In this issue:

Is being keen to answer losing you opportunities?

Book of the month

Rainmaking depends on trust

Intellect One day Training on Rainmaking

    ISSUE 14 • October 2007

  Quick and thoughtless answers can kill a multitude of opportunities.

Every day countless opportunities are lost because people blurt out simple answers to what they mistakenly see as simple customer questions.  The fact is that many customer questions, if answered immediately, will derail the sale.

Two classic errors can occur when you answer the wrong question too fast.  First, the question may throw your presentation out of sequence.  For instance, the customer may ask about price before you have had a chance to identify needs or establish the value of your solution.

If you don't know the reason behind the question, then you must probe for more information.

The second error arises when a seeming innocuous question is, in fact, loaded, and you don't have enough information to answer correctly.  If you don't know the reason behind the question, your hasty answer may land you in trouble.

Even experienced sales people can fall into this "being keen to answer" trap. Just imagine how many potential business opportunities are let go by untrained and inexperienced customer facing services delivery people.  Here the kind of tragic little scene that plays out every day, with minor variations, in thousands of both products and services based businesses .

A customer thumbs though a catalogue and points to an item.  "Do you have any of these in stock?" he asks his contact.

Client facing person : "No, I'm afraid not.  We sold out yesterday."

Customer (annoyed): "Ok, I'll get them somewhere else.  You don't seem to stock as many items as you used to."

Why would you call that tragic? 

Maybe because your customer facing person  might have turned the situation around so easily—rescuing a nice opportunity and pleasing a valuable customer—if only she knew the value of answering a question with a question. 

The scene might have played like this:

Customer: "Do you have any of these in stock?"

Rep: "How soon will you need them?"

Customer: "Well, we're running a little low. Probably in a week."

Rep: "So if I can get them for you in a week, that would be all right?"

Customer: "Yes, that will be fine."

Ca-ching!  Hear that cash register ring?  See that customer who is now impressed by your service and by your rep's helpfulness instead of disgruntled by your lack of inventory?

Book of the month

We work quite with a number of wannabe rainmakers who are not the best self promoters in the world. We often recommend this book to get them to realise that you do not have to become a braggart to let people know who you are and what you do.

This book is just a super way to introduce them to the middle ground. After all rainmaking is not all about who do you know but equally who knows you and what you can do to help them. 

Click the book to link to our recommended book page

Rainmaking depends on Trust

As Green points out, and my own experience tells me, most sales and marketing people either ignore the trust factor altogether, or simply believe the act of building trust is telling their prospective customer all about their expertise, experience, reputation, etc. While this does build credibility, it does not build trust and with all things seeming equal, the buyer will always choose trust.

The difference that a true Rainmaker brings is that they usually come from the services delivery side of the house where trust in each other as client and supplier is absolutely necessary to bring a project in on time and in budget.

So, what's the acid test for "selling or rainmaking from trust?"
It's simple. Would you ever be willing to recommend a key competitor to a significant client?
Be honest. This is not the time to live in denial.
If you answer no, you are not selling from a position of total trust.

In "Trust-Based Selling," Charles Green identifies four values that a trust-based seller must hold and act from consistently:

1.  True customer focus, which means treating customers as ends, not as means, and cultivating a habit of noticing and paying attention.

2.  A collaborative style and willingness to involve the buyer in the sales process, going way beyond customer satisfaction surveys or client dinners.

3.  A medium-to-long term perspective, which involves focusing on multiple transactions and interactions over time, as opposed to the particular sale at hand.

4.  A habit of transparency, the best guarantor that motive will be understood. Secrets break down trust, while being transparent means being willing to let the client into the seller's business by sharing information that sellers might normally consider proprietary.

                          Well.... Did you pass the acid test?

    
 Rainmaking with Intellect

Here's Intellect's details of the training course that will be
       run by Rainmaker Coaching Ltd for Intellect's members and non-members. 

If you want to get a taster of how Rainmaking training might fit in your organisation this is an ideal way of finding out. But please hurry their rooms are only able to take limited numbers of attendees...

Rainmaking Training
Many companies provide sales training courses for their services teams and then wonder why the training hasn’t worked. This course is different.

Our core assumption is that we must maintain the service deliverer’s integrity and trusted advisor status with the client. These are too important to be jeopardised. Rainmakers start with these as their platform and then build additional skills into their repertoire. We do not try to turn them into sales people; that would defeat our aim.

This course enables delegates to explore their own beliefs about selling and rainmaking. They will understand the important differences between the two and be given the tools and skills that will enable them to uncover business opportunities in their client organisations.

This training provides extensive opportunities to tailor the skills and knowledge to specific situations that delegates find in their work environment and to practise the new skills in role-play exercises.

What does your company gain?

• A team of delivery staff interested in developing further business with clients as a way of increasing the company’s revenue, with almost no increase in the cost of sales.
   
• Increasing chances of winning business by influencing clients' early thinking.
   

"It is what we make of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another."

Nelson Mandela (1918 - )South African statesman

Mike Meyer on organising your customer data to support your processes

"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thingthat ever has."     Margaret Mead (1901-1978)  American anthropologist