This post is one in a series of five guest posts authored by the super star bloggers pictured below. As part of a celebration of National Small Business Week we are asking readers to match all five guests posts up with the contributing blogger to be entered for a chance to win an iPad2. Read all five posts in today’s series and come back each day this week for five new posts in this great educational series and another chance to win.
Mahan Khalsa
Mahan Khalsa is the founder of the Sales Performance Group of FranklinCovey, the creator of the Helping Clients Succeed sales improvement program taught in over 40 countries and 10 different languages. He is currently a founding partner at Ninety Five 5 (Less Nonsense – More Sales). He has consulted extensively with many Fortune 1000 companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, Accenture, Aon, Mercer, Motorola, HP, Dell, GE and others.
I Hate Selling, So Now How Do I Convert Leads 3
If you hate selling, don’t do it. Forget about it altogether. Put it out of your mind. Just focus on helping people be successful in a way you can both feel good about. When you first talk with “a lead” forget about “converting them”. However vaguely or reluctantly, they have raised their hand and signaled that they may need some help. Can you help?
If there is a good fit between what they want , need, value – and what you do well, then it likely makes sense to keep talking. If there is not a good fit, it makes sense to find out quickly, declare victory, and allow both parties to move on to things that are more productive. Which is the case?
The challenge is that people don’t often start out with clear definitions of success – of what they want, need, or value. They suggest that they may want a product or service such as you provide – a solution if you will. “A solution to what?”, is the question. Solutions are only motivating to the extent they solve some problem(s) that people care about or provide some result(s) they highly desire.
If you want to help someone be successful, first find out how they define success. Diagnose before your prescribe. What are all of the problems or results they would like to address with the requested solution? Are some more important that others? How do those problems show up today and when they do, what are the consequences, both economic and intangible. If they apply a solution, what results do they expect? How will they define or measure success? If they get success, what is the payoff to them?
If the value of success is considerable, what do they feel is a reasonable investment of time people and money to realize that value? Does that fit with what you feel is necessary?
With good understanding of what they truly want to accomplish, let them know at a high level how you and your solutions might help. Together, answer the question, “Should we keep talking?”
If the answer is yes, sketch out a series of steps you could mutually take to conclude whether working together makes sense – or not. Each step should have a clear Go/ No Go decision and ideally be low risk, low investment for each party. And no is OK. If it is a good fit, then together you can do good things, have fun, and make some money. If not, it’s painful for everyone.
So stop selling and start helping people succeed. Stop converting and start conversing about whether working together can produce the results and relationships you both value.
Is that so hard?
