Put Down The Cookie Cutter And Listen

by Paul Grimsley

So, you sit down with someone and you assume that you know what they need, because you have some great products, and the one that you are talking about has proven to be very popular, so how could they not want it? You don’t bother aiming, you don’t even assess whether you have the right weapon, and you miss the target.

It was a pitch in a sense. You threw something at them. And it bounced off.

Imagine that you were trying to make friends with this person and you just felt like you knew everything about them and treated them a certain way because your other friends liked to be treated that way — not exactly going to go very well, is it?

So, let’s start again. What do you know about this person? You know what they produce and you know who they are. You do not know what they want to do with their business and you do not know what they consider to be the problems in running said business. You need to discover these things. You need to ask questions.

You know you have some great products, and they might want all or none of them, but in order to determine which is going to be the best fit, you have to know something about their goals and problems first.

You are working on the close before you even have the cycle opened, which is why you are bumping into the door. You have to be on the same page first. It starts with a handshake, and then it continues with the building of a relationship, and that relationship allows for an evolution of viewpoints, where the client may not want the same things two months into working with you that they wanted when you first sat down with them. By having a relationship with your clients and maintaining good communication with them you don’t find yourself drifting away from them, and discovering six months down the line that they aren’t getting what they expected, and they have been talking to someone else.

Cookie cutter, low friction, lowest common denominator may seem like an easy way to do business, but if you force through a sale with something someone doesn’t really want you are going to have problems. You didn’t listen to them in the sales process, and you are probably not going to do a great job of listening to them once the product’s sold. What are you going to do? That’s the product. Like it or lump it. You sit down and try to hammer the template over the person and make them fit. It seems simple.

Listening is simpler. Finding out what the client actually wants and needs is simpler. Building a relationship with them, and working with someone who is, if not your friend, at least friendly. Maybe it involves a little bit of hard work, but in the long run it will be a better set-up for you and your client.