New Business meetings

It is a fact that pursuing unqualified business is one of the most common reasons companies fail to reach their revenue targets

Make each new business meeting count

Do you really have the time to go haring off all over the country?

Meeting with anyone and everyone who is prepared to see you - in the hope that some of your activity, somewhere, sometime will result in business?

Especially when you remember that it's not a bad rule of thumb that the easier it is to get someone to agree to see you (unless contact was made at the time the individual has a desperate need) the more lowly in the Decision Making process he or she is likely to be, and thus the less clout that individual is likely to wield.

So let's look at three areas to help you make the most of that initial meeting:

1. Qualify the contact before you meet

Whoever makes the initial contact and however it's made, your time will be spent more productively if you qualify the prospect before you both decide it's a good idea to meet up.

You should:

Desk research

1. Help the prospect or customer identify and "flesh out" his problems - if your initial approach was made before the prospect had really thought about the problems you've introduced him to (open questions)
2. Get him to list them in order of their importance to him, thereby tacitly committing him to them (open question)
3. Commit him to wanting to find a solution to them (closed question)
4. Take your understanding of those problems and convert them to needs and get his agreement or correction (closed question)

Alternatively, the prospect may be further down the line and already has a relatively well thought through need that your company can potentially satisfy - not so good, because you're likely to be lumped in with the rest of the competition, but definitely worth a meeting.

How do you do it?

To achieve this you need to learn the A.I.(c.)D.(c.)A. pattern of the sale:

Attention

Interest (+ committal)

Desire (+ committal)

Action

And practise applying it on all of your telephone calls (whether incoming enquiries or outbound canvassing)

The key is in the questions you ask and how you ask them in order to qualify the prospect and decide whether a meeting is desirable or necessary.

2. The meeting

If you have qualified your prospect to some extent prior to the meeting you can just review your understanding of the situation and move on, otherwise you'll have to do that now.

Either way, one of the common mistakes that untrained people in sales situations make is to try to present their case (offer, solution, etc.) way too soon. You're not ready, so don't try yet.

You should have a number of questions prepared to help you and the prospect refine the perceived need. You ask as many as required in a conversational way (using the A.I.(c)D.(c.)A. pattern of the sale and employing direct, assumptive and alternative questioning techniques) to reach that goal before you go to the next stage.

One more thing:

3. Are you progressing contact with the right person?

Remember, no matter how good the offer, it's wasted if it is made to the wrong person. Whilst it may normally be fairly obvious in consumer sales, it sometimes takes more digging to establish the right M.A.N. in business to business. This is the person with the Money, Authority and Need. Use this meeting to probe who else is involved in the decision making process and the role each person plays.