Sales people are in massive competition today, with all the distractions that are out there for the client’s attention.
We want to get our message across about how we can help build the client’s business, but it is a tough row to hoe because of all the competition we face from meetings, emails and social media. There are so many things that are occupying the minds of our clients and our buyers before we get to talk to them. We have the appointment, we have their time; we turn up on the day. But inside their minds, there’s a lot going on about what has already happened in the day and what is going to happen in the day. They are thinking about many things, but not about us.
There’s a great little acronym, C A R E S cares, which will help us break through some of that competition we have for their attention.
C stands for compliment. When you go to someone’s office, there might be something there that’s really spectacular or something that’s very impressive, so pay them a compliment. But don’t pay them the sort of compliment that every other salesperson coming through the door is giving them.
There’s a company here who have a very beautiful foyer entrance wall. It is a very spectacular wall feature. Now, I know every single salesperson who goes there will say, “Oh, what a spectacular wall feature”. We have to do better than that. We can go in say, “You have a beautiful office. Have you found that it has really impacted the motivation of the team since you moved here?” We have to say something a bit more intelligent. We are now asking about the impact of the feature on their business. Importantly, we are now on a business topic.
A is for Ask. We ask a question. It might be something like, “how have you found things going with the prospect of a rise in taxes. Is your company confident that this is not going to have a big impact on your business?” So we get them into a business discussion straight away about where their business is going, getting them to talk about how they see the future. This is good for us, because we get an idea, a glimpse, into where they’re going.
R is for referral. Now a referral could be someone who’s introduced us to them or someone that maybe we know mutually. “I was talking to Takeshi the other day and he said you guys are doing a great job over here. He suggested, maybe I should come and talk to you, and so here I am today. I’d like to really find out a bit more about your business. Let’s see if there is any possibility where we we can help you take your business even further”. We can say something like that to get into a business discussion. We break into what they have been thinking, to move them to where we can go with our conversation today.
E is for educate. Now as salespeople, we often turn up, and we have this great questioning model. We want to ask a lot of questions. We want to find out about their business, where they want to go with it, what is stopping them, what is it going to mean for them if we can see some success, etc. The problem is, this is all very much one way traffic in our favour.
It is more important that we can come in and talk about something which is really valuable to them. We can share some information we’ve picked up in the market, something we have seen in the media or something we have seen that is relevant to their industry or their sector of the industry. We can talk intelligently about these topics because when we are in sales, often we are dealing with a very broad range of industries and companies. We will see something working in another industry which might have some good benefit to them in their industry. When we connect the ideas together, they see a benefit in talking to us because they are being provided with some information they didn’t have to help grow their business.
Lastly S is for startle.
Now this is a technique where you can break through all the competition going on in their minds, which is conflicting with our delivery of the message. We need something which is really going to make them sit up and take notice. For example, “The youth population in Japan has halved in the last twenty years. It is going halve again in the next thirty years. We are going to run out of people for staffing our companies. We will run out of clients. What do you think about this for your company? What are your specific market demographic prospects? How are you going to deal with this major change?”.
From the very start of the conversation, we get them on to a business topic. We get them thinking about business with us. From this point, we are going to move along the sales cycle and go into the sales questioning phase. The bridge to our solutions explanation will be our credibility statement.
This CARE formula is useful to get a little bit of conversation going, so they start to feel comfortable with us. They will like us, and trust us, so we that can ask for permission to ask questions to really dig in and fully understand them. CARES is a great way to break into a very packed day for a very busy buyer and get them to concentrate on our conversation. We slay all distractions. If we can do that, then we will have a much better sales conversation. This is how we can get great outcomes, which will work for everybody.
