I am trilingual; I speak fluent English, SOUTHERN and sales.
I’m sure that it won’t shock any of you to learn that over
all my years in business I have always found a way to communicate with a
customer using one of my languages. That is until a few weeks ago!
I was in the field working with a rep and we stopped to make
a cold call at a business that he had targeted as a prospect. The call started
like most with the rep doing some basic introductions and probing. He then did
a great job telling the customer about what we do and how we do it.
As the rep and customer started to chat about how we could
help the customer, the rep asked me if I wouldn’t mind telling the customer about
one of our products.
I opened our demo case and got out a sample of the product
and started to set up the demo when the customer got a very funny look on his
face. I asked if something was wrong and he just looked at me as if he were
lost. I apologized for talking too fast and asked where it was that I lost him.
(I couldn’t imagine where it happened since I was just starting and hadn’t even
gotten into to demo yet)
The customer said that he didn’t understand why we were
there. With that I went back to the introduction the rep had just finished and
tried to help the customer understand what we were there for. When I got back
to the same spot, about to start the demo, the customer put the same look back
on his face.
Now I was starting to think the customer was just messing
with me. I laughed and said very funny trying to make him admit he was just
playing around. But as I watched his face I could plainly see he was not
joking.
I tried a third time to explain what we do and as I was
talking I could tell the customer just didn’t understand what we were all about.
Not wanting to show my amazement or frustration, I decided
to just continue on with the demo and see if he caught on at some point.
The demo was almost over when the lights came on in the
customers mind. He got a big smile on his face and said (actually almost
yelled) “Are you selling this?”
While the three of us stood there looking at each other we
all started laughing. The customer told us he thought we were the guys that
were coming to work on his front end loader and really thought we were kidding
when we started talking about selling things.
Going back over the first few minutes of the call I have
been trying to pinpoint where the miscommunications broke down. Then it hit me,
it didn’t break down, it was never started. Right from the start the customer
was looking for one thing and we were looking for something else. Because we
were both looking for something that wasn’t there, we were not communicating.
I could have spoken 100 languages and the customer could
have spoken all 100 of them, we still would not have been communicating.
When you are making a sales call, and you start the sales
process, always make sure that the prospect knows who you are and why your
there. NEVER assume that your words alone will tell your story.
Lorin
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