Tag: closing

Sales Velocity and Momentum

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Velocity and momentum are both essential in sales.

When you are selling anything, you, by definition, have a greater sense of urgency than the person on the other end of the line: you are there to solve their problem today, while they are often willing to wait until tomorrow (because doing something now means paying a known financial or emotional cost today for an uncertain benefit.)

For this reason, if you are the person selling, velocity is your friend. In a fight for someone’s fleeting attention, being exceptionally quick, responsive, generous and available is how you capitalize on any positive movement in your direction. Being quick is a free opportunity to give your prospect a glimpse of what it will be like to work with you: “She’s so on top of things, she’s attentive, knows her stuff and moves quickly” is a desired reaction no matter what your product or industry.

While velocity is your ally at all stages of the sales cycle, momentum is particularly important when you’ve gotten your first verbal “yes.”

Imagine you’ve just had a great sales call: you’ve accompanied your prospect through their doubts and helped them push through their natural inertia to get to a “yes.”

At this moment, it’s essential to keep momentum by getting them everything they need to cement that yes—the proverbial dotted line to sign on. Move too slowly, and time’s passage is your enemy, pulling them back from their out-on-a-limb ‘yes’ to the much more comfortable ‘maybe.’

We often think that selling is about convincing people that what we have on offer is worth buying.

That’s just the starting point.

What selling is really about is turning a positive inclination to positive action.

For that, close to the finish line is not good enough.

It’s your job to take all the necessary steps to get your prospect across that line.

Your ‘ask’ is not ‘by the way’

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

It’s so easy to be terrified by “the ask” that you want to make – whether that’s for advice or a job or to create a partnership or for funding.  It’s as if there’s this sense of shame and embarrassment that you would actually want something to come out of the meeting.

Why?

Your meeting has a purpose.  There’s something you are trying to create in the world and some role that you hope the person across the table from you might play in making that creation happen.

Yes, you must explore, you must understand one another….and it’s fabulous to dream together.  There’s no way to properly ask for something before understanding who the other person is, what they are trying to accomplish in the world, and whether the thing you’re hoping to do is something that connects with who they are, where they are in their lives, and their dreams.

But if the moment you come to that thing, that “ask”, if you find that you’re muttering quickly under your breath; or, just as bad, if what you really are hoping will happen comes across as just one in a list of things that you rattle off all too quickly in the last five minutes of the meeting – if that happens you have to ask yourself why you had the meeting in the first place.

A great test: ask yourself afterwards whether there’s a chance, any chance at all, that the person you met with doesn’t actually know the most important thing you were hoping would happen.

And then, think which mistake you’d rather make: getting turned down, or having the person walk out the door not really understanding what you hoped to accomplish in the first place?