Yikes! Are You Scaring Your Prospects?

Yikes, your prospects smile has now been replaced with a straight line and their pupils have started to shrink to small piercing beads. 

Your prospect has just moved from Interested and Motivated to the Fight or Flight Survival Instinct. What happened? In seconds you have managed to convince your prospect that you are a sales person who cannot be trusted.

Here are some valuable tips to avoid this in the future.

1. Prospects are potential friends not just paychecks!  Prospects have an almost innate suspicion of sales people. Even sales people don’t trust sales people. Prospects think sales people are only interested in manipulating them to do something that is in the sales person’s best interest. I believe it all starts with your attitude. Make your first goal to simply get to know your prospect as a person and if nothing else is achieved you have made a friend.
2. Before a prospect will care about what you know, they need to know you care about them!  Always be professional and patient and resist the urge to ask where they live, how much money they have and when they will move in in the first few minutes of the conversation. Prospects are already on high alert when beginning to shop for anything. Asking personal questions that are not really related to what the prospect wants will just put the prospect on edge. To build trust it is much better to ask questions about the situation that has prompted their action and how changes in their situation are currently affecting their family.
3. Ask questions about the prospect!  Try to ask more questions than you answer and remember that when you are talking you are buying and when you are listening you are selling. Prospects tend to believe themselves much more than someone they don’t know.  Remember that most questions asked by the prospect are designed to dis-qualify not qualify you and your company. So the more you say the higher chance you have of saying something wrong.
4. The best way to make a positive impression is to Listen, Listen, Listen! Prospects love listeners. Listening is the number one way to establish trust and credibility and visa-versa, inattentiveness will cut the electricity right out of any new relationship. The secret is to ask questions and then ask more questions about the answer.
5. Be Present and give the prospect your full attention! Always make sure you make the prospect the complete focus of your energies.  Looking at your phone or watch or allowing yourself to be interrupted during a sales meeting is a cardinal sin.  In the absence of being shown deference and respect prospects get angry and see time spent as a waste.

I am happy to share more ideas on these topics. If you are interested to learn more about how we can help your sales team get phenomenal sales results you can check out our website, www.Peak PerformanceMS.com or ValueMatchPlus.com or reach out to me at [email protected] or call me directly on my cell :(602)-284-0124

Will Nowell is the President of Peak Performance MS.  Peak Performance Mystery Shopping is a premier provider of mystery shopping services and Will has been providing sales consulting and training in the retirement industry for more than 20 years. Will is the author of the best selling book, ValueMatch Selling.