3 things that you should never do as a professional sales person.
Transcript of Session –
Hey, folks. Let’s learn something new about the oil and gas industry, shall we?
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All right. Today’s show, we’re going to talk about three things you should never do, so don’t do this. Here is the first one.
All right. Folks this is one of those things I just hate to see. Don’t do this. This guy obviously, he meets me at API luncheon and the same day he fires me off this e-mail. A couple of things I noticed. The first thing, see the different font size here, here, here and here. Obviously, this is [boiler], this is cut and paste. He put no thought into this.
And then, he didn’t even pay attention to what I did or didn’t even do any research on me because right here he starts talking about how the oil and gas industry can’t work if the cost continue to rise and that cost is a big driver, and that’s not true. He forgets he’s talking to an oil and gas sales expert. So, you know, do your research.
And then, you know, two pages of him basically telling me why I should want to meet with him, instead of him asking me if I’m having problems he could help me solve. And then, finally just to make it even more evident that this is a cut and paste job, his signatures are in here twice and he sends me a PowerPoint deck. People, don’t do this, this not what professional sales people do.
And then the next one.
All right, so here is another one I see quite often and let me tell you a little story about this. So this company reached out to me via e-mail and asked if I was interested in talking about a Google AdWords campaign and I said yes. And what happens? They set up a meeting to discuss my needs, my desired outcomes and budget or even a phone call? No. The next day they lobbed this proposal over the fence and this is just almost absurd. At least he’s seen my website ‘cause he lifted my logo off of it.
But if you go through this proposal, what it is is them telling me why I should want to do business with them. Nowhere in here is anything about me. And then, this is my favorite part, in the proposal they gave me cost and they gave me three different options. You know what that tells me? That tells me this is what they’re thinking. Mark, we don’t know anything about you, we don’t know anything about your business, we don’t know what your budget is, in fact, we could give you three options and hope that we – you guess – we hope that we guessed right and you could pick one of those and you’d actually pay for it.
I mean this is actually absurd. And what’s so funny about this is I actually am very interested in the Google AdWords campaign, I get tons of inbound leads, I get more inbound leads than I know what to do with, so I want to improve the quality of those leads. And nowhere in here did they talk about lead quality.
So folks, be a professional sales person, figure out what is troubling your client before you even start thinking about a proposal. And when you do a proposal, work on it together with your client, that way they have active buy in and you get feedback immediately if things are priced incorrectly or if you’re missing features or functionality. And when you’re finished, you client helped you build that proposal, so of course they’re the one excited. So folks, don’t do this.
And finally, I’ve save the best for last. Listen to this voicemail. “Hi, David. My name is [Benjamin Watson]. I’m a financial representative at Northwestern Mutual. I’m also [0:03:04][Indiscernible]. So the purpose of my call is to just to set up a time when we could meet. I can tell you more about what I do what my company does. So please give me a callback and let me know when you’ll be available. My number is 215-680-3479.”
Can you believe that call? He did everything wrong. First thing, he immediately went to move to the fact that he want to set up a meeting and what was the meeting about. He wanted to tell this guy what he did and what his company did. Nobody’s going to accept that. So folks, don’t do these three things.
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