Question: When should you tell your spouse that you love them? Answer: Before someone else does! The same basic principle holds true for your clients and customers. Your best clients really are your competitor’s best prospects. That’s why every sales professional should include specific customer success behaviors in their account plan to maximize the client onboarding experience, build and protect the relationship, expand the account, and generate repeat business and referrals. This is not a “customer service” issue. It’s a customer success issue, and we need to think of it that way!
Identify the most relevant pain indicators your prospects are likely to experience. Then use those pain indicators as the foundation of a respectful peer-to-peer conversation about whether it makes sense to invest the necessary time and energy in a deeper discussion about the possibility of working together. If it doesn’t make sense… move on!
We adore them as fans. We admire their focus and talent. We wish we had their skill. They are at the top of their game. And their success has come from hard work, dedication, focus… And coaching. At some point in our lives, a trusted coach can be the difference between reaching goals and simply working hard.
We all love to win. We all need strokes. We all need to feel OK. However, the professional salesperson shouldn’t try to get those needs met by a prospect. The prospect is the one who needs to feel like a winner in the selling situation. The prospect should feel stroked after a sales call. And, perhaps most important, the prospect must feel OK when dealing with a salesperson.
Salespeople sometimes dig themselves into a hole by leaping into action at the very first sign of interest from a prospect. Maybe something like that has happened to you. Perhaps you had a “good initial discussion” with a prospect, and, based on that conversation, you agreed to invest time and energy gathering information, working up prices, and putting together your presentation. Then what happened?
Most salespeople want a brighter tomorrow. They want more opportunity, more customers, more business, and of course, more commission. Fortunately, there are numerous things they can do to ensure a brighter tomorrow. So, why aren’t they doing them?
