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| Image Courtesy of Stanford University |
I used to believe one of the best compliments you
could pay a sales person was, "you could sell ice cubes to Eskimos,"
or "that guy is a closer!" Both are old sayings that many
people believe are the trademark of an amazing sales person. Today
though, I would be insulted if some one would say that about my
abilities.
Why?
The answer to why is simple, it is because I
learned quickly that being successful in sales is not about selling what so
ever. To become a real success at sales, what you need to master is the
ability to help others. Which part of that help may include the products
or services you offer, or it may not. The important thing is that your
soul focus must be first to help the person, no matter what path that helps
leads.
The realization of helping to sell came to me about
three years ago when I was working with a sales person who worked for me.
The sales person was struggling to get a client to sign the agreement and
get their call center program launched with our company. Negotiations and
talks had been going on for almost two months, and it really looked like this
deal might not ever happen. So as a last ditch effort one evening I sat
down with all the notes from the program, the agreement, contracts and all the
emails sent back and forth.
As I sat there going through countless amounts of
communications, I saw a little handwritten note on the back of the original
lead form. The note simply said, "LD costs." It was the
only place I ever saw any mention of long distance on any communication to this
point. This made me wonder, was this the reason the client was not
pulling the trigger. Was it because he had expressed a concern about
something? Had we just focused on selling our services, rather than helping him
take care of everything?
The next morning I asked our CTO and Telecom Administrator
to join me on a call to our prospect. I called the prospect, to check in
with him as I had done routinely for the last few weeks, but this time I added
a question, "out of curiosity is there anything beyond the scope of call
center outsourcing our team may be able to help you with?"
"Like your CRM integration, process documentation, telecom, or
anything else?"
I no more said the words telecom, when our prospect
spoke up, "yes! actually I would love it if I could get your telecoms
teams opinion on our current long distance rates." That is when I
introduced my CTO and Telecom Administrator to our prospect, and let them chat.
In the end it came out that our contact person was
in charge of contract negotiations for both telecom and the new call center
project. Negotiations had gone south with their current vendor, which
made our contact not have time to deal with our agreement. By simply
asking if there was any more help we could be, beyond our scope of business, we
found our delay. Better, yet we found a delay that we could help the
client with, as we had enormous leverage with the telecom carriers.
Immediately after that first call was complete my
CTO and Telecom Administrator called their contacts with the carriers we work
with, got our prospected a rate almost as good as ours (about 15% less than
what they asked their current carrier to be at), and 3 hours later our prospect
had a contract that made him look like a shinning start at his company.
The next day our prospect called thanking us for
all our teams help, and going the extra mile. Now knowing this is how we
work, they decided to more than double the scope of the program and became one
of our top 10 revenue-producing client's.
This moment in my life led me to the understanding
that it is not how well you sell a person on what you do that makes the
difference. It is when you show that person that you are willing to go
beyond what they ask you for and help make their job a little easier that
matters.
So next time you are on the phone with a prospect,
slow down and ask your self this simple question:
Did I go beyond what was needed to help my client?
To Your Success & Prosperity!
