The Definition of a Sales Call
A key component of learning to #SellLikeYou is redefining selling for yourself so that you can feel good about doing it. The reframe is crucial. It gets you out of someone else’s ideas, and into a position where you can really do your best work.
Of course, a critical component of selling is the sales call. While in the shower the other day, this hit me straight upside the head.
A sales call is “a productive conversation about a problem worth solving.”
The more I think about this definition, the more I love it. It doesn’t just expand the perspective for what’s going on in those discussions, it reframes the expectations and standards for the seller.
In the following four sections, you’ll find the bars to clear to make your sales calls more successful.
“A Productive…”
There’s an objective for these meetings. They’re not just check-ins or visits. I advise my clients to answer three questions before every sales call:
1. What am I trying to accomplish?
2. What do I want to ask for?
3. How will I ask?
Without an agenda like this, most calls go nowhere. That’s why deals stall (if they ever get off the ground at all) and why so many deals are lost to no decision.
“Conversation…”
The word “conversation” suggests a dialog between two or more people. It’s important to remember that productive sales conversations are not one-sided; they’re collaborative exchanges of information and suggestions.
Selling is not so much about telling as it is about learning. You were given two ears and one mouth. I find that’s a useful ratio for how much you should be listening versus talking.
Go into every interaction seeking to learn something. When you learn enough, you can make a simple recommendation.
“About a problem…”
If I was only allowed to make one suggestion that would most help salespeople, it would be to talk more about problems and less about solutions. No one cares about your product, but they’ll talk all day about the problems they’re trying to solve.
A bigger problem <ahem> is that most sellers don’t actually know the problems they solve for their prospects. The irony is that it’s because sellers have been taught by people like me to think about how they help instead of what they sell. Because of this effort to make salespeople feel better about selling, they miss the point completely.
Whenever I ask a seller what their prospects’ problems are, I inevitably hear, “We help people by…”
That’s not what I asked.
As soon as you get absolutely clear on the problems you solve and start offering conversations about those issues, you’re going to book a lot more meetings, and a lot more of them will lead to closed business.
This will be a big part of my webinar this week.
“Worth solving.”
Your prospects have more problems at any given time than they will ever be able to solve. The issues at hand are whether they are important enough to solve ever and urgent enough to solve now.
This concept relates directly to tension, the group of emotions responsible for compelling anyone to do anything. Some salespeople seem to create massive amounts of tension out of nowhere, while others are able to let all the air out of the balloon without realizing it.
The point of this piece is not to show you how to create or avoid those situations but to underscore the fact that people make decisions emotionally first and then justify them logically later. You forget this rule more than you should.
Simply put: no tension, no sale.
This definition creates a straightforward scorecard for you to grade yourself against and also shows you how to improve.
Do your sales calls pass these standards?
Where do they most often fall short?
My next webinar is this Thursday, and I'm going to be giving you some practical exercises you can do with your team to help you build a better pipeline. I hope you can attend live, because the recording will not be shared. See you then.
