In this video and blog post, we talk about how to improve sales appointments by focusing more on the prospect. What we show you here is part of a prospect-focused sales approach, which is where we make our communications and sales process steps more about the prospect than about the product we are trying to sell.

 

Traditional Approach

What we show you here will differ from what most salespeople do, as the common approach is to make sales appointments more about the product. What that typically looks like is a salesperson might schedule a sales appointment from a cold call or cold email, and then show up for the appointment and primarily talk about the product or service and the company.

While this seems like a logical approach for a salesperson, it is not optimal for a few very clear reasons:

  • All about me: The approach makes the appointment all about the salesperson and his or her stuff
  • Missed opportunity to learn: The appointment is a great opportunity to learn about the prospect
  • Too early for this: It is too early in the sales process to try to sell the product

 

Prospect-Focused Approach

With our prospect-focused approach, we solve all those issues and improve sales appointments by completely flipping everything around, focusing more on the prospect than on us and the product. To help with this, we divide this part of the sales process into two steps: 1) Conversation and 2) Explanation.

The conversation step is the typical sales appointment, and what we typically try to close the prospect for when cold calling and cold emailing. While the product-focused salespeople will focus the appointment and conversation on the product, we will focus the conversation on the prospect. After the conversation, we move to the explanation step, where we will present details about our company and product.

By separating these two steps, we can focus more on the prospect in the conversation and sales appointment. We can then tailor our explanation and presentation more to the prospect and include what we learned about them in the meeting.

 

How to Organize the Conversation

Our goal is to improve sales appointments by making them about the prospect and learning about what is going on in the area where our product fits. A nice way to do this is to make the first half of the conversation all about the prospect by asking questions. And then spend the second half of the conversation talking about you and how you might be able to help.
We can use our building blocks to create an outline for what to talk about and how to organize the conversation:

  1. Current State Questions: A great way to start sales appointments is by asking current-state questions to learn what is going on with the prospect.
  2. Pain Questions: You always want to identify areas for improvement, and pain questions should help with that.
  3. Pain Points: If you don’t uncover any pain with your questions, you can share examples of the pain points you help to fix.
  4. Product: Hopefully, through the discussion with the prospect, you uncover pain points or areas for improvement. You can then transition to talking about you and your stuff by sharing details of your product and company.
  5. Value Points: After talking about your product and company, it’s a good time to share and explain the improvements you help create and deliver.
  6. Customer Example: An efficient way to further explain what you sell, how it works, and how it helps is to share an example of a customer you helped.
  7. Close: At the end of the sales appointment, focus on closing the prospect to move to the explanation sales process step.

This process should help you drastically improve sales appointments by not only helping you learn more about the prospect but also finding opportunities and building relationships.