“Don’t try and use disasters or some other major negative events that are happening to your clients to try and get them to do business with you.” – David Weiss in today’s Tip 228
How about you? Have you tried to use disasters to get them to do business with you?
Join the conversation below and share your experience!
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2019 Sales Success Summit
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. David Weiss sent this tip to me over the weekend and I wanted to get it out to you as soon as I could while Hurricane Dorian is still relevant, but as you’ll here this tip doesn’t just apply to this hurricane:
David Weiss: Good morning Sales Success Community. David Weiss coming at you here with a tip of the day. So as many of you know, there’s a very large hurricane coming towards the coast of Florida right now called Dorian. And I am working through a few other partners of mine at ADP on an opportunity that we’ve been working for quite some time and they happen to be located in Florida. So last week a colleague of mine came to me and said “David, I’ve got, I know you’re speaking to them later today. I’ve got a great idea of how we can close this opportunity on your call.” And I said, “Hey man, you know, I’m all ears. I think we’re pretty close, but what he got.” And he says to me “Let’s tell them that the hurricane’s coming and that they need to sign with us now because the hurricane’s coming, and if they don’t sign with us now, they may be delayed for a couple of days or even a couple of weeks, and that would mess up their timelines. And we can get working on everything behind the scenes while they’re repairing their business.” So I thought about this for a second and I replied back, I said “Look, there’s not a hurricane close technique. I’m going to have a conversation with them and we’re gonna, see where their business is at and their decision process and we’ll go from there.” So I get on the phone with the client and I started talking to her and the conversation, of course with the hurricane comes up and how she’s doing and how their associates are doing and things like that. And she says “David, I was gonna cancel this call, but I wanted to talk to someone that wasn’t going to talk to me about the hurricane.” And I start laughing and she’s like “If I had done a shot of Tequila for every single time, someone said Dorian to me today, and I would have been asleep by about 9:00 AM.” And she’s like “I currently have over a thousand emails in my inbox, no joke. And probably 8 to 900 of them are about my associates being worried about Dorian.” And I say to her, you know, tons of empathy. “Hey, appreciate taking the call, really understand where you guys are at”. And we just kind of had a really empathetic good conversation and it ended with her making a couple tweaks to our agreement and asking me to revise it so I could send it to her. So she’d get it over her legal team and our legal team would start reviewing it and we left the call with me saying “Hey look, normally I would, during this part of the call, I’d just be asking for basic timelines that we both agreed to serve on the same page with what things look like moving forward. But I’m not going to do that to you instead. I don’t want to put any pressure on you. I want you just to go and get your mind right. Help Your Business, help your associates, cause I really feel for all the stress you’re under and everything that’s, you know, up in the air right now it’s kind of chaotic.” And she’s like “David, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I took the call today because I needed a break. This was a really great conversation. I’ll let you know kind of how things play out over the next week. Perfect.” So we leave the call and this kind of comes to the point of the conversation. If y’all haven’t gotten it already, we weren’t at the final close step. Her legal team hadn’t even reviewed it and if I had put pressure on it to sign it today, this person like probably just couldn’t, it would have been the wrong time. She’s probably could have handled it. She’s a professional, but mentally speaking, like her head was not in a, I need to sign a contract with a vendor. You know, I need to protect my associates and I need to be there for my associates, for their houses potentially not low, longer being there in a week or two. So I shifted towards this part and you know, what I want people to take away is there’s no magic bullet. There’s no such thing as the hurricane close. Unless you’re selling products and solutions for hurricane management, like batteries and water or sandbags or something along those lines. Don’t try and use disasters or some other major negative events that are happening to your clients to try and get them to do business with you. Have empathy, have understanding, put yourself in their shoes and know where they’re at in their journey and be really honest with yourself, is a deal closing today or are we really there in the process? And if we’re not, let the process play out organically, but putting milestones in place that help you kind of get to where you need as far as you want to be alive by the state. We’re here today. Here are the steps that need to take place between now and then, but be empathetic that things are going to come up. So that’s all I have for you today. I hope you have a great week and hopefully, this was helpful and I’ll come back with more tips in the future. Thanks guys!
Scott Ingram: For more about David Weiss who will be one of the presenters at the Sales Success Summit next month, just click over to DailySales.Tips/228
Then be sure to give a listen tomorrow for the latest installment of Jeff Bajorek’s “You Don’t Have a Closing Problem” series. Thanks for listening!