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It's Only Common Sense: Making the Most of a Sales Call

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...It's getting more and more difficult to get a potential customer’s attention. In recent columns I've been talking about how much harder it is to get people on the phone...never mind schedule a meeting with them. Meetings with potential customers are now at a premium and sometimes as rare as hen's teeth.

When you do manage to secure a meeting with a potential customer you'd better make it good, because chances are you're only going to get one crack at it. You'll get just that one opportunity to make good on your time with that target customer.

Here are a few ideas to make the most of a sales call:

First, know everything you can about your target customer. You need to know what the company does, when it was started, and by whom. Understand their products, how they build them, how they service their customers, whether or not they're successful, whether or not they're an industry leader, and just about anything else you can discover. Honestly, in this day and age, that’s quite a bit--you can find out just about anything online. This fact is one of the perks of selling in the 21st century.

The last thing you want to do is walk into a prospect’s office and start asking questions to which you should already know the answers. You’re going appear ill-prepared and he'll know it right away. You want to ask the right questions, which is why you need to know so much about the company. In many cases, if you know enough about the company you'll already know the answers to the questions you should ask, but you will ask them strategically as part of your very-well-put-together sales pitch. Here’s what I mean: Say you find out that the company won a J. D. Power award for excellent customer service a couple of years ago--ask about that. Obviously, this will be something that she'll want to talk about and it will also show that you did your homework. Most importantly, this question will drive the conversation toward customer service, which will then get her talking about what she considers great customer service. From there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to discussing your company’s great customer service as well as all the things your companies have in common. See what I mean? Intelligence pays off.

Here are a few other pertinent questions you should ask. Wait. Let me rephrase that: Here are a few things you need to find out and, rather than just asking questions point blank, learn through seemingly casual conversation. In other words, engage the prospect in a leading dialog in the manner described above.

When she starts talking about what she considers good customer service, it’s easy to get her to divulge her company's needs. That revelation can lead to what she considers her biggest problem right now, which can lead to what she is doing to solve that problem, which, hopefully, will be your opening to show her that your product and service can solve her problem. What a coincidence!

From that point in the conversation, you can explain how your company can solve her problems and ask her what would have to happen for her to consider working with your company to jointly solve her problems. The two of you can talk about what your company can offer. You can demonstrate what solutions you can provide and simply ask how your two companies can start working together--it's the best way to ask for business without asking for business.

What's the next step? If you've done everything right, she will be the one to tell you what the next step will be, and it’s more than likely going to be for you to provide her with a quote for selling her your fantastic problem-solving solution.

There's one more step you need to complete to solidify the results of this meeting: Tell her you are going to write up a summary of this meeting complete with discussion points and actions. Do this immediately so that you'll both have it in 24 hours. This way, you are actually creating a blueprint that become the foundation of your new business relationship. As we all know, business is all about relationships. It’s only common sense.