Episode #291: Your Agenda Or The Buyer’s When Selling

What would the buyer’s agenda be, during the sales call? “Don’t take too long, because I am busy”, “Don’t waste my time with stuff I don’t need”, “Don’t erode my cash flow”, “Don’t rip me off”, would probably be the most prevalent. Our clients often tell us one of the biggest problems they have with their sales teams, is the buyer runs the sales meeting. Their own salespeople just sit there, nice and sweetly and do whatever the buyer wants. “We are paying them, but we feel they are working for the buyer not for us”, is another common complaint. This is all very fortunate or we would have nothing to do!

“Always be closing” is an old saw in sales and is partially correct. As salespeople, we have no idea if what we do or what we have is going to be relevant for the buyer. From the buyer’s point of view, they are not sure if we or our company are the right people to do business with. We need to build trust from the very start, before we even think about closing the buyer. How do we do that?

Trust is hard to build in sales. The image of salespeople is high pressure, lots of smooth talking and duplicitous attempts to get a sale. This would be a great set of descriptions for failing salespeople, who will shortly be ejected from the profession. We do not want to get smeared with that brush, so we need to make it clear to the buyer we are real professionals.

We present ourselves in a manner which says, “this is a solid person, who looks professional”. Buyers initially only have our outward appearance to go by, when they meet us. We must make that winner. For men, that means no food stains on the tie, no crumpled suit or one which doesn’t fit properly, no scuffed, worn down shoes, clean ironed shirt, etc. In my experience, women have better common sense about how to dress for business and don’t have these types of problems.

What comes out of our mouth has to be clear, articulate and confident. That means no umming and ahhing. If we don’t sound like we know what we are doing, the buyer is certainly not going to feel they can trust us. We start by explaining four things: 1. Who we are, 2. What we do, 3. Who else we have created success for and 4. our suggestion that maybe, we can do the same thing for this client. This should be concise and clear, in order for the buyer to decide to invest more time listening to us, rather than getting back to more pressing matters.

Next, we map out the meeting. We do this so that we are in control of the agenda and don’t allow the buyer to take us off course or highjack the sales call. This might be a prepared piece of paper for the buyer to look at or we might just go through the items verbally. We start with the benefit to the buyer to have this meeting with us. Next we ask how familiar they are with our company and what perceptions they may have. Why would we ask about perceptions? Aren’t we setting ourselves up for trouble with that type of question, you might be thinking.

Now in the rough and tumble of business, competitors may be spreading false information about our financial situation or this client may have had trouble with one of the salespeople who preceded us, who has long since left the company, but not the memory of the buyer. We need to draw this resistance out early and deal with it, because if we don’t, it will sit there as a blocker to building trust with the buyer. If the perception is so bad, then we won’t be able to make a sale anyway, so we are better off to meet it head on and early.

If the buyer says, “I remember one of your company’s sales reps and he was useless and unreliable, so why should I deal with your company?”. We can reply, “Mr. Customer, if you had a member of your sales team, who was not reliable and you received complaints about him from customers, what would you do?”. The buyer will probably say, “I would fire him”, or “I would move him out of a sales role”. At this point we say, “That is exactly what we did, which is why I am here today, to serve you and make sure my company provides you with real value”.

After getting through the perceptions bear pit, we move on to suggest we look at their current situation and where they would like to be in three to five years. We also add we will look at any challenges which may be impacting the company’s ability to get to those five year goals fast enough and the implications therein. There is a small detail here which is important. We don’t just talk about getting to their goals. Given 100 years, they could probably do it on their own without any assistance from us and there would be no sale. Instead, we inject the element of speed to reaching their goals which gives us some leverage to talk about how we can speed up the solution achievement from our side.

We then talk about addressing how we might be able to assist the company, based on our solution lineup. Importantly we then ask, “how does that agenda sound and do you have any items you would like to add?” If they have no other points then, we ask sweetly, “May I ask a few questions” and we are off to the races with the sales call. Doing it this way increases our ability to direct the sale’s call. We can get enough information to know whether we can in fact help them and if we can, then how we can help them. This is the professional’s way of doing sales. Is this what your sales team are doing or are they being pushed around by the buyer?