Once you have the appointment make sure that you have done all of your homework. Investigate everything, making notes as you do so. I have already discussed some of the investigating that needs to be done, but there is always more to it than you might believe. I would visit as many of the stores as I could that were in the particular chain. If available at the time I would talk to cashiers, stock clerks and management. I would ask them about the service that they were or were not receiving from the competitor. I would walk the whole store looking for other competitive products and then finally I would look at the products that I was going to replace.
Knowing everything that you could before the appointment is important in two ways. One it saves time as you may only have one chance to present yourself, the next appointment you want is to go for the close and the customer will know that you are serious about earning their business. Second is the customer will appreciate you not wasting their time because you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to their needs.
Need’s and wants are what both you and the customer are trying to achieve. You must understand both of these to get to your goals. The customer may or may not need your product, but they may want to have better service. They are trying to provide for their customers need’s and wants too. You need to increase your business and the results are the wants of achieving your companies goal. Want’s and needs are what equals the bottom line for your customer in putting more dollars in the register. Want’s and needs is what makes your company profit. Wants and needs is what it takes for you to make a living in the sales world.
When you do your homework and investigate and you are prepared in every way how could you ever expect to the customer say no. Zig Ziglar taught me that the word no does not nessesarally mean n o, it may mean k n o w. The customer just doesn’t know enough about what you are trying to sell. I just could not believe that any customer could ever say no, so I would try to explain all over again just what the customer didn’t know.
Sometimes you have to shoot from the hip in trying to sell a customer. I had plenty of chances in the shooting from the hip technique. My company would want me to participate in consumer shows. We would set up booths at a convention or hall and customer would come by the different booths and see the items on display and you would have the chance to sell to them. In our booths we would set up a full display with our cleaning supplies and equipment. I must admit it can be very tiring to stand in one place for the whole day and generally there would be two of us so we were able to take a break, however, if there were a lot of potential customers coming your way I just could not leave. Sometimes it would be so busy that both of us would be busy demonstrating to customers at the same time.
Quite a bit of the time most people would just walk by. I couldn’t believe that they could just walk by my display at the booth. So I would get aggressive and go into the isle and get their attention. At that very time I would introduce myself and my company and investigate, all within a couple of minutes. The results more often than not the customer would come back to my booth. Most of the time you wouldn’t get a yes but, most of the time I would get an appointment. Not all of the people attending the show were the owners or buyers and that was okay because I would do some homework and investigate finding out the name of the account, how many stores, where the main office was located, phone numbers and the main buyers name. Every show was a success to me as I always received leads and sales. Achieving my ‘Wants and Needs’.
