continue to improve my selling skills.
So notes to self:
- You can’t figure out if your product or service solves a customer’s problem until you (and they) know what the problem is. The only way to do that is to ask questions and let the prospect do the most of the talking.
- Related to #1, don’t try to solve problems the prospect doesn’t have or doesn’t care to fix.
- Only the prospect can overcome objections.
- Don’t get in the way when a prospect is closing himself.
November’s edition of the Duct Tape Marketing Coaching Excellence Series features Brad Sugars, the founder of 
