Understanding the basics: Time, communication, and dress

Right from the outset, you need to come across as professional in your approach to a prospect. Often it’s the little things that can make a big difference, especially when it comes to nonverbal communication. To get off on the right foot and make a good impression, especially when meeting a client for the first time, follow these basic rules:

• Be on time. Irrespective of how the contact is made, being on time is important. If you arrange to be somewhere or do something at a specific time, make sure you do it. Don’t be late. Fashionably late may be acceptable in social circles, but punctuality is essential in new business.

• Be culturally aware. You need to act the part. By this I mean the way that your communication comes across should be in line with your prospect’s culture. You need to be aware of cultural sensitivities as well as basic manners and etiquette.

  Age, gender, and seniority are as important as cultural issues in determining how you communicate. In North America or the United Kingdom, addressing your prospective client by his given name may be acceptable, but in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, for example, this is a big no-no unless invited to do so. Much more formality is required, unlike doing business in the United States or Western Europe. In Japan, for example, you need to dress formally for business meetings because Japanese business etiquette doesn’t accept casual attire. In Spain, don’t be surprised if meetings begin late and if the core of the business isn’t discussed at the initial meeting. As a general rule, err on the side of caution in early meetings, and if you’re in doubt, go with the formal approach.

• Dress well. In face-to-face meetings, either pre-arranged or perhaps at a networking or other business event, the way you physically present yourself is vital. How you dress and your overall appearance will unlikely win you a piece of business on their own, but they can easily lose you one.

  Although no absolute rule on style of dress applies across all situations, be sure you consider how you’ll be perceived and dress accordingly. Old-school sales thinking will tell you to dress “better” than your target audience to gain “respect,” whereas other schools of thought will tell you to dress in the same style as your audience. Being yourself and being the best representation of yourself at all times is most important. Be smart, not scruffy. Be well turned out and clean at all times. Be tidy. Should you wear a suit? That depends on individual new business situations, and being smart and appropriately dressed are the main attributes here.

  Some new business salespeople will tell you that they “feel the part if they look the part”; if that works for you, it’s fine. My rule is to give careful consideration to how you’re turned out and ensure that it’s appropriate for the role you’re playing in new business, for the business you’re representing, and for the target audience you’re dealing with.

Making the client important

In a selling situation, you need to remember that the client is king. What I mean by this is that you need to make your client important and focus on his needs, but that doesn’t mean you should act subservient. Treating the client as king is a mindset that you need to adopt, and you may need to make some adjustments to your natural salesperson’s instincts to gain traction here. You need to act in a professional manner at all times, and to be seen as doing so. Often, a new business salesperson likes to talk and “needs” to be talking. Remember that while you’re talking, you’re unlikely doing any active listening. Conversely, if you can get a client to do the majority of the talking while you apply active listening techniques, you’ll gain in two ways:

• Allowing your client to talk to you while you show genuine interest will make him feel important. The most important topic of conversation to most people is themselves and how they do their job. Showing genuine interest enables your prospect to feel comfortable when talking to you and often provides you with valuable insight into his personality that you can build on as the sales cycle progresses.
• By listening, you’ll gain valuable insight to the real needs that your solution has to address. Adopt the mindset that you’re not selling to the client but that he is buying from you and you need to fully understand his requirements.

Listening is only part of the task, though. You need to show that you’re interested in learning about the client’s requirements or issues and how your solution will be of benefit to him in meeting those requirements. You can use this priceless insight later in the sales cycle when presenting your solution (see Chapter 5 for more information on solutions). Show your interest and accelerate your learning by asking open questions, such as “How does this … ?”, “What would the impact be of doing … ?”, and “What type of advantages would you gain if you could … ?” Ask your prospect how he sees a solution fitting into his needs. He may even tell you exactly what you need to show him or do to win the business.

Active listening and open questions give your client the opportunity to open up to you about the real needs he’s seeking to address. It will also demonstrate that you really have his best interests in mind when proposing a solution, especially if you don’t just end with a sales pitch without first having taken the time to let him tell you what the drivers are.

Taking control

There’s a difference between letting the client talk to you and allowing focus to be lost. You need to remember that you’re the one with the solution to his needs and that you’re the expert in your field. Taking and maintaining control of the sales process is an important step for you. Throughout this chapter, I examine some of the ways for you to put yourself into this position of control. Although you want to encourage your client to talk about his needs and potential solutions, you need to be aware of the danger of being led down blind alleys by recognizing when you’re being taken off topic and returning the conversation to the key areas.

Two ways to maintain control of discussions, as you see later in the chapter, are establishing some basic objectives and having an agenda to work through. You can use these items as reference points during your discussions — either face to face, on the phone, or in writing — as a road map to closing the sale, as a means of summarizing where discussions have reached, and as a checklist of topics that you covered and agreed upon.

This style of active summary not only allows you to control the active discussion but also acts as a method of closing off objections that you’ve already covered. (See Chapter 10 for details on overcoming objections.) Use this to demonstrate that those areas are already agreed upon should the topic reemerge later in the sales cycle. This way, you’re setting out your stall from the very beginning in a professional and concise manner while demonstrating that you’re listening to and addressing requirements and issues as they arise.

If the client raises a new issue or objection, acknowledge it but know that you don’t have to necessarily cover it at that moment, especially if the topic isn’t on the agenda for that meeting or touch point. Let your client know that you’ve noted the issue and that you’ll return to it and fully address it later. This way, you maintain control of where the discussion leads and can keep it on track in accordance with the agenda and objectives, and you avoid being taken into blind alleys by off-topic issues that may get in the way of your planned progress.

For example, you may learn that a side issue of the project under discussion is actually more important than you initially thought. Make a note of this, but don’t allow the discussion to be sidetracked onto it until you’ve had an opportunity to consider the implications further. Tell your prospect that this matter is important and you’ll address it at the next meeting.

I’ve seen lots of examples of new business salespeople not making progress in a sales cycle because they allow the client to drive the discussions and just follow the client’s lead. At best, this approach will delay a sale; at worst, it will lose the sale because the salesperson never establishes and forms control.

You’re seeking to make a good first impression and using that to establish your ground rules. One of the key rules is that you’re driving the sales process, although you’re doing so subtly. Failing to take control from the initial contact sets a precedent and once done is difficult to undo.

Setting expectations

In Chapter 19, I talk about the importance of qualifying new business opportunities. One of the key elements is not to rush headlong into meetings with everyone who comes onto your radar. This is also relevant in making first impressions count because you need to avoid the “let’s meet to discuss” time-wasting trap. Your time is valuable, and you need to treat it accordingly. When you agree to meet with or have a detailed phone conversation with a prospect, you need to have a good idea of how useful this meeting is going to be in terms of getting an order. Don’t agree to spend valuable time with a prospect until he’s qualified.

When you do have a meeting or detailed phone call scheduled, both parties must understand why this touch point is happening and what each can reasonably expect to gain from it. This is usually defined in the form of an agenda, but the agenda doesn’t necessarily have to be laid out as a formal document. Sending an email that sets out the key objectives of the touch point is a more useful tool. Use the agenda to keep the touch point on track and to ensure that you’re covering the right areas. (Find out more in the later section “Setting the agenda.”)

On those rare occasions where a prospect won’t agree to an agenda in advance and just wants to “talk,” you need to understand where in the qualification process you are and whether that justifies you spending valuable time on the opportunity. If it doesn’t, don’t commit to the time, and instead suggest that a meeting or conference call may not be the best way to move forward.

You need to set the prospect’s expectation at each stage of communication. For example, “This is what we will be discussing, and this is what we will look to achieve by a meeting or call.” Setting expectations is an important step in ensuring that your time is valued, as I discuss later in this chapter.

Keep in mind that the expectation of a touch point isn’t to build a friendship; the purpose is to take another step toward securing a new business deal.

Establishing trust

At the beginning of a new business sales cycle, the prospect likely won’t know you and may be reluctant to provide too much information until you establish some basic credibility. You have some initial credibility by virtue of your position as a representative of your company, and you need to build on this quickly. Providing prospects with a brief outline of who you are and the role you play in new business is usually the first step to establishing credibility.

