How to Speak to Customers - Ask Evan

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In this video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Stephanie, who asks, "Hi Evan, I need your help on how to actually speak to a customer or client when I'm first meeting him or her. The thing is, I'm a sales rep, and I get confused as to what I'm supposed to say or how to introduce the service. I need your help. Kind regards, Stephanie." So Stephanie, there's a lot of different ways to sell and it depends on your personality, but what I'm going to do is share with you how I sell one of my services and hopefully there's some lessons you can learn from that. So the service that I sell is called the Mastermind Group and this is a membership program that I use for Toronto entrepreneurs and we meet once a month to talk about our businesses and we try to help each other out to grow our businesses. So it's a little informal advisory group for your business. Now when people are first finding out about it, it's usually via my website, so by the time they're contacting me, they're they already have some kind of interest in the product. If you don't have that yet, if you haven't created awareness yet, then your first step is to come up with a benefit statement that can really capture somebody's attention very quickly and get them interested in learning more about your product or service. What happens after somebody finds out about it, they'll email me and I'll always set up a face-to-face meeting. And we usually meet over coffee. And I want to meet them face-to-face because it gets some buy-in for them. It's easy to do an email, it's easy to do a phone call, but for a meeting, they're taking time out of their day and they have a vested interest in learning a little bit more and spending some more time on it. So I want to make sure I have that commitment before I start spending a lot of my time on it as well. When I first meet them for coffee, I'll ask them a little bit about their business, their history, what their problems are, and based on that, I'll be able to tailor the discussion to be able to help them solve their problems. Right, if they have a strong pain point and you're able to help solve that, you're much more likely to get the sale. So what I'll do is I'll always ask them about the challenges they're facing, and for every person I meet, it could be a different challenge. So it could be having problems with a business partner, or trying to raise capital, or trying to grow the business and get more sales and marketing. Whatever it is, it's a different challenge for every person, and so I want to make sure I know what their pain points are before I start talking about what I have to offer. So I'll spend some time talking about their business, the pain points they're having, and then once we've had a good discussion around that, I'll say, well, let me tell you a little bit more about our service, and you can see if it's a fit for you or not. And answer any questions, hopefully, that you have. And usually then they'll say, yes, it's great, let's learn more. And again, I'm getting their buy-in. So you want to make sure that it's not just a sales presentation that at the end they say yes or no to, but they have an active role in the entire discussion. So it starts off with them talking about it, and people love talking about themselves, and so that gets them a little bit more invested too into your potential product or service and hopefully closing the sale. And then by learning more about them, you're able to tailor your presentation to be able to fit the particular sales problems that they're having with the company. So I hope that helps. That's a little bit of how I will first get introduced to a client and start the sales process. If you have extra questions, you know, let me know in the comments below. I'd also love if you can give it a thumbs up and stay tuned for the next episode.