Chapter 8 - Assuming Needs
A common problem among businesses, and particularly among salesmen, is that they assume that they know what their prospects want and need. And they often do no.
Consider this: many husbands have great difficulty choosing a gift for their wives. That is, they struggle and often fail to identify the wants and needs of a person with whom they have been in constant and close contact for years or decades. How can they then go to work and presume that they know the wants and needs of thousands or millions of people they have never even met?
There follows another page-filling fake dialogue between a salesman and a client in which the salesman gives a lengthy pitch about how the product will serve their needs, meanwhile ignoring and interrupting every attempt of the client to explain what his needs really are. Then, he immediately follows up with a rewrite of the scenario in which the salesman asks questions and listens to the client, to demonstrate how knowing the needs of the customer enables a salesman to position his product as a relevant solution.
He then proposes an 80-20 "rule" for salesmanship, which suggests the percentage of "the talking" that the prospect and salesmen should do. Effective selling isn't about convincing the client that your assumptions about them are right - but in not making such assumptions and speaking in reaction to what you hear them say. And while this rule is well-known, the majority of salesmen seem to be fast-talking braggarts who seek to browbeat the customer into a sale - and when they fail to get results, they feel the need to be even more obnoxious.
The author describes his ideal breakdown of a one-hour sales call:
- Five minutes of introduction, in which you present yourself and your company in one minute and listen to the prospect for four minutes.
- Ten minutes of setup, including a general outline of what you think your product can do to benefit the prospect.
- Thirty minutes of questions - specifically, you asking the prospect about their situation rather than assuming they will ask questions about you. The goal here is to gather information to which you can speak in the next part of the conversation.
- Ten minutes presenting your product as a solution to the problems the prospect has described. This is not a boilerplate product pitch, but an extemporaneous speech that addresses the very problems the client described in the previous step, and nothing more.
- Five minutes to set up the next visit. This is very important because relationships fizzle if there is no commitment to meet again.
Of particular importance: the salesman is not trying to pressure the prospect to close in this call - his objective is to have a conversation, and keep the discussion going, until some point in the future in which the prospect demonstrates an interest in closing the deal.