4
speak to the right person
(STEP THREE: QUALIFICATION)
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
I’d been in the news agency talking with her for almost an hour. She was excited, she saw the savings, and I could tell she was ready to sign. I was reaching for the paperwork when she said, “Okay, this all sounds great. The boss is in the back. Let me go get him.”
She walked down the hall and poked her head in an office. “Bill, are you interested in saving money on telecommunications?”
I heard a gruff, “No.”
“Alright.” She walked back up to the front and shrugged. “He’s not interested. I’m sorry.”
I’d successfully sold something to someone who couldn’t buy it.
Looking back, it’s painfully obvious, but I didn’t know it at the time: I was so excited someone was listening that I never stopped to consider if I was actually speaking to the right person.
More than a decade later, I made the same silly mistake again.
My phone rang and I found someone from a trade association on the other end, wanting to talk about booking me for a speaking gig. I was just launching my speaking and coaching business in the States. I had my coaching sales pitch nailed after some trial and error (again, experimentation) with multiple inquiries. However, I hadn’t yet developed my sales process for inbound speaker inquiries; I still used my basic process. My off-the-cuff pitch was good enough to get him on the hook; he wanted me. I could taste the sale. I was ready to email him the agreement. But in my excitement—and, more important, my lapse in religiously following my process—I forgot the third step: I didn’t qualify whether he was the ultimate decision-maker.
Let me stop for a moment to point out that I tell people to always, always, have the seven steps on a piece of paper sitting by their phone or computer. I’d have never made this mistake if I’d followed my own advice and had the skeleton of the process in front of me when I took the call.
I realized my mistake when he said the bone-chilling words: “Okay, I think you are a perfect fit, so let me take this to our executive director and get back to you, okay?”
Of course I didn’t land the gig. If I’d known—via the qualification process—that I wasn’t speaking to the key decision-maker, I would have handled the conversation very differently. Instead of trying to close the sale, my aim would have been to get a meeting with his boss. I would still have wanted to get him excited and see me as “a perfect fit,” but I’d have underscored how important it was that I speak to the executive director.
If I’d known, I would have said something along the lines of, “Because of my diverse industry experience—unlike many speakers who just use a canned presentation—I always tailor my presentation directly to my audience. To ensure that I customize the optimal experience for your attendees and to ensure I stay within your budget, it would be great to speak to your executive director before quoting any pricing or committing to a specific way forward. I generally can work with any budget, but my goal is to provide you with an experience that participants will talk about for years to come, and that delivers a real-world, tangible result.”
He was the guy doing the legwork, not the guy pulling the trigger. Without me there to communicate all this, I had to trust him to be my salesperson. When his boss ran through potential speakers, I was just another name on the list. They went with someone else, and I bet the speaker they picked was the one who got the gatekeeper to put him in front of the man in charge.
With the news agency, I’d entrusted my whole sales process to the person selling newspapers at the front of the store working for minimum wage. No one can sell my expertise better than I can, especially not an intermediary just gathering information to summarize and hand to the boss. My problem in both instances was that I wasn’t speaking directly to the person who had the authority to make a decision.
Instead, I was speaking to . . . the dreaded gatekeeper.
GETTING PAST THE GATEKEEPER
Some people have designated gatekeepers such as receptionists, secretaries, executive assistants, or even digital ones like email filters and voice mail.
Then again, some people function as gatekeepers without even realizing it. During my cold-calling days, when I’d walk into a shop and say to the clerk, “I’m from Ozcom. Are you interested in switching phone plans?” of course they’d say no. Regardless of how low they sit on the totem pole, just about everyone has the authority to stop salespeople from getting to the boss.
Or worse, not wanting to be rude, they’d sit with you, go over everything, and then ask for a proposal. I can only imagine how many of Alex Murphy’s thirty-page proposals were destined for the trash before he even sat down to write them.
After successfully selling to that news agency secretary for an hour without getting the sale, I learned to simply put the question like this: “Hi, my name is Matthew, here on behalf of Ozcom, and we’re trialing out a new savers package in your area. Are you the right person to speak to about that?”
It flipped the question from basically “Can I sell you something?” to “Are you in charge?” Instead of setting the person up for the automatic no they gave to every salesperson who walked in, it activated another one of their default decisions: I don’t know what’s going on with this guy, so let me defer to the boss. Instead of wasting time talking to the person out front baking the bread, I got ushered in to see the guy in the back making the dough.
A few years later with the Pollard Institute, I wrote our telemarketers’ script to begin with, “Hi. I’m just calling about a new educational offering to help you increase the productivity of your business. Are you the right person to speak to?”
If they were a gatekeeper of some sort, nine times out of ten they said, “Um, no I’m not. You need to speak to [name]. Let me see if they’re available.” Even if they didn’t put the salesperson straight through to the decision-maker, we had a name to ask for the next time we called.
Our success rate (in this case, measured by the number of appointments generated) skyrocketed beyond the industry average because we spoke to fewer people and landed more bookings . . . which is an excellent segue into another fundamental principle of the introvert’s edge to sales.
DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME
You want more customers. Everybody wants more customers. And herding more people through your doors (literal or digital) will result in more sales. Every salesperson knows that if you just keep on knocking on doors, keep picking up the phone, or somehow keep generating leads, sooner or later you will land a sale.
I mean, look at me. Even a dumb kid in a bad suit knocking on one door after another finally made a sale. I think it was Zig Ziglar who said if you tied your business card to a dog and sent him into the city, one day somebody would call you and you’d make a sale. Eventually. Every sales manager I know repeats the industry mantra as if they were brainwashed drones: “It’s a numbers game. It’s a numbers game.”
Um . . . no.
As you saw with my Pollard Institute telemarketers, our goal was not simply to speak to as many people as possible. We wanted to speak to the right people. We wanted to spend more time with fewer people.
For instance, if I’d gone to a soccer club and spoken to all one thousand people there, I’m sure at least one of them would have been a business owner who wanted some training. My closing rate would have been one in a thousand. If, instead, I’d gone to ninety-three more businesses and landed one sale, my closing rate would have been one in ninety-three. Which one would you want? To speak to another thousand people before you got another sale or just another ninety-three?
Yet people still fixate on working harder: paying for more sponsored Facebook posts, making more phone calls, spending more on advertising, mailing out more brochures, getting bigger email lists, visiting more businesses, optimizing their website, attending more networking events, covering a bigger area—more and more and more.
Then there are those for whom all of that seems overwhelming so they simply shut down, doing nothing (going back to The Paradox of Choice).
When you’re optimizing a production line, you want to do more with less: less effort, less raw material, less electricity, less waste, fewer man-hours. Most of us introverts would rather take a punch in the gut than have to speak to an unending line of people, most of whom will reject us before we even get our second sentence out. We want to minimize the number of strangers we have to speak with and sell to.
In sales, we don’t want to do more; we want to do less.
BE NICE TO THE SECRETARY
With this third step (qualification), that’s really what we’re after. We want to speak to the fewest number of people possible and land the highest number of sales we can.
That said, we still have to deal with the gatekeepers.
Don’t forget that gatekeepers wield enormous influence over your access to the decision-maker. You want to establish rapport with them just as you do with the eventual person you speak to. You want to glean as much information about the decision-maker and the situation as possible, plus excite them to the point that they want to pass your information along. The gatekeeper—be it a receptionist or the sales manager reporting to the COO—may be the one forwarding your email or phone message . . . or round-filing it. If they’re in your corner, they may even advocate for you.
So, while you always want to ultimately speak to the decision-maker, sometimes you have to start with selling to the gatekeeper, especially on inbound leads. With the guy from the trade association, for example, I couldn’t simply say, “Look, you’re obviously not the person calling the shots. Have your boss call me.” That would kill my chances of working with them at all.
In short, sell them on the idea of getting you in a meeting with their boss. Even if they’re tasked with getting information, there are questions they can’t answer. Explain that you want to tailor whatever you’re selling to exactly fit what they need.
You absolutely don’t want to attempt to close the sale (because they can’t decide anyway). On top of all that, gatekeepers may have their own agenda. The boss might want something they feel jeopardizes their job security or makes them less valuable.
By recognizing that you’re speaking to a gatekeeper, you can focus on the real goal: getting through to the decision-maker. You don’t want to leave it up to them to be your proxy.
WHY IS THIS STEP THREE?
If you’ve been paying attention, you see that qualification has often been the first step in many of my stories—figuring out if you’re talking to the right person.
So why is qualification listed as Step Three in my sales process?
First, in only the most straightforward of sales meetings (basic cold-calling, such as telemarketing and door-to-door sales) can you get away with quickly bypassing