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Selling to Individuals One-on-One!
The annals of recent sales history are full of exceedingly powerful people in the sales world reaching the pinnacle of their industry, with stories of how they made people in conversation seem to be the only person on the planet to talk to.
- Mary Kay Ash of Mary Kay Cosmetics fame was known for opening her home to her sales stars at conventions, rewarding super achievers with pictures, hand written notes, and of course the pink Cadillac. Many also know, have heard stories or personally experienced the opportunity to have dialogued with Mary Kay. She shakes your hand genuinely and firmly, holds onto your hand or arm, looks you directly in the eyes and addresses you by name. She looks at you the entire duration of the dialogue.
Never does she look beyond you to see if someone more important has entered the area or become distracted with other items around her. - Sam Walton of WAL*MART fame was famous and successful for among many reasons, one is that the stores are manned and lined at the front door by an individual who’s sole job is to “Meet and Greet” all arrivals and make them feel like they are home – a smile, name, a gift and an offer to help.
As a sales professional realize that any signal sent to a prospect/customer that they are in fact not as important as someone or something else, can give the prospect/customer cause to tune the sales professional out.
When engaging the prospect/customer in one-on-one situations, here are just a few guide posts to help you to focus out all other potential distractions and focus into the other person, it is critical to:
- Make eye contact (can you remember the eye color of the last person you talked with?)
- Notice the color of the hair and hairstyle
- Take vivid mental notes or better yet have a writing utensil and something to write on, to take physical notes; Use your smart phone to take notes, or exchange call numbers in real time so you can create a directory contact file and add your conversational notes in real time into that file
- Call them by their name, get their name and correct pronunciation. If follow-up correspondence is necessary, get the correct spelling of all names – don’t assume spelling
- Remember the talk to listen ratio should be to listen twice as much as you would talk (remember you one mouth and two ears, utilize them in that ratio)
- Dialogue to find something that you may have in common with them (home location geography, hobby, schooling, vocation, industry, etc…)
- Establish rapport by finding out where the other person sees them self in relationship to using your product or service (defer to the conversational ‘Stacking-N-Linking’ model taught in our PERFORMANCE DRIVEN SELLING® programs and in our best-selling sales book, IT! How to FIND It, GET It, KEEP It & GROW It©
- Conversationally get the other person to share what their 5W, 1H are in respect to why you are face-to-face with them, find out what their goals and needs are in this interaction of B2B, B2C, C2C, etc.
- Take notes and track what their real core needs are on both an immediate level and longer term basis to determine if there is even a legitimate reason for you to be in their presence
Building a relationship with people one person at a time, can be done more effectively if the sales professional first connects with individuals one-on-one. Here is a simple and silly game to see if you really do connect with the other person, or when you meet people are you so preoccupied with your internal ‘Agenda’ that while they are talking your are not connecting? Consider ...