Next comes establishing trust. Active listening, as I discuss in the earlier section “Making the client important,” is undoubtedly a factor, but the fastest way to establish trust is to do as you say you will. Take note of action items as they arise during your discussions, and if you commit to doing or checking something, make sure that you do it quickly and provide the results to your prospect.

Summarize the discussion for your prospect, too. You should be doing this in any case for your CRM system, as I discuss in Chapter 9, so documenting it for the prospect shouldn’t be difficult or too time-consuming. Get into the habit of writing contact reports with a copy to the CRM and a copy to the prospect. You don’t have to go into massive amount of detail; just summarize the main discussions and make note of action items along with the defined time frame for dealing with them. (I describe contact reports in more detail in the later section “Owning the next stages.”)

Your prospect will quickly come to expect these contact reports, and they’ll become part of the buying cycle as documented evidence of decisions taken and progress made. They will also serve to enhance your credibility in the eyes of the prospect and, in conjunction with ticking off your action items and keeping commitments, will quickly establish you as someone your prospect can trust to deliver. This is a good example of your professionalism and will come to be appreciated as the relationship develops.

Don’t ever consider contact reports and CRM updates to be a waste of your time or an inconvenience, because nothing could be further from the truth. In Chapter 9, you discover the importance of logging data into a CRM system and why you should always do so. In the same way, contact reports will prove to be a valuable selling tool as the discussions progress because they’ll provide documented evidence that you’ve dealt with issues and closed them off.

Having your time valued

Unless you’ve mastered time travel, you have only a finite amount of time in each working day, and you need to use it to your best advantage in meeting your new business goals. I’m sure you have turned up for a client or prospect meeting and felt it has been a total waste of time for a variety of reasons:

• The prospect didn’t show up or wasn’t expecting you.
• The prospect was doing something else and not focusing on you.
• You found that you were covering old ground yet again.
• The meeting kept going off topic.

How many times have you left a meeting or finished a phone call and told yourself that it was a complete waste of time? Generally, this comes down to how the touch point was set up, and 99 times out of 100, it will be down to the new business salesperson not covering the bases.

In Chapter 19, I discuss the importance of qualifying continually and not agreeing to have a meeting until the time is right according to your qualification criteria. When it’s right to have a detailed phone discussion or a face-to-face meeting, you need to ensure that it’s going to be both productive and worthwhile for both parties. If you leave a meeting feeling it was a waste of time, imagine what your prospect is thinking — that you’ve just wasted his time, too, which won’t do either your credibility or sales success any good.

In this chapter, I keep referring to the importance of an agenda, and that really can’t be overstated. If you don’t have a good reason to meet, then don’t meet. If you ignore this basic rule, then don’t be surprised to find that your time has been wasted. I discuss agendas in more detail later in this chapter.

The main premise of this chapter is to make first impressions count, so you need to start the way that you intend to go on with a prospect. Value his time and be seen to do so, and he will value yours. If you look at the earlier bullet points, I can guarantee that each of them was caused simply by one not valuing the other’s time sufficiently and trying to shortcut the setting-up processes. If the worst comes to the worst and you’ve set up the touch point correctly only to find that one of these bullet points still applies, then what do you do? First, add it to the CRM as a warning for others in the future, and second, write a contact report in negative terms and let it be known that the touch point was a waste of time. One of two things will happen: Either you’ll lose the sale, but it was unlikely to happen anyway, or you’ll discover that future touch points are treated with the professionalism they deserve.

Agreeing on the objectives

After you get beyond the initial contact phase and into a sales cycle, every touch point has a purpose, and the overriding objective you have as a new business salesperson is to move the discussions forward and closer to the elusive yes that you seek as your ultimate goal.

Clearly, your prospect is going to have to investigate your solution as a fit to his need and, as part of this, will need to be in contact with you. You’re going to want to continually qualify the opportunity (see Chapter 19 for information) and therefore be in touch with him. In setting up these touch points, either as phone calls or face-to-face meetings, you need to set and agree on clear objectives. What are you hoping to gain from this next interaction? What is your prospect hoping to gain?

Until you understand what your prospect needs from you, doing precise preparations is difficult, and I don’t suggest attending a touch point in this state. So you need to pin down the objectives and form into an agenda that you both agree on. Saying “Let’s meet on Wednesday and see how things are moving along” is too loose, because there is no objective and, apart from passing some time, this statement is unlikely to achieve anything. On the other hand, saying “Let’s meet on Wednesday to review the needs analysis” is much better. It’s specific and measurable and will move the discussions forward. You’ll both know whether you reached the objective. You may need to spell out how you go about “reviewing the needs analysis,” and that is where the agenda comes in (see the next section).

Setting the agenda

When it comes to an agenda, having just the list of topics to be discussed is generally sufficient. This process allows your client to better prepare, assuming that you set the agenda, and to have no doubt as to what you’re expecting him to be ready to discuss. This process also helps with making a good impression. In advance of a meeting with a prospect, you both know what you’ll discuss and can arrive prepared to comment on and commit resources as necessary without having to refer to others and take up more valuable time.

Suppose that you have an objective for a meeting with a prospect on Wednesday about “reviewing the needs analysis,” and that’s a start, but how are you going to go about achieving this? Maybe in this example you agree that the agenda includes

• Clearing up any points of clarification resulting from reading the needs analysis
• Highlighting any areas of concern
• Determining who will take responsibility for each section
• Ensuring that resources are assigned
• Setting a timescale for completion

You don’t have to formally present the agenda on a piece of paper titled “Agenda,” but you should email it or at the very minimum agree to it verbally in advance of the meeting. However, as the new business salesperson, you should own both the objectives and the agenda and be the driver of the process. Without this, you lose control of the sales process, which leads to delays and potentially no order ever being received. In other words, the objectives define what you’ll discuss, and the agenda defines the process you’ll use to meet the objectives.

Using research (or not)

Although you should do the bulk of your preparation in advance, you’ll need to account for some last-minute checks before a meeting or phone call. As a minimum, you should do an Internet search for any news about the target company that has hit that day and for any specific industry news that may be relevant. Your prospect will expect you be on the ball and to know what’s happening in any relevant activity, but this also allows you to demonstrate your professionalism and understanding of the issues that affect your prospect and his business sector.

Another good reason for last-minute research is that you don’t want any surprises. Imagine how you’d react if you arrived for a meeting to find that the company was in the midst of a takeover bid that threatened to overturn your project? A true story serves to illustrate my point about last-minute research. Several years ago, I was due to speak to a senior marketing person at BP about an environmental awareness campaign. As you’d expect, I did my last-minute research and found a breaking news story about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Easily putting two and two together, I was able to determine that today wasn’t the best day to be speaking to BP about environmental issues, so I sent a message to rearrange the appointment for some other time.

When it comes to research, there’s a fine line to what you should use and what you should set aside. You want to be perceived as knowledgeable, but you also need to avoid being labeled as someone who has an opinion on everything and needs to talk about it. Although research is vital and last-minute research is massively important, the real skill comes in knowing when to use this knowledge and, perhaps of more importance, when to not say anything. For example, your prospect may have just released a poor set of financial results, and you should know about this, but it may not be appropriate to bring it into discussions unless he does first.

Log each piece of research that you find into the CRM, and make it available to colleagues, current and future, who may have dealings with this company or this industry. No research is ever “pointless” or “wasted.”

Answering frequently asked questions

Most companies and most solutions have a string of questions that prospects tend to ask frequently, and your situation likely won’t be any different. You need to deal with company and product background questions fairly early in the sales cycle because they’re pretty fundamental to a prospective customer. You, as the new business salesperson, need to know your numbers and your background as part of creating a good impression.

Moving on to more specific solution questions, you’ll find that the same questions crop up time and again with different prospects, so you’ll know to expect them and how to answer them. It’s important to have your answers ready but to treat each question as if it’s the first time you’ve been asked it, and not with a sign of resignation about being asked “that question” again. It’s likely the first time this prospect has asked it, and the answer is clearly important to him, so treat it that way. You need to have ready answers to frequently asked questions but not stock answers.

