In my first few sales pitch I found myself in a hurry to say my pitch to the client. This was more so because I always felt that talking anything beyond hard selling my product would be wasting clients time, lest s/he may hate me for this and would lead to losing the prospect.
Also, post pitching the product to the client there was little less to be said. So the sales pitch looked more or less like a 30 sec TV commercial which leaves little impression unless not repeated multiple times.
However with experience I learnt few things about sales and have mentioned the tips below:
- Smile:
Always smile and have a body language that exudes confidence .This will be always welcomed by the customer.
- Ask:
Always ask the customer about their business. Learn from them as much as possible about what their business is all about, their competitors, and the issues that they are facing (not necessarily related to the product or service that you are selling). This helps to build up relationship with the client.
Now it’s a right time to ask more… about the need for your product / service to the customer.
Ask them more and more on this, and believe me, they will share a lot of information with you . This is the time you should start thinking at the back of your mind about how you are going to pitch to the customer.
- Lead:
Now that you know so much about the customer, lead him/her to the holy grail…i.e. pitch your product with all the HOT features which solves the customers issues. Thus ASKing helps you to be more specific and to-the-point when explaining to the client.
This also grabs customers attention, each time you say..”hey, my product will solve the issue you just mentioned….”
- Encourage:
Now that the customer is excited about your product, its time to encourage the customer to try/experience your product.
- Show the demo to the client and
- Share success stories
- Send a mail:
Send demo ids or product description or proposal asap. I had a wonderful experience dealing with Just Dial. Their sales personnel asked for the interested option, entered the details in an online form, asked for my mail id and Voila! The proposal was there in my mail instantly.
In short waste no time!
Now if you are wondering that why such a heading for this topic, the reason is that all of above is only possible if you accept the offer for a tea if the client asks.
This helps you to buy some time to talk to the client and get some valuable insights. Earlier I used to always say no to such offering , not knowing what I was missing on 🙂
Ranjan Bhattacharyya
“Perhaps more importantly, the business head managed to motivate others in his team to rise above being developers and managers, and instead began to think like entrepreneurs :- “I have these resources, I know my goal ; what’s the best way for me to get from here to there?“”
This kind of change in thinking can be a force multiplier. Will try this approach in our organization.
Mahesh, thanks for the story !
Praveen Prabhu
True – Never say no to tea.
During my first job as an Account Executive in an Ad agency, I was never a tea drinker, but had to learn quickly after i noticed that the client’s (a National Bank) representative would give me more time to talk with him once he ordered tea. These extra minutes gave me ample opportunity to get incite into what new products they were planning to launch & what we could do to help them in this.