1: “In the selling arena, customers don’t care if you have a mortgage to pay,” Jeffrey Fox writes in How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients.
“Customers don’t care if you need their business to win a contest,” he notes. “Customers don’t care why your shipments are late. Customers don’t care what you like, where you went to school, or what sports you play or played,”
What do customers care about?
Themselves and their problems.
Rainmakers focus on the customer. They know they are there “by invitation only.” They are on “high receive.”
They don’t talk about themselves. They ask probing, preplanned questions. They listen. They clarify. They summarize. Their goal is to determine how they can help the customer and how their product solves the customer’s concern.
2: The Rainmaker always creates a pre-call or pre-meeting plan.
“Appointments with decision makers are relatively rare events,” Jeffrey suggests. And “meetings with decision makers are crucial to getting the sale.
“Because of this, meetings with a decision maker must be carefully preplanned,” he writes. “Precall planning is particularly important when making the first call on a new customer and when making the last call—the one that concludes with an order.
“Ninety percent of all sales calls are won or lost before the salesperson sees the customer. This is because so few salespeople actually plan the call.”
Why don’t they create a pre-call plan? Because they think they don’t need to. Or, they mistakenly believe experience is a substitute for a thorough pre-call plan.
“Others don’t even know how to precall plan,” Jeffrey observes. “Some don’t know they should.”
Not Rainmakers.
“Rainmakers never waste a sales call,” he writes. “They always pre-call plan. It is typical for a Rainmaker to spend three hours planning for a fifteen-minute call. Planning and practicing for two days to two weeks for a single sales call is not uncommon.”
Jeffrey shares the story of a Rainmaker who spent fifteen straight 8-hour days researching and planning a 15-minute sales call.
“The call was on the CEO of a leading company in a new industry,” he writes. “If this company adopted the Rainmaker’s product, almost certainly the other companies in the industry would follow.
“The Rainmaker made the sale and successfully used it as a case history to close other customers. The single sale saved the Rainmaker’s company and led to years of success.”
3: What are the elements of a pre-call plan?
o Written sales call objective.
o Needs-analysis questions to ask.
o Something to show.
o Anticipated customer concerns and objections.
o Points of difference vis-à-vis competitors.
o Meaningful benefits to customers.
o Investment return analysis.
o Strategies to handle objections and eliminate customer concerns.
o Closing strategies.
o Expected surprises.
What else? “Plan to be flexible,” Jeffrey suggests. “If after sixty seconds into your two-hour painstakingly prepared presentation, the customer says she will buy, stop talking, take the order, and gracefully leave.
“If the customer wants to do business with you, but in an entirely different manner than you expected, adjust to the change. Don’t be so intent on following your plan that you miss a customer’s cue. Be flexible.”
The bottom line: “A Rainmaker never calls on a decision maker without a written plan,” Jeffrey writes.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What lessons can I learn from the Rainmaker book?
Action: Experiment with one of these ideas today.
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