Understandably, long-term customers demand and consume a lot of your time. Yet, they are your best customers because they compensate (higher profits) you for the time you invest in solving their problems. They are the basis of the so-called 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your (long-term) customers. Just make sure they consume less than 80 percent of your time so you get a fair return on your investment (more on this point in later chapters).
You cherish relationship selling. You probably welcome the day when the repeat business from long-term customers means you never have to make another cold call (other than out of boredom) to exceed quota. However, if relationship selling is the prize, what are the other two stages of selling you must go through to win it? These stages are brinkmanship and courtship selling.
Brinkmanship Selling
Brinkmanship selling occurs with new prospects. It is the most challenging type of selling. You must uncover many unknowns while trying to establish rapport with strangers (not unlike the singles’ bar scene). Adding to your difficulty, you have only about fifteen minutes in which to make it happen.
You attempt to discover the prospect’s “pain,” or at least the prospect’s sense of urgency, deadlines, competition, decision makers, and budgets. Your goal is to obtain enough specifics to qualify or disqualify the prospect as quickly as possible. You do not want to waste time presenting products or services that might not satisfy the prospect’s purchasing requirements or your pricing levels.
Conversely, prospects also want to determine whether you can help their situation. Therefore, they seek to gather product or company information such as prices, delivery dates, technical specifications, and warranties. The cat-and-mouse game begins. You ask qualifying questions; they ask product questions. You are both careful about how much information you provide each other. You treat selling as a race that you win when you gather information that is beneficial to you faster then you give out information that is detrimental to you. You delay giving out prices until you know their budgets. Prospects delay giving out budgets until they know your prices.
The cat-and-mouse game continues until price or budget amounts surface. You bring each other to the brink. You then see if anyone blinks. The call either continues with some chance of success or someone mercifully ends it.
As is so often the case with first meetings, it is anybody’s guess how they will end up. Do you walk away with another meeting, a follow-up call in six months, send more literature, a purchase order, or is it a waste of time? If you decide it is best to wait for the prospect to be fired or quit before you try again, you can safely assume the sales call did not go well.
Courtship Selling
Courtship selling occurs with new buyers who do not yet qualify as long-term customers. It is the most confusing type of selling because you deal with customer schizophrenia. Sometimes these new customers act like long-term customers (and share details)—and sometimes they act like new and fickle prospects (and clam up). Courtship selling is a blend of brinkmanship and relationship selling. Your challenge is to know which selling mode you need to use and when.
Since they just bought something from you, initially you treat them as long-term customers and use relationship selling, exchanging information freely. You stay in this selling mode until you lose a sales opportunity to a competitor. You then shift to brinkmanship selling with all its challenges. Eventually, customers either evolve into long-term customers or regress into prospects again. If you are willing to let another salesperson handle their account, it is safe to say you do not consider them to be potential long-term customers.
Note A common mistake is to evaluate your selling skills by your successes with long-term customers. Using the relationship selling model, which depends on time, past results, and personal bonds, will not work effectively on new customers and prospects when those factors do not apply.
It Takes Time
Time powers your progression from brinkmanship to courtship to relationship selling. As the time of doing business together with a customer increases, everyone’s risk goes down. Conversely, trust levels and the value you provide (through better understanding of the customer’s business) and receive (through higher profits) goes up. As you will see, the element of time becomes both a benefit and a liability to your pursuit of relationship selling. (See Exhibit 1-3.)
Exhibit 1-3: It’s all about time.
Getting Rid of the Wait
While it is easy to see the benefits of long-term customers and relationship selling, they do have one major drawback: They are dependent on time. You must accept that relationships often take years to develop. Fulfill your commitments, do not disappoint your customers, mingle socially, and let nature take its course.
In other words, if you wait long enough, you will have long-term customers that embrace relationship selling. With the selling system in this book, you can short-circuit the time requirements and still have all the benefits of relationship selling. As previously mentioned, it works like a time machine.
You quickly progress from brinkmanship to courtship to relationship selling over the course of several sales calls, not in a matter of months or years. MeasureMax dramatically shrinks the time it takes for prospects and new customers to act like long-term ones. As time speeds up, so does your productivity.
You need fewer sales calls to get more orders because measurable information flows freely. Customers benefit too. At an accelerated pace, they also know whether they can receive the value necessary to make working together worthwhile. Together, you both quickly gauge the potential of a business opportunity. You know whether to stay with this sales opportunity or to move on to one with a higher potential for success.
Shrinking Time
The principle behind how MeasureMax shrinks time is simple. It makes the five key components found in every sales opportunity visible and measurable to customers and you. When these key components become measurable, trust is not a function of repeated successes over time, but of short-term, quantifiable results. These five components determine whether customers act like new ones or long-term ones. They operate the same way laws of nature, such as gravity or centrifugal force, do. They have measurable effects on the outcome of sales opportunities whether you or your customers are aware of them or not.
The five waiting-to-become-measurable components are as follows:
The dollar value the features of your products or services generate by achieving customers’ goals (Chapter 2 explains this topic)
The dollar value customers gain from achieving specific goals (Chapter 3 explains this topic)
The ability of customers to achieve their goals (Chapter 4 explains this topic)
The progress customers and you are making in achieving their goals, which tells you whether it is worthwhile to continue investing in the sales opportunity (Chapter 6 explains this topic)
Your ability to achieve customers’ goals and receive higher profit margins for doing so (Chapter 7 explains this topic)
Note The fact that the word goals appears in every one of them again tells you that this selling system concentrates on making customers’ goals measurable. (See Exhibit 1-4.)
Exhibit 1-4: Measurability shrinks time.
When you are unaware of these components, they stay invisible. Even if you wait until you win, lose, or abandon sales opportunities, you still might not know what they are. However, you are the only one with the power to make them visible by making them measurable. Once they become measurable, you are in the relationship-selling mode. You also doom competitors to brinkmanship or courtship selling—even if these opportunities involve their current customers.
Take these two selling scenarios. While slightly exaggerated for effect, they highlight how a salesperson seeking measurable details can go from brinkmanship to relationship selling in one sales call. You probably can put faces and names to both of these scenarios—unfortunately more often on the first than the second, but that will change shortly.
In the first scenario, Carole Nelson, a top-performing salesperson, is on a first call with Pete Sommers, a new prospect. She is in full brinkmanship selling mode, with her focus on obtaining Column 1 details. The second scenario illustrates what would happen if Carole’s questions sought measurability and motivated Pete to act like a long-term customer. The difference in Column 2 details that Pete provides Carole jumps out at you, as she is at the height of relationship selling.
Scenario One: New Prospect (Brinkmanship Selling)
Carole is meeting with Pete Sommers for the first time. Although they spoke briefly on the telephone a week ago, Carole is not certain what to expect or how the sales call will turn out. (Her thoughts are in italics and parentheses.)
Carole: Good morning, Mr. Sommers. (Should I call him Pete? Should I make a comment about the picture of the sailboat on his wall?) It’s nice to meet you.
Pete: Yeah, you too. I tried to contact your office to let you know that a last-minute meeting popped up. Therefore, I only have fifteen minutes, not thirty. So, what can you show me quickly about your products and services?