Asking the right questions and offering appropriate solutions is a recipe for more business.
Asking the right questions and offering appropriate solutions is a recipe for more business.
I receive many emails from people seeking insight or asking me to solve their sales dilemmas. Here are a few that may relate to your job, your life, and (most important) your sales thought process right now.
Q) Years ago I took your advice to get into Twitter for my business. What do you think of only paid clients having access to tweets through an approved followers account?
A) If you do it that way, you need two accounts. One that you give to everybody in the world and one that you give just to an elite group of people. And if you do the elite group of people, notate on your Twitter page that: ‘This is for my clients only. All others, if you’re looking for this great advice, you have to become a client of mine. Here’s how …’
And use it as a lead source.
Q) Do you think it’s a waste of time to call a guest who has just checked out of my hotel to thank him or her for staying with us? What would be the best way to gain their repeat business?
A) If you’re going to call a customer after they’ve stayed in your hotel, first of all you better make it short and sweet. Second of all, the value must be for them. Don’t ask something like ‘How was your stay?’ because they’re going to say, ‘Fine’.
I want to know what the best thing about their stay at the hotel was. Did the hotel accomplish their goals? On a scale of one to 10, how was the food? On a scale of one to 10, how was the shower? On a scale of one to 10, what was the quality of your room like? On a scale of one to 10, how fast was the internet? Those are the things that bug customers.
Don’t pat people on the head and ask a bunch of stupid questions. Get them engaged. And then you can say, ‘Well when are you coming back?’
Q) When I send out quotes and proposals, clients seem to take their time reviewing the information and completely disregard the respond by date on the quote. I feel clients don’t respect this timeframe and, in addition, I feel that we as salespeople end up on the defensive explaining why we’re following up. I feel clients today want everything for nothing, expect the best from a company, and yet, they just do not seem to care about the value of what they’ve requested. How do you know when to just give up on a client like that and move on?
A) Clients want everything? Give them everything. Clients want value in the proposal? Put value in the proposal. Leave your prices out of the proposal so they have to call you to get it. You’re not sending a quote out, you’re building a relationship and the quote is basically something that confirms the sale. What are you doing with your time? And don’t cast yourself with a bunch of other salespeople. This is you. Don’t be defensive when you’re following up. Explain more reasons why they should buy. Talk about their motive. Talk about their value. You don’t even know why they want to buy. You’re just sending out a proposal on a wing and a prayer and hoping. Not good.
Q) I’ve recently moved into cruise sales. I find that customers in the travel industry shop for prices but after the prices are given the customer will disappear before any real discussion takes place. How can I turn these prospects into a sale?
A) The first thing you want to do is get to a real discussion before you give the price. Find out why they want to take a cruise. Is it a honeymoon? Is it a 10-year anniversary? Is it just for the heck of it? What are they trying to do? At the end of the cruise what do they want to have happen? What do they want the outcome of that cruise to be? That’s their emotional trigger for buying. And I want to know about the best cruise they've ever been on? I want to know if this is their first cruise or their 100th cruise.
Assure them my cruise may not be the actual lowest price but it’s always the best value, because when people get off a cruise, they’re going to remember three things:
1. What happened? Did anything go wrong?
2. How was the food?
3. What did they do? How was the view like if they went by the mountains? What were the ports like if they were adventurous?
Your job in this process is to uncover all their stuff before you give the price and set a firm meeting – I mean a firm meeting, a day and a time, not like early next week; Monday at 1:30pm – to talk to them after you give the price so you can reconnect.