Two things to keep in mind when preparing for questions: There is no such thing as a silly question for your prospect to ask, and always bear in mind that questions equal engagement. The time to worry, especially early in the sales cycle, is if the prospect doesn’t have questions to ask.

Keeping commitments

It should go without saying that when you commit to a client or prospect that you’ll do something, make sure you complete it. Doing so is both good manners and part of creating a good impression for you and your company. I have come across too many instances of follow-up commitments not being kept to know that this message needs to be underlined.

Delivering on your follow-up commitments shows that you’re a serious new business salesperson and one who your prospect can do business with. It also does two other key things: reinforces trust and establishes precedent.

• Take seriously any opportunity you get to reinforce prospect and client trust in you as a salesperson. The more credit you can build up here, the easier some of the selling tasks further in the sales cycle will become.
• Make a habit of delivering at least what you committed to and do so by at least the committed time. If you can beat either of these, then do so. You’re setting an important precedent that will position you as someone who delivers and keeps commitments, someone in the sales process who the prospect can trust and rely on.

For example, if during a meeting a side issue is raised that may not be immediately important, tell your prospect that you’ll address it later, and then make sure that you do so. An email follow-up telling him that you have noted the issues and will resolve it by the next meeting is a good way to handle this.

Defining the ground rules

What are you following up on? It should be in line with the objectives that you established prior to the touch point (I talk about objectives earlier in this chapter). If it isn’t, then you need to revisit your objectives because something may have been miscommunicated and needs correcting. Doing so is both good practice and contributes to making a good impression.

Guard against unreasonable and unrealistic requests for more information, which can have a habit of slowing down the sales cycle and introducing additional elements that you’ll need to sell around. Try to steer your prospect to focus on what is necessary and relevant for solving his problem or need. If your solution can provide additional benefits, you can summarize them simply without going into unnecessary detail. You need laser-sharp focus and may need to guide your prospect back toward the key objectives if he begins to go off on a tangent.

In defining ground rules for following up from a touch point, be realistic with timescales. You need to balance acting quickly to get to the next stage with your workload, prioritizing areas that will provide you with maximum returns. Don’t promise to get something done by tomorrow in the hope that you will find time. It’s better to commit a few days later and deliver early if you can than to make an unrealistic commitment and miss it.

If something is needed urgently, qualify why that is and what impact it will have on the sales cycle progress if delivered early, on requested dates, or later. If you’re under pressure to provide something quicker than you know you’ll be able to, then push back. Ask what the real urgency is. It may be that you need to reprioritize to meet a deadline, but equally it may transpire that the prospect has plucked a date out of the air and that the need is not as urgent.

Owning the next stages

What happens as result of a touch point is important. You’ve worked hard to get a meeting, your qualification is looking good, your solution is a good fit to the prospect’s needs, and you have agreed to provide some additional information in three days’ time. So far, so good, but now what? What is the next step in the sales cycle? Don’t agree that your prospect “will look at the information and get back to you” or words to that effect. This is just about as bad as a straightforward “no thank you,” because you’ve lost control of the sales cycle.

You need to own the next steps, at almost any cost. You need to maintain permission to instigate contact, which you lose if agreeing to let the prospect contact you.

As a tactic, you can fall back on the contact report, which I introduce in the earlier section “Establishing trust.” Tell the prospect that you will, as you always do, send a contact report to document what has been discussed and decided, and leave the follow-up at that if you can’t get further agreement. You can then add into the contact report that you’ll speak in a week’s time or whatever is appropriate. If it’s in the contact report, then you have given yourself permission to maintain contact and kept the initiative.

Have a look at an example contact report in Figure 3-1 to get an idea of how this can work for you. A good contact report has the basic information of who was present and where and when the contact occurred, summarizes issues discussed and agreed upon, and specifically notes anything you feel may be contentious that you have resolved. A report protects your position should the issue be raised again as you can demonstrate that it was discussed and resolved.