“Meet with them so they can build a relationship and then nurture that relationship until it’s time for them to change and make a decision” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 332
How do you handle “now is not a good time?”
Join the conversation below and check out and comment on that LinkedIn post!
Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Jason’s LinkedIn post
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listing to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with another of his super insightful tips. Check it out:
Jason Bay: One of the objections that can happen a lot when you’re prospecting, especially if you’re selling something where people typically sign annual contracts or longer, multi-year contracts or if maybe what you’re doing is in commercial real estate and it’s least driven and that kind of thing you’re going to hear now is not a good time and your contract is not up for another nine months or it’s not up for another year. And if you hear that you’re not alone, but something that happens very common and what I want to focus on today is instead of addressing that objection directly on a cold call or just moving on, I want to first think from the prospect’s perspective and then I want to show you a way that you could get a meeting out of it sooner rather than later because I want to meet with this person.
If they’re a good account, I wanna meet with them so they can build a relationship and then nurture that relationship until it’s time for them to change and make a decision, which oftentimes happens, a quarter to two quarters prior. So three to six months prior to their contract expiring. So let’s first think about this from the prospect’s perspective. Getting them to hop on a call to discuss something that’s like 6 to 12 plus months away is a lot like a convention, a college student to start studying early for a midterm. You know, if I was a tutor and I wanted to work with college students and help them with their midterms, if I focused on helping them study for the midterm, that’s a month or two away that isn’t nearly as compelling as focusing on something that could help them right now.
So there are two approaches that someone like that could use. So the first one, if you said something like, “Hey, if we meet, I could share what students that score the highest scores do to prepare for their midterms.” That approach. In my opinion, it doesn’t create very much urgency. Again, it’s focused on the thing that is a month or two away. The other approach that you could take is something like this, “Hey if we meet, I can share techniques for taking better notes in class so you can score higher on your weekly quizzes. And what that could do is help you create a little bit of buffer room so you don’t have to score so high on your midterm.” That approach focuses on giving immediate value, so we need to find a way to do that same thing with our prospects. Share how we can add value now versus something that’s going to help them 6 to 12 months from now. That’s not irrelevant. So you could do something like this. So if I was selling our services, it might sound something like, you know, “Hey, if we meet, I can share three strategies are, and then insert the niche or industry clients are using right now to increase their response rates.” They can close the gap between where their revenue is at right now versus where they’d like to be. So that you’re getting the best return on your reps time. So that’s one way that you could approach it is focusing on what that gap is. And Keenan from gap selling actually commented on this LinkedIn post that I have linked up in the show notes, so I definitely check out his response. He had some really good stuff there, but if you focus on where the gap is between where they are and where they want to be and you can share some information that will help them right now to close that gap. That’s a really compelling reason for meeting right now and they’re going to look at you as more of a value provider. In that case and you can begin nurturing a relationship. So I’m really curious, how do you handle it when a prospect says “Now is not a good time.” Head to that LinkedIn post and let us know.
Scott Ingram: How do you handle “now is not a good time?” We’ve got a link to that LinkedIn post for you to check out and comment at DailySales.Tips/332.
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