A sales rep is only as good as the commitments they keep. Agree or Disagree? I don’t know why I ask, I can’t tell what your vote is. So I will tell you, TRUE! With that being said, why is it so many reps refuse to take notes while they are making a sales call?
No matter if you make 1 sales call a day or if you make 15 sales calls a day, if they are face to face calls or phone calls. Most successful sales reps I know start their day about 7AM and finish their day about 5PM. I once had a boss that said reps work the “T”s. Tuesday and Thursday from Ten to Two.
No matter which group you fall into, the fact is that a lot goes on between the time you start your day and the time you end it. You have a lot of conversations with a lot of important people, your clients. These clients are giving you the information you will need to help make future sales, can you really afford NOT to remember it? You are telling them what you are going to do for them; can you really afford NOT to remember these things?
Over the years I have seen reps that will work a full day and then come home, eat dinner, have some family time, and then go to their desk and place their orders for the day. I have watched them sit at the desk and think where they were and what was ordered. Some reps wrote down the order after each call when they got back into their car so they could remember it. After writing the orders the reps try and remember what promises and commitments they made during the day. Keep in mind, their day started as many as 15 hours ago and they are trying to reconstruct the details of conversations they had. To some reps credit, they are darn good at it and can recall everything. These reps deliver on every promise they make.
Now let’s talk about the rest of the reps and how you will know which group you fall into. How many times during the day do you find yourself saying something like this to a customer, “OH gezz, I forgot about that, I will bring it next time.” or you make some other excuse for not delivering on a promise. Easy to tell which group you’re in isn’t it? Why didn’t you fulfill your promise? More often than not it is because you totally forgot about it. It was one of the details that got lost between the time you made the promise and the time you sat down to reconstruct your day.
This never has to happen again. If you will just bring a pad and pen into each call with you and use it. There is nothing wrong with writing while talking to a customer. Actually you can turn the pad and pen into a great selling tool. You can use a pocket pad or a full size pad, it doesn’t matter, what does matter is using it. While you are talking to the customer write down the things they say that are important. Write down the little facts that you may be able to use sometime in the future to help close a sale. Imagine if weeks after a customer told you about a job coming up or an inspection, you could show up with a solution they can use to make the job or the inspection results better.
I have asked reps that don’t use a pad and pen why. What is it about using these tools that they don’t like? The usual answer I get is they lose eye contact with the buyer when they look down to write. I understand this. However I often wonder if the rep thinks the buyer will disappear or turn and run during that short moment of no eye contact. I don’t think so, in fact I think the opposite, writing during the conversation will keep the customer in front of you and engaged if done correctly. The customer will become very interested in what you are writing and many times tell you what to write.
The first thing to remember is we are taking notes not writing novels. When you are with the customer and something is said you want to remember jot down a couple of key words. If you make a promise to the customer, again a few words to remind you what it is you told them you would do. When the sales call is coming to an end, you can use your notes to recap what you are supposed to follow up on and what the customer has committed to. By using this tool you appear to be, and actually are, a much more organized rep.
A nice added benefit to this is the fact that after you use this method for awhile, the customer realizes they can no longer tell you they didn’t say something or didn’t “mean it that way” If you recap what was said and what actions are going to be taken (orders, samples, commitments from the customer) you will eliminate the majority of problems created by miscommunications.
Finally, if you take notes correctly you will very quickly have a lot of paper accumulate. You need to have some sort of filing system so it doesn’t become overwhelming or so you don’t lose the note. (This is as bad as never taking the note to start with) I know of a rep that uses pocket pads. He has done so for years. He numbers each pad in order and marks the start and end dates for each pad. When a pad is full he files them in a shoe box. He can look things up that were done years ago. Some reps use 3 ring notebooks the same way, or they have file drawers with folders either by date or customer. It doesn’t matter which method of filing you use, just make sure that you have a method. For the reps that are computer savvy, making notes on paper and transferring them to the computer can be a lot of work, and if the computer is the only place you have the notes filed a crashed hard drive could be disastrous to your business. Sometimes the old outperforms the new.
Lorin
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