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

Author:Stephan Schiffman [Schiffman, Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2002-03-31T18:30:00+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?)

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