We are always selling ourselves. We try to convince our supervisor that we deserve a raise, request a free airplane seat upgrade at the gate and ask a potential client to hire us for his or her next project or service.
If we are always performing this task, why not look at a process that works most effectively in generating beneficial outcomes and incorporate it into your life, both at work and outside of work? I will focus here on this selling process and its implementation in the business setting, but it can easily be adapted to just about all we do in life.
Our goal is to make an influential contact where we desire a positive outcome, one where at the end of the day, the result becomes a win-win for all parties involved. The process involves five distinct steps, in addition to pre-planning and post-evaluation. I will discuss pre-planning and the first two steps in this blog.
Once we use this process a number of times, it will become natural and its successful effectiveness will become obvious. As with most things that are worth following, practice will make sense once implemented.
In pre-planning, before making a sales call or approaching someone for an appointment, research him or her in advance. These days, you can find a tremendous amount of information about potential clients from the Internet – what their duties are, how they perform them, who their competition is, who makes the decisions and what they like.
For example, I once received a bottle of Italian wine in the mail with a request for a meeting. After thinking hard about how this person knew that I liked that, I realized that is was in my web bio! This person earned an appointment from me thanks to that.
Also, often you know someone that is friends with the person you are meeting. These “allied resources” can provide you invaluable information about the person that you can then use to build rapport in your introduction.
Pre-planning pays. Research can make the difference between getting in the door or not. Once you succeed and are in front of your potential client or of a selection committee, do the following:
Step 1: Build rapport with your audience. It is imperative to know your audience. Building rapport is a subtle and natural way to help lower defenses and understand the person’s natural behavioral tendencies before proceeding with the presentation. Basically, it gives you an opportunity to learn how to pace the presentation, or in other words, customize it to your audience behavior.
If the person is in a hurry and seems impatient, then your presentation needs to be paced fast, arriving at bottom lines quicker and engaging with short questions and answers. It is very possible that this person will also arrive at a decision right there on the spot. On the other hand, if the person appears relaxed and patient, pace the presentation with more details and examples to help him or her in considering you.
Step 2: Ask questions about the needs and confirm the reason you are there. Ask broad, open-ended questions – the basic who, what, when, why and how. Discover their level of compromise and the process of their decision making if possible. You may be talking to the wrong person!
Before making the presentation, do a communications check-back, basically restating the issues addressed to make sure you have a clear understanding of what was discussed. Hopefully by now you have gained insights on the audience and then gear your presentation to their behavior, not yours.
Next up will be the presentation and follow through. We will discuss this in Part Two of our next blog.