303: The Final Five Of Your Sales Call

<p>A miraculous thing often happens when I am meeting clients for the first time.  We have had our meeting, I am closing up my organiser where I have been taking my notes, I am getting ready to leave, when they will drop some major insight or important piece of information on me.  It is always a bit fraught because the meeting has obviously ended, I am already packed up and I cannot easily unpack the organiser and start making additional notes.  I have to wait until I am out of sight to then grab that vital titbit or garnish they have added and record it before I forget it.</p> <p> </p> <p>I have come to realise that the way I run the meeting isn’t allowing for these opportunities.  Naturally, I am running the meeting rather than the client.  I have the navigation in mind.  I know where we have to get to and how we will get there. It revolves around me directing the action, because that is my job in sales.</p> <p> </p> <p>Asking intelligent questions and listening carefully for the answers is the sales life.  Many salespeople reading this will have no idea what I am talking about.  They think the job is to do all of the talking, batter the buyer with data and information and through force of will, wrestle the buyer to the ground and get them to sign the order form.  They are pitch people not salespeople and there is a vast difference between the two.</p> <p> </p> <p>In the course of asking questions, I am searching for opportunities to ask something in a way that stops the buyer in their tracks.  I want them mentally reeling back and thinking, “I haven’t thought about that”, or “I haven’t prepared for that”.  I want to bring them to a point of realisation that if they don’t buy my solution, life will be grim, the business will suffer, the future looks bad, etc.  Now I could just tell them all of these things as a statement but that is not effective.  If I make these statements, the buyer is thinking, “well of course he would say that, he is trying to sell me something”.  Instead, I want to ask a question in such