A miraculous thing often happens when I am meeting clients for the first time. We have had our meeting, I am closing up my organiser where I have been taking my notes, I am getting ready to leave, when they will drop some major insight or important piece of information on me. It is always a bit fraught because the meeting has obviously ended, I am already packed up and I cannot easily unpack the organiser and start making additional notes. I have to wait until I am out of sight to then grab that vital titbit or garnish they have added and record it before I forget it.
I have come to realise that the way I run the meeting isn’t allowing for these opportunities. Naturally, I am running the meeting rather than the client. I have the navigation in mind. I know where we have to get to and how we will get there. It revolves around me directing the action, because that is my job in sales.
Asking intelligent questions and listening carefully for the answers is the sales life. Many salespeople reading this will have no idea what I am talking about. They think the job is to do all of the talking, batter the buyer with data and information and through force of will, wrestle the buyer to the ground and get them to sign the order form. They are pitch people not salespeople and there is a vast difference between the two.
In the course of asking questions, I am searching for opportunities to ask something in a way that stops the buyer in their tracks. I want them mentally reeling back and thinking, “I haven’t thought about that”, or “I haven’t prepared for that”. I want to bring them to a point of realisation that if they don’t buy my solution, life will be grim, the business will suffer, the future looks bad, etc. Now I could just tell them all of these things as a statement but that is not effective. If I make these statements, the buyer is thinking, “well of course he would say that, he is trying to sell me something”. Instead, I want to ask a question in such a way in which the buyer has to agree with the proposition. When the buyer accepts the idea, they are saying it and so it is true.
I might say something like, “If there was a way to make sure your key people are not going to be poached by the current horde of ravenous recruiters who are constantly scouring firms like yours for bodies to move to your competitors, to collect their 40% first year salary fee, would that help to keep your business from instability?”. Perhaps this client wasn’t aware that recruiters were getting paid so much for lifting people out of companies like theirs or that there was so much of this poaching going on. Maybe they were aware, but they hadn’t concentrated on the problem until I brought it up. I am purposely using highly evocative language, drawing word pictures of disaster, doom and destruction: “poached”, “horde”, “ravenous”, “scouring”, “competitors”, “40% fee”, “instability”. The question is also framed in a way in which the only logical answer is “Yes”.
As professional salespeople we go through the process of asking questions about where they are now and where they want to be, to gauge the distance between the two to see if there is a possibility of the client taking immediate action. If they think they can get from point A to point B under their own steam, then we have no urgency in play and we won’t do a deal today. We are looking for what changes need to happen to get from point A to Point B and what is possibly blocking the path. Usually, we have what they need to clear that blockage and help them make it to where they want to be and we can do it faster and cheaper than they can do on their own. Given a 100 years, anyone can get to the goal, which is why we always emphasise the time it takes to get there and the consequent opportunity cost of unnecessarily waiting. We also want to know what all of this means for them personally in career terms. If we solve the issue, how will this help them inside the company. Even if they don’t proffer an immediate answer, we get them thinking about their own self interest and subtly make the point we are here to help them in that endeavour.
In Japan, the chances are strong that we will need to come back to them with the details of the solution for them and there will be another meeting required. This is the point where we may be tempted to pack up and head out the door. Before we do that, we should just pause and wait a moment to see if they are going to add anything additional to the conversation about what they need.
Remember we are experts at this. We are doing this questioning gig all day long, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. They are not experts in this field. They will only be in the receiving end of this occasionally, because most of the time they will be getting smashed with a pitch by our competitors. Consequently, their brain will be slowly digesting the essence of our message and processing it. Further things will occur to them, especially toward the very end of the meeting and we should allow for that.
So once you finish talking, just sit there for a moment, don’t say anything and just look at them in silence. Fifteen seconds is a very long pause and at this point we ask, “Is there anything else I should know before I come back to you with our proposal” and then shut up - don’t add, garnish or expand on what you have said. You will be surprised at what comes out when you do this. I must say I always am.
