Ben Wright breaks down three mistakes that kill deals in the first meeting: poor qualification, failing to uncover what customers actually need, and not asking follow-up questions. Fix these behaviors and your close rates climb.
Questions this episode answers
25 to 30%
The first three podcast listeners who are spoken to that week
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday
20 years
Chapters
In this episode, you will learn the biggest mistake salespeople make in front of customers. Welcome to Sales Process Made simple. The show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade. Sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode, we will focus on the three biggest mistake salespeople are making in front of customers, what they can do about it, and then how you can make sure those mistakes don't happen to you. It's so difficult to always be on your game when it comes to customer interactions. As a salesperson, it doesn't matter whether you're the most experienced in the industry or you're learning. It's never easy to to be at the top of your game 100% of the time. And what that means is that regardless as to how experienced we are, the big mistakes can happen to any of us. And the biggest mistake that I see from salespeople in front of customers is that they worry far too much about them. And what I mean by that is they worry far too much about what they can offer to customers. The features, the benefits, the outcomes of the product that they do worry about without really understanding what the customer wants. And the result here is not necessarily a bad relationship, but certainly lower close rates. And those lower close rates come about because the salespeople haven't been able to really understand what the customer needs, but have instead focused around them. So this most typically happens in our first meeting. That's the time when salespeople tend to get this wrong. However, there's a really nice format that we can train our sales team in to make sure that they're not making these mistakes. So there's three parts to this. Let's go through each one of these now, and then we'll wrap up what you can do to make this work for you. So the first thing we can do to make sure we're not making this big mistake in front of our customers is qualifying them. So before we go and see them actually making sure that they're a business that we're gonna be able to add value to. Now, that can simply be done through your qualifying questions, and that should happen in the very early stages of your lead generation, before. Before we even get out face to face. That's number one. Number two is when we're in front of customers, we need to make sure. That we're asking what adds value for them. So we're getting really clear around what their problem is, what their opportunity is and what they see as a solution to fix it. Because once we understand that, it gives us the opportunity to pair our services or our products with exactly what they're looking for. The third piece, and this is very much a technical element here, that is a way that our team should be behaving, is to make sure that when we're asking these questions, we're following them up with a second question. What I mean here is if we're asking the question that says, what's the reason that we came together today? We're then following that up with a more direct question around their answer. So if their answer is, well, I need you to help me reduce my operational expenditure. Fantastic. Can you tell me more about in particular which operational expenditure lines are causing you the biggest trouble, or can you tell me in particular about where you're overspending and how we can pull that back? Or if we're in a residential landscape. What I'm looking to do is actually make my house feel like my home. Fantastic. So when we talk about taking your house to be your home, what are the type of things that are going to really land with you to make it feel like that forever home? So they're both slightly different examples. However, what they're doing is they're following your first question with a deeper second question that allows us to really understand exactly what our customer is looking for. It's also by asking questions, stopping us talking about ourselves. Because as soon as we start doing that, our products and features become the main star of the show, rather than lining them up with exactly what our customer wants. So the biggest mistake we're seeing sales people make in front of customers is focusing more on themselves than what the customer wants. It's generally happening in the very first meeting. So it's really early when this mistake is, but it's nice and easy to fix and all we need to do to fix it is make sure we're qualifying customers so we're actually sitting in front of the right customers in the first place. When we get there, we're focusing on their problem or their opportunity. So we can then work out where we add value. And to get to the bottom of that problem or opportunity, we're actually asking multiple follow up questions. So a general question is followed by a more specific question, which may even be followed by more specific questions after that. But then the narrower we can go in terms of what they want to achieve at a meeting with us, the more likely we are to be successful. So as you leave today, the thought that I'm hoping is landing with you is thinking about those three levers and wondering where you can improve them in your team. Are we qualifying people well enough? Are we actually spending enough time understanding what they want when we're in front of them? Or lastly, are we asking multiple questions or just taking the first answer and flowing straight into what we can offer? In most teams I work with, there's something in there that they can improve and if you can take that 1% better approach, that's a perfect example here around little mini improvements or micro improvements that improve our sales team. Thank you for joining in today. Very grateful as always. We're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday between now and next session. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does help grow sales. That's it for today. See you next time. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get money on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales. To book in, click the link in our Show Notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.
