1: The Rainmaker knows.
If we are at a cocktail party with customers, we are not there to party.
If we are playing golf with a client, we are not there to play golf.
“These are business meetings or sales calls or both,” Jeffrey Fox writes in How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients.
“Some salespeople,” Jeffrey observes, “actually care what golf score they shoot. And at the nineteenth hole, instead of closing the deal, they are still talking about the thirty-five-foot putt they made on the front nine.”
Rainmakers do business at business meetings.
Lunch with a prospect? It’s a sales call with tableware.
We are there “to ask questions, to listen, and to get a commitment,” Jeffrey writes. We “are not there to sample the bronzed shrimp Creole or do research for a restaurant review.
“Don’t waste time perusing the intricacies of the menu. Don’t ask the waiter how anything is prepared. Don’t ask the waitress if a rasher of bacon is three strips or four.”
What do we do instead? We order something easy to eat. We order only one course. Something inexpensive. “It’s not about lunch,” we know.
Are we focused on the food? No. We are focused on our customer.
2: “A sales call was scheduled three months in advance,” Jeffrey writes.
“It was difficult to get an appointment with the harried decision maker who was responsible for buying high-ticket (over $300,000 a copy) computer peripheral packages.”
The sales call begins. The customer asks: “Would you like some coffee.”
“Sure,” the salesperson replies.
“Off they trudge to the coffee room,” Jeffrey writes, “and begin the ritual. They return to the customer’s office.
“The salesperson puts his coffee on the worktable, but accidentally sets the cup on a heavy-duty marking pen. The coffee spills over the worktable. The customer scrambles to save the blueprints. Paper towels are needed.”
Finally, the sales call starts again. “Ten minutes into the call everything looks promising,” Jeffrey writes. “The customer was in agreement, he had a need for the package, and he had the budget.”
Suddenly, there is an urgent knock on the door. Someone barges in. There’s a server in degrade mode.
“The prospective customer jumps to his feet and politely excuses himself, inviting the salesperson to phone in a few weeks to see if they can reschedule.
“And out the door vanished the customer,” he writes, “and the sale.”
3: Sales math: “The duration of the average sales call is eighteen to twenty minutes,” Jeffrey writes.
The Rainmaker does “not have time to go get the coffee, pour the coffee, stir in the cream, or drink the coffee.”
Instead, we maximize the value of the time spent by concentrating on our prospect.
We never let coffee kill the sale.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: List all the things that could go wrong at my next sales meeting.
Action: Avoid those things.