Ask your prospects what they think to identify opportunities to improve your sales process.
I love to sing the lyrics from the Mac Davis song, “It’s Hard To Be Humble”. The moans and groans of whoever is near just encourages me to sing that much louder. As far as I know, I am pretty hot stuff. HaHa
I have come to learn that looking in the mirror is not very reliable when it comes to self evaluation?. A few years ago, I enlisted the help of competitive consultant in our industry. I asked him to contact several of my prospects and customer’s. His job was to ask them to share their feelings regarding my company and he promised anonymity in return for their honesty.
I was surprised by the results to say the least. Some of the feedback was direct and blunt, and a little difficult to hear. It was also the best thing I ever did.
After taking the observations and opinions to heart, I made some significant adjustments and implemented several changes which have produced some amazing results.
Through this experience and my work helping companies improve their sales and service, I have come to understand that to get and keep a competitive edge, managers need to stay humble and continuously seek quality outside opinions. I believe the most honest and reliable feedback can come from our prospects and customers. Afterall, they have first hand experience and they are more than willing to tell us the truth if we just ask for it. Here’s why!
We could ask our customers but customers are already heavily invested in us.
Customers will tell us what they think we want to hear and will resist sharing negative opinions or observations unless they absolutely have to. The reason, customers don’t want to run the risk of harming their relationship with us. Think about it, when you were asked by your spouse if their outfit was unflattering, what did you say?
We could ask mystery shoppers or consultants, but then you run the risk of getting opinions that are void of real emotion.
Mystery shoppers have been a staple but their feedback can lack the emotion to be real and the frequency to be reliable.
Now consider Prospects?
They have not yet invested fully in you or your company. They are in a position to share how you compare to there other shopping experiences. They are still in a position of trying to avoid making a poor decision so they are still looking at you through their disqualifying values and they are chalk full of emotion.
let me suggest that if you are at the point where you are looking for opportunities to improve, try to resist looking in the mirror and instead, gather information from the people who have had an opportunity to experience your every day performance, have valid and helpful observations and who have the least to lose from sharing their unfiltered opinions. Your Prospects, because their opinion counts. Consider these benefits:
- Real Prospects can be reached by email surveys in a cost effective way
- Real Prospects can provide authentic observations and objections
- Real Prospects do not waste real sales time
- Real prospect feedback can be used to increase conversion
To learn more about SoftSurve – an automated prospect survey system >>>
Will Nowell is the President of ValueMatch Plus and Peak Performance Mystery Shopping. Will is the author of one of the Best Selling “ValueMatch Selling, How To Sell What Matters Most”.
Peak Performance Mystery Shopping is a premier provider of Mystery Shopping services. William Nowell has been providing sales consulting and training in the Housing and Retirement industry for more than 2% years. Will Provides sales consulting and training to more than 10,000 sales people and has worked with many of the top Home Builders in the country to help them upgrade their sales process to sell value over price.
