Engage Your Customer
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By John Newland in Selling Published: Tuesday, 29 April 08 - 03:40 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Tuesday, 29 April 08 - 03:58 PM (GMT) |
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Since I am now among YOU, the small business owner, I find myself relearning my own lessons.
Just starting out, you need to do a lot more outreach to find new customers. Unless you have an enormous marketing budget and the copywriting skills of Dan Kennedy, this means trying to meet a lot of new people.
The most common way to do this, at least for salesfolk, is to cold call. Cold calling is seen by non-salesfolk as the lowest form of outreach. Seth Godin would refer to it as a type of "interuption" marketing. On the other hand, it is the lowest cost, most controllable method of outreach, which is why it is used so much.
Here is the lesson. I have found, somewhat late in my career, that the only way to make cold calling work is engagement. So it is with all relationships, selling or otherwise. You need to engage the other party in order to have a conversation, selling or otherwise. Without engagement, the conversation, and the relationship, are going nowhere. Whether you are meeting someone for the first time at a Chamber event or over the telephone, you need to engage the other party as soon as possible.
The best way to engage is with a compelling question. By compelling, I mean a question that forces the other party to stop thinking about whatever it was that they were thinking about, and concentrate on your question. Further, this question can't be the kind of question that brings up the "anti-selling" defenses, but it needs to require thought in order to answer. I've been working on mine. Here is what I have so far:
"As far as your sales organization is concerned, what has been your most surprising disappointment in the last 12 months? What really caught you off guard?"
Please comment - give me your most compelling opening question, and your ideas to improve mine.
SERVE
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