So far, we have dealt with making the cold call to get a meeting, building trust, getting permission to ask questions, using a four step structure to get information about what the client needs. Now we deal with how to present our solution.
In the face to face world, after asking all of these questions and deciding we can actually help this client, we would go back to the office and put together our proposal, outlining our solution for them and the price. Given how hard people are to catch these days, if we were well organised and smart, we will have already locked down the date and time for our next call, during this meeting.
In the next meeting, we can share our screen with the client. The client may want the proposal before hand. Do not do that. When they get it, what do they do? They go straight to the last page, idly skipping over all the bits where you have laboriously explained the value of your solution. They are now solely focused on price to the exclusion of the value you will bring to their business. No, no, no. We don’t want that, so resist sending it until after your online meeting. In a face to face meeting, we would be nuts to hand over the proposal document at the start, because they will go straight to the last page.
In person or online, we need to walk them through the document, so that we keep control of the navigation, the pace and the build of our argument, as to why they need our help.
If we were sitting in front of them, we would swivel the document around, so that we are holding it on the table facing them, so that they can easily read it. We take our expensive pen and we point to the bits where we want them to look, when we want them to look at them. This is vitally important, because we are doing a number of critical steps at this moment. If we are online, then we are showing our page and we have the onscreen pointer to show where they should be looking, as we control the page advancement.
We take them through the context. We check for understanding around whether we have fully grasped their situation and their needs. If we have this wrong, then we need a new proposal and we need to know that, before we proceed any further. Presuming we have understood them correctly, we now move on to explaining our solution.
Before we do that, we give them our capability statement, summarising that we have the capacity to meet their needs. This lets the buyer know that we have understood what they want and that we have the means and the capacity to meet their requirements. If that wasn’t the case, well we wouldn’t be holding this meeting in the first place. So at this point before we go into the detail of the solution, we need to make it explicit that we are confident in our ability to help them.
They told us where the gap was between where they are now and where they need to be and what is holding them back from bridging that gap by themselves. We explain in detail how we can bridge that gap for them.
When we do this, we start with the details of the solution – the data, the facts, etc. But clients don’t buy facts. They buy the application of the benefits of our solution. So before we get to that part of the explanation, we start going through the detail of the benefits and how these align with their needs. In particular, we connect back that question about what is in it for them personally. We might say, “you mentioned that the team will feel good if the outcome is achieved. With this solution, they will be able to hit their targets more quickly and easily. They will really appreciate that you helped them to do that”. We then go into the full detail on how the benefit will work inside their company when applied.
This explanation of the applied nature of the broad benefit is what they want to hear about. This is very, very important, because a benefit by itself, can seem rather abstract. We need to anchor it to the concrete actions to be taken and the specific outcomes to be achieved inside their workplace, so that they can mentally visualise the results. Having piled on the concrete benefits to their business, we now scroll down the screen to the pricing attached to enjoying these benefits. Which, by the way, is always referred to as the “investment” and never as the “price”, when we are talking with buyers. Because we have been controlling the flow of information, by the time they get to this page, they are fully aware of the value we will bring. The cost is now in context for them, rather than being a set of isolated figures on a page, cast off from the value we bring.
Now it is the time to go for the trial close. We want to flush out resistance, hesitations, further questions and objections at this point. It is always amazing that even after carefully walking buyers through this process, they sometimes ask questions that tell you, they haven’t properly grasped what you have been telling them. You could say to yourself, “boy, this buyer is really dumb”. However, you are better to question your own ability to clearly articulate the proposal to the client and whether it is you who is “dumb”?.
In the next instalment, we deal with objections and how to close the sale, while we have the client online with us.
