Key In with Your Prospect
Two people in the same spot, looking at the same thing, may have quite different thoughts. At a circus an old farmer and his wife were watching a ferocious lion in a cage. A show girl entered the cage. She put a lump of sugar between her lips. The lion came up quietly and bit off the lump of sugar without even scratching the girl.
That happens in selling every day—the salesman talking about one thing, the prospect thinking of something else. A creative salesman leads the buyer with him along the path toward the sale, checks to see whether the prospect is following him or is back in the lion’s cage taking a lump of sugar out of the mouth of the pretty girl. There’s quite a difference.
The Presentation is the Heart of the Sale
At this point, let’s consider just what your situation is as you wait to see your prospect: You are ready to go into action. You have a prospect. You have qualified him. You have an appointment to see him, in a few minutes you will be face to face with the man who will decide whether you accomplish your goal or whether you have wasted the time and effort spent in preparing to see him. His decision will be influenced by the effectiveness of the presentation you are about to make.
Salesmen agree that the heart of the sale is the presentation—delivering the sales story. In a way it resembles the eating of a meal. The actual consumption of the roast beef, potatoes, salad, and dessert may only take from fifteen to thirty minutes. But for hours before the meal is served the conscientious cook is planning and preparing it. She carefully selects the meat and vegetables, the butter and bread. She makes hors d’oeuvres and bakes a pie or cake.
She prepared the salad, roasts the meat, washes and cooks the vegetables, pares and cuts the French fries. She carefully schedules each dish so that it is ready at just the right time—when the guest is ready to sit down. The actual meal is all the guest takes part in. But the meal would be a flop if the housewife hadn’t planned the sequence and the content of each dish and then exercised every care in serving
Everything must go off on schedule, like the housewife with a meal all ready, you are at that stage in the selling situation where you are prepared to serve product benefits to your invited guest, the prospect
But much of the satisfaction of the delicious meal can be lost if it is poorly served. The effectiveness of your sales presentation can be wasted if you grow careless let your talk become disorganized and slipshod.
Preparation
What, in these few minutes ahead, are your objectives? Your first objective is to take an indifferent individual and make him dissatisfied with his present situation in relation to your product or service. Then you want to show him how your car, or your insulation, or your insurance plan will answer his need adequately. Whether or not you attain these objectives depends on the care with which you’ve prepared your presentation.
Suppose the advertising manager of a company in your home town invites you to talk to a group of three hundred insurance salesmen. You learn that they are coming to the home office for a training convention. The advertising manager has indicated that your fee for your thirty- minute talk will be a $100 government bond. Complimented by the invitation, you feel you have to work hard on that talk, practice it until you can deliver it without a hitch.
But what about the talks you have to deliver every day to your prospects? One talk may be worth many times the value of the bond to you. Do you prepare your sales talk as carefully as you do this lecture to the salesmen? Or do you deliver it and then find, when it is over, that you didn’t do as well as you wanted to? If you feel that you might have done better, then somehow you weren’t well prepared. You didn’t have your story as well in hand as you might have.
The Standard Sales Talk
Your two objectives are 1) to make the prospect dissatisfied with his present condition, and 2) to show him how your product solves that problem.
Many salesmen find it difficult to accomplish these goals by a hit-and-miss sales presentation taking up advantages in any sequence that occurs to them. John H.
Patterson of National Cash Register became dissatisfied with such indifferent methods. To find out why his star salesman consistently out produced other National Cash Register salesmen, he arranged for a secretary to be with his best salesmen at their sales interviews. The secretary took down the exact wording of some fifty presentations. Noticing the similarity of the content of these talks, Patterson decided to have all his salesmen use the same wording in their presentations. This resulted in what is known as a standard sales talk. A standard sales talk is a sales talk memorized and used by all salesmen of a particular product or service on every call.
The standard sales talk has much to commend your use of it: All points are arranged in a fixed sequence to assure completeness and to build up an accumulated emotional effect. It encourages the prospect to say yes at each stage and so makes buying easy. Each sentence has been tested for effectiveness, even each word carefully chosen.
Other advantages of the standard sales talk are that 1) it wastes no time in inconsequential conversation before the sales story gets under way; 2) it provides a track to run on, and so no important advantage of the product is overlooked; 3) it unfolds naturally, enabling the prospect to follow it readily; 4) it saves time; and S) it is less likely to become boring or let the prospect’s mind wander (many people can concentrate on a given subject for only a few minutes).
Some salesmen object to the standard sales story. They point out that I) the salesman is likely to deliver it parrot fashion; 2) no talk exactly fits each prospect’s situation; 3) it is not appropriate when selling the expert or the professional buyer, who is mainly interested in technical details, which are not covered in the standard sales talk because they mean nothing to most prospects and 4) it cannot be repeated to the same dealers or jobber salesmen from month to month. But whatever its drawbacks, the standard sales talk is vastly more successful than the oft-the-cuff, catch-as-catch-can palaver which the unprepared salesman stumbles and mumbles through.
Some salesmen feel it is difficult to commit a sales talk to memory. Yet one winning retail salesman in the Westinghouse Appliance contest confessed:
“When the contest was announced, I typed up the story on the frost-free refrigerator and pinned it on the wall over the phone. I wasn’t taking any chances. I figured that when the call came and some guy from the factory asked me for my story, I would grab that paper and read it off to him. I found, though, that by the time the call came somebody had taken the paper off the wall; but I had the story pat enough so I didn’t need the printed sheet.”
Recently a group of top insurance salesmen-challenged their sales manager on the value of the standard sales talks. They claimed that they tailored each presentation to fit the prospect and his situation. To test the claim, the sales manager had each of ten of the salesmen agree to deliver a sales talk on the same subject to ten different prospects. He also arranged for these one hundred talks to be taped. The talks were then analyzed. Those sections which were practically identical in all their talks were marked at the margin with red pencil.
The sales manager was not surprised at the results, for they proved his point. Four-fifths of all the presentations of these master salesmen were the same. They said the same things in much the same order and in practically the same words. Faced with this evidence, the salesmen agreed they were really using a standard sales talk that they had developed without being aware of it.
Even more striking was the evidence that at the points where the sates talks were not identical, the variations were only in the inconsequential and immaterial advantages included.
“I found it hard to believe that I told all prospects practically the same things, even arranged my arguments in the same sequence,” one of the high earners of the group admitted.
Not a Canned, But a Planned Talk
The creative salesman, you’ll remember, is quick to recognize each customer’s needs and desires and to relate them to specific advantages of his product or service is the standard sales talk, then, of any value to him? Right here, let’s make a distinction between two types of standard gales talks, the canned talk and the planned talk.
The canned talk is a standard sales talk that you memorize word for word and deliver with no attempt to adjust it to the individual customer. If the prospect breaks in with a question, the interruption throws you off the track, and you have a hard time getting back on it. Besides, a memorized talk is readily recognized. It sounds mechanical. It is often recited without enthusiasm. It is too evidently not the way a creative salesman would talk if he were using his own words and believed what he was saying.
A planned talk is also a form of the standard sales talk. But it is designed by you to fit your way of saying things. It suits your personality. “Our talk is standard in that it always includes the key features and the buying motives associated with them. But you adapt your presentation to individual differences among your prospects. You present each point so that the prospect will not only find it easy to understand, but impossible to misunderstand. As you go along you keep constantly in touch with your prospect’s mind, to see if he agrees with you. For otherwise he may be sitting there dreaming about the fishing trip he was planning when you called.
Just as the housewife varies her menu to suit the taste of her guests, so the creative salesman varies his standard sales talk to key in with the interests of his prospects. Whether he develops the talk himself or his company provides the story, he modifies it to meet different situations. Fortunately, people are much alike in their motives for buying; and so within the framework of the sales talk there is some appeal for everyone.
How to Develop a Planned Talk
Remember the buying motives you learned about in, remember how you learned to list your product advantages and after each add one or more buying motives that applied—motives suggested by the key word PACES, standing for Pride, Affection, Comfort, Economy, and Security? It is around this key word that you will build your planned sales talk.
For the Studebaker car, as an example you might arrange you’re buying motives into the key word pace. This keyword gives you an outline you can follow. No matter how often the prospect breaks in, you return to your formula, adding another advantage that fits the prospect’s situation. So you know at all times just here you are. You have covered F and A and you will next take up C, or the Comfort (convenience) of this smart little convertible finally, you make an appeal too, or Economy Do you see how easy it is to keep going ahead toward the sale?
“The ideal sales talk is not designed for delivery as an uninterrupted speech or gobs of indigestible argument,’ points out Harry Simmons, sales consultant “Instead, it is so grouped that, despite interruptions of the prospect, the salesman does not lose his trend of thought, but carries on from that point to the next, smoothly and effectively.”
Properly used, this key word can be a most useful tool, for you can work around it the telling statements that you find effective. Also, you can use it as a peg on which to hang the added facts which forestall the more frequent objections.
Let’s see how flexible a talk based on this key word can be. Suppose your prospect indicates when you check each advantage with him that to him Economy is the major buying appeal. You build up this appeal; get conviction on this point by showing the prospect records of test runs and testimonial letters from users proving mileage economy. For another prospect the Pride appeal may be the way to influence his decision favorably. So you highlight P by stressing the smartness of appearance.
To go back to the parallel of the housewife and her dinner, it may be supposed that she serves a second helping of French fries to the guest who she notices has preferred potatoes to anything else on his plate. Likewise, the salesman caters to the interests of his customers. As he proceeds with his story, he keeps in contact with his prospect by asking questions like this one:
‘Are you sure you want a car that is easy to park, don’t you Mrs. Van Schuyler?” The answers you get to testing questions of this kind give you a clue to how little or how much importance your prospect attaches to each of the major advantages of the Studebaker car.
But if you are in doubt as to which appeal seems to be reaching home, go on with the regular pattern in this case, pace. For appealing to these motives has proved most effective with the majority of your prospects.
Presenting general appeals while groping for specific benefits to a particular prospect is one of the most difficult steps in the entire selling plan.
National Cash Register salesmen do not attempt to discuss general equipment benefits at this point,’ says Mr. Wilson, vice-president in charge of sales. ‘‘All of their interest-arousing material is beamed at getting the merchant to discuss his business system. If the salesman fails to do this, he does not know what the merchant is doing now. Since selling is comparing, how can the salesman possibly make a comparison between the present and proposed systems? Just as it is important for the doctor to have all the facts before making a diagnosis, so it is necessary for the salesman to get the facts. The interest- arousing step is complete when the prospect says, OK, what do you want to know?’”
If you have been wondering why you aren’t selling more effectively, or if you are a new salesman, or if your company does not furnish you with the basic structure of a standard sales talk, start with the advantages, add the buying motives, and set up a sales story key word. Then write out and get down pat your standard sales talk, following the sequence of buying motives you have decided on. Begin using it at once. Each presentation will improve your story until you have made it letter-perfect in every way in completeness, in clearness, in force, in results. You will find that each time you close a sale with it; you will renew and increase your own faith in your product and in your sales presentation.
The Opening Statement
The inexperienced salesman is likely to open his talk on what he hopes are pleasant generalities. In fact, few salesmen, even after years of experience, have learned to say the right thing after the introduction. The intended effect of a casual pleasantry is, of course, to put the prospect in an amiable frame of mind, to make him receptive to the salesman’s story. But how often the plan backfires!
Listen:
“Well, how’s your business, Mr. Potter?” asks Salesman Harris.
Potter thinks, “Why should I tell him? If he expects me to claim business is good he’s crazy.”
Or
“Certainly beautiful weather, isn’t it, Mr. Harrison?” is Salesman Wherry’s opening.
Mr. Harrison thinks, “Little does he know the crops are burning up in this county and our farm trade is headed for a fall slump and a lean Christmas.”
Or
“Wasn’t that a great victory for our party, Mr. Donnelly?” says Salesman Carson.
Donnelly thinks, “The poor fool must think I’m a Republican. If he supposes he is going to butter me up that way, he’s a dope.”
All such greetings—comments on the weather, politics, or the state of business have nothing to do with the first principle of getting favorable attention. The goal is not to get the prospect thinking of something else; it is to get him thinking of the service the salesman can render. Also, most buyers and business executives today are under pressure, and a delay in getting down to the business of the call is just one more strike against the casual opening.
Martin W. Clement, who started with the Pennsylvania Railroad as a surveyor’s assistant and worked up to chairman of the board, had a way of cutting short small talk by a direct question, “Well, what can you do for this railroad?” Of course the creative salesman has his opening statement worked out letter-perfect He waits a moment until the prospect looks at him, and then launches his talk without preliminary remarks about some headline, or the long dry spell, or the hotel.
What, then, should you say first, after you have paused a moment until your prospect has turned from whatever he was doing and faces you with an inquiring look? Here are some possibilities:
a) Ask a question directly related to the prospect’s need. For example, if you know your prospect is adding a new wing to his factory, you might ask ‘When will you be ready to install hoists in your addition, ‘Mr. Davis? ‘‘
b) Make a striking statement or claim to arrest attention. For instance, “You can park the new Vanderbilt car with your little finger.”
c) Point out a current condition which plays up the prospect’s need. For example, that cork fire in Baltimore last week will cause an acute shortage of bottle caps.”
d) If it’s feasible lay your product on the prospect’s desk and say, “Have you seen this new plastic envelope that will keep your endorsement letters c can and fresh looking Refer to some personal interest of the prospect, such as the fact that his twin sons are entering the university this fall:
“You’ll want to make certain that they complete their education, won’t you?”
e) Ask your prospect something about his business that he can answer readily and without reserve. It may refer to the investigation you made while qualifying your prospect. It may verify a major or key interest tying in with your product and thus lead naturally into your sales story.
Obviously, how you open the sales talk, how quickly you drop into the sales story, will depend a goad bit on such factors as your product, your prospect, and where the sales talk takes place.
If you are selling a new frozen food to a grocer you have a different situation than if you are selling lubrication to the manager of a trucking service, or copper wire to the purchasing agent of a telephone company. And so your approach will be different in each case.
The sales opening will be more leisurely in a man’s home than in his office. Also, you take more time to break the ice with the prospect that will use the product for his own comfort, convenience, or security than you will with the merchant who will resell your frozen lima beans to the ultimate customer, or with the professional buyer of the telephone company whose linemen will string your wire.
As a rule of thumb, remember that your opening should drive directly to the purpose of the call with the professional buyer may be less abrupt with the merchant, and may be still less abrupt, even leisurely, with the ultimate customer in his own home. Again, experience and common sense indicate the pace.