The 25 Sales Skills They Don't Teach at Business School by Stephan Schiffman

Author:Stephan Schiffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook
Publisher: D.E.I. Management Group
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Skill #14

Don’t “Product Dump”

“I give what I think is a great opening summary of my company and its products and services during the opening phase of the first meeting. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes. Prospects don’t seem to be responding well to it, though. What’s happening?”

What’s happening is you’re forgetting one of the most important facts of professional sales: You are more than a walking brochure!

Most salespeople are taught to “find the needs” of their prospects, so they can make presentations designed to show how their organizations can fill those “needs.” In fact, they get used to six or eight common “needs” and become very comfortable indeed discussing them.

There’s a problem with this approach, though. It turns you into a walking advertisement. You recite a familiar “spiel” during your first meeting. Guess what? In today’s economy, the odds are high that your prospect already has—or has access to—some variation on what you offer. He or she doesn’t really “need” you at all.

The act of reciting a well-known (and lengthy) monologue to a prospect is called “throwing up” on the prospect—or, to use a slightly more pleasant term, executing a “product dump.” Whatever we call it, it means we are sending far more information out during the first meeting than we are taking in. In fact, product dumping is the most common reason for a first meeting with a prospect not to go well. Prospects hate hearing a product dump during the first meeting. (Don’t you?)

How to Turn Prospects Off

Reciting what we think we know about familiar “needs” during initial meetings with prospects won’t help us to sell more efficiently. In assessing people’s needs, we usually assume we know all about their business already. We assume that this prospect is facing exactly the same situation as the last prospect we met with. So we just soliloquize about what we have to offer or read from a brochure. In so doing, we overlook opportunities to gather meaningful information about what’s actually going on in the life of the person we’re talking to. The result: another turned-off prospect.

The reason so many salespeople rely on product dumps is that meetings with prospects can be stressful. When we’re stressed, we fall back on what’s familiar to us—namely, what we know about our product or service. Unfortunately, when we do that, we close down the lines of communication.

Not long ago, we had a visit from a salesperson who represented a copier company. The meeting consisted of a brief exchange of greetings, a couple over superficial remarks about the weather and the traffic, and the salesperson’s spiel about the features of his machine. This spiel went on, uninterrupted, for twenty minutes, at the conclusion of which time the fellow tried to “close” me. He didn’t succeed. He tried again. He didn’t succeed. He packed up his things and left.

Why do I share this story with you.? Because I want you to understand the real reason I didn’t even consider buying from this young man. He never asked me what businessI was in.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.