When I say “Sales IQ,” I’m referring to the presumed intelligence level of your audience that you’re projecting when you deliver your sales pitch. Obviously there are a few ways to go.
You can assume your audience knows nothing, and overload them with information, from the fundamentals to complex tech-specs.
Benefits: By the end of the process you have a highly educated customer. You’ve left nothing to chance and minimized risk of confusion or omission of key information.
Risks: This can lead to insulting the customer’s intelligence and essentially “boring” them. Not everyone is a fan of bells and whistles!
You can assume your audience MUST know something, so you can inundate them with questions to determine their “IQ” as it relates to your solution.
Benefits: Asking questions lets your prospect do the talking, and leads to a more qualified, informed salesperson. Asking the RIGHT questions can make you look like thought leader and a good listener.
Risks: If you’re asking too many questions and your audience is doing all the talking, their patience may be tested, and they’re not being sold on YOUR value. They may feel like they’re having to “sell” themselves to you, and I think most people don’t enjoy feeling like they’re being interviewed.
On the other hand, you can put complete faith in a potential buyer’s intelligence.
Benefits: If your customer is totally engaged and savvy, and you’re conversing on a higher level, than you’ve got a great connection and probably a higher likelihood of doing business.
Risks: If your customer is NOT savvy, and you’re conversing on a higher level, but they’re just nodding their heads – your sale is in trouble. If you don’t catch on and adjust your style, then you’ll convince yourself everything is great until the other shoe drops and no one is stepping up to sign on the dotted line. I think this is a leading cause of “radio silence.” If your communication was lopsided and assumed too much about their level of engagement, they are likely to avoid/ignore you.
I’m not trying to say the customer is stupid, but I think in Sales when we don’t hear what we want to hear, we often go there, possibly as a form of scapegoating. I’ve experienced my greatest successes in Sales when I’m the one on the receiving end of questions 90% of the time, and when I balance my answers without insulting their intelligence or talking over their heads. I think finding the optimal style and level of communication is absolutely critical in the sales process, and especially difficult when the vast majority is over the phone. Mike Damphousse of GreenLeads just posted a great blog entry on this topic – read more here.
This type of identification of your prospect’s intelligence, engagement, body language, etc. is so much easier in person. Another common bond between my successes have been when I’ve met with the prospect in person one or more times during the sales process, even if it was just meeting for the first time at a trade show. Telesales is tough! You’ve only got this voice on the other line to try to gauge a lot of these factors by. And more often, trying to decipher cues from emails or website history is even more impersonal and inaccurate, and does little to aid in evaluating your prospect according to a term I’ll coin right now: “key personal indicators” – the set of these cues by the prospect that guide our own behavior through the sales cycle. (As opposed to “Key Performance Indicators“)
Here I’ve primarily discussed intelligence (as related to your solution) and engagement, and a bit on body language including vocal and written cues. What are some other “KPI”s that you’ve found to be effective in managing to your advantage in the Sales process?
