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When one of
our top sales people first started into sales, he took his
friend the superstar software salesman to a baseball game with
the naïve notion that he could learn how to sell successfully
over a beer and a hot dog at the stadium.
Here’s the
advice our person received: “Listen to your customer. The
customer will tell you how to make the sale.”
And that was
it. The rest of the game they talked baseball.
And that
little bit of advice is still the best advice anyone ever gave about
sales. And it’s the core of what we teach at Speechworks.
We’ve refined that message a little since then. But it’s
essentially the same: customers will buy from you for their
reasons, not your reasons.
It’s amazing
how good salespeople almost always hit on this same idea. We
sat down with Deepak Raghavan recently at the OK Café over
coffee and juice to discuss his views on how to sell
software. He had his own variation on the same theme. If you
want to be successful selling software, fight the temptation
to “show off your baby.”
Raghavan, a
founder of Manhattan Associates, points out that software
sales people, especially if they’re engineers, have a tendency
in sales presentations to jump to a description of all the
neat things the software can do. “The instinct is to show off
your baby,” said Raghavan, who knows that tendency first hand
since he lead the development of Manhattan Associate’s key
products for many years.
Instead of
launching into a description of the product’s bells and
whistles, he said, focus on the interests of the prospects.
“It’s very important to get tuned into them. It starts with
understanding and listening.”
In other
words, you need to tap into the customer’s buying rationale
and show how your product satisfies that need.
Raghavan
points out that sometimes PowerPoint can get in the way of a
great sales presentation. “For the first six years, we didn’t
use a single PowerPoint slide,” said Raghavan, who is retired
from Manhattan Associates and is now a full time astronomy
graduate student at Georgia State University.
“We’d go
into a client empty-handed and ask for a whiteboard and some
markers,” he recalled. “Rather than sell, we’d consult with
them . . . For the first 15 minutes at least, we’d ask them a
lot of questions and listen to them and their answers.”
Only after
listening to the client, he said, would he and his colleagues
begin proposing solutions to the challenges presented by the
clients. And their methods were highly effective at beating
the competition, which usually came equipped with a full
fledged “dog and pony show”.
And once
you’ve listened to the client, “only present the points of the
software that are relevant to the client.” Anything more can
cause confusion and lose the sale.
It’s funny
how sales really doesn’t change that much. Whether it’s over
a beer and a dog or coffee, the advice is the same. Listen to
the customer. Then give her what she wants.
If you want to learn how to sell successfully, contact Speechworks at
404-266-0888. Or check out the website at
www.speechworks.net. |
