Today’s subject:
The rediscovery of America for what is about sales: on the importance of rediscovering a healthy and unfairly forgotten custom of traditional sales.
Here is the video:
A few days ago, I was on the phone with a prospect. We were telling each other a few things, and in the end, he asked me to send him some in-depth material with some investment indications.
At other times I would have done it, because it seemed to me an opportunity with little potential.
But I wanted to carry out an experiment, so I asked him the most trivial thing in the world:
“Dear Customer, can I come and visit you so that I can better understand what you might need, and, on the basis of that, I can give you a more precise idea of the possible solutions?
Having said that, after a few days we met.
And… yes, at the beginning it was very hesitant.
And… yes, they already have suppliers.
And… yes, “they don’t have a budget” 😉
But in the end, something else had emerged after an hour and a half of conversation:
- things that the customer did not have;
- things that other suppliers didn’t do;
- things other suppliers have been bragging about, losing a bit of credibility;
- things that the client doesn’t know because he never did them before;
Result:
I have been asked for a very detailed quotation for a couple of possible projects.
Will I sell? Won’t I?
Who knows.
It doesn’t matter (So to speak… 😉
But at this point we’re really playing this right…
Well, that’s the moral of the story:
In order to save costs, it’s now common for salespeople to stop moving around, unless they feel safe to go and get an order.
So, we’ve all become less good at selling.
And the more we keep doing this, the more we leave it to customers to decide for themselves, or based on a website, as if we were now completely useless.
What a gross mistake!
We have to rediscover that healthy, ancient, habit of selling … which used to consist in going to visit customers.
Come on, let’s go out, let’s visit our customers, let’s shake hands!
Something so simple that it could seems stupid.
Yet it works.
Is this the (re)discovery of America?
Probably, yes.
But we’ll definitely sell more.