“You have one chance, one opportunity to captivate them. Don’t waste it. Don’t lose your audience right off the bat with a tired, boring opening.” – DJ Sebastian in today’s Tip 955
Do you spend time crafting a powerful opening for your meetings?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from DJ Sebastian. As a top-producing sales executive for some of the best technology corporations, DJ learned that to become great at selling, you must be a great communicator. Now, as a sales coach and author, DJ’s mission is to help the next-generation B2B sales professionals become elite sellers. Here he is:
DJ Sebastian: For every customer interaction, you must start out strong. Whether your meeting is face to face, a remote web conference, a phone call, or even an email or text message. Spend time to craft a powerful opening. Your customer or prospective customer could be one person or many, and they will evaluate your worth, your message, and its importance within the first 30 seconds of your meeting. You have one chance, one opportunity to captivate them. Don’t waste it. Don’t lose your audience right off the bat with a tired, boring opening.
The most important thing is what you do or say right at the beginning. So forget the warm-up. Forget making small talk. Forget starting with a joke or a so-called ice breaker. Forget doing your introductions, yacking about your background, droning on about your company mission, your impressive list of customers, or spending ten minutes chatting about each agenda item. Those add up to a giant yawn. You are about to put your audience to sleep. Instead in those first, 30 seconds, when you have their undivided attention, give them something that captivates them to quickly engage them. Because it’s not about you, it’s about them. Nobody cares about you until you give them something they should care about.
Here’s an example of a captivating opener. As the salesperson opens a customer meeting like this, “What if you could reduce your shipping costs by 10%, what would that be worth to your company? Later, we’ll explain how some of our other customers worked with us to achieve exactly that. Stay tuned.”
See what happened here. You can envision how this can be a great way to get the customer yearning to learn more and set the tone for more in-depth discussion because you got them engaged right at the beginning.
Scott Ingram: For a link to connect with DJ on LinkedIn where you can let him know your thoughts, just click over to DailySales.Tips/955
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!