My goal as a sales professional is to ensure the following three things happen with each of my clients on every project or job we do for them:
- Help my clients be successful
- Provide them with a solution that exactly meets their needs
- Make sure there are “no surprises” at the end of the project
Open and honest communication between me and my clients is the most important thing required to ensure each of these three things happen.
Over the past 3-4 years I have been following a sales process developed by Mahan Khalsa, who is a very successful sales consultant and has developed proven techniques that allow sales professionals to meet these three goals outlined above. The whole premise behind the success of Mahan’s techniques is “No Guessing.”
Clients naturally want to be successful. So in order for me to help them accomplish whatever it is they think they need to accomplish to be successful, I need to know a lot about their issues and results they are hoping to solve or realize by hiring my company. That way my company can come up with whatever it is that may help them succeed.
In most initial sales calls, sales people want to brag about how great their company or products are because they generally have limited amount of time to be in front of the customer to try and convince them that what they have or do is better than everyone else in the world.
I go into sales calls with potential and or existing clients, with a totally different mindset. Number one, I assume that they already know enough about my company to even get a face to face meeting in the first place. So spending time over selling myself and my company is a waste of time. After all, they just want to know how much, how long it will take and how much they will make if they spend money with my company, right?
So what I focus on is right out of the Mahan “No Guessing” training. I never assume I know what the client’s needs are, and I never assume I have a solution that will exactly meet their needs until I’ve asked the customer a pile of questions. Each question I ask is centered around finding out what issues they hope to solve or what results they hope to be able to realize. Through this question and answer process with the customer, we eliminate incorrect assumptions or guessing and actually find out from the customer themselves what exactly they are dealing with. You can also ask the customer what they have too little of or not enough of.
The more we know about a client’s needs the better chance we have of providing a solution that exactly meets their needs. If the client seems hesitant to provide you with information specific to their needs or issues, you can easily stop and let them know that all you are trying to do is find a way to help them be successful, provide a solution that exactly meets their needs and ensure that there are no surprises down the road if they choose to move forward with your company.
