Are you an expert? Let me give you a hint, you are assuming you aren’t on your first week of the job, you know more about your offering and your client’s challenges than any prospect out there. And it’s time to use this to your advantage. Don’t forget, your prospect only knows his or her challenges, but you get the 30,000 foot perspective on your prospects, industry and their challenges. In this chapter, I’m going to show you three tips to become the expert in sales. Check it out.
Number one, start your opening with observations of the challenges you see in the marketplace. I want to give you an example, here is how my client who is a trade show display provider starts his interactions. So he’ll say something along the lines of, right now I’m seeing a lot of companies that are worried about their trade shows ROI, they’re concerned about being perceived as the leader in their industry. And finally, they’re struggling to stand out on the show floor more than ever before, do any of these issues ring true, you know, timeout, this opening is providing value, but it’s also something that the prospect can relate to. So by doing that, we are setting ourselves up as an expert who sees what’s really going on.
Number two, ask if they’ve experienced any of those challenges. Now that you’ve listed off the three issues, it’s time to actually engage. And you heard in my example, what it sounds like. So by listing the challenges, you show that you know what’s going on in their world. And then you seal it off with any of these issues ring true to you. By doing that you’re going to get them to open up to say, actually, we are dealing with one of those challenges. Number three, dig into the response with more questions. This is where you act as the doctor to discover what is really, really going on and prospects will see the value when you help them articulate a challenge that they hadn’t even mentioned to anyone before, this creates massive value sets you up as the expert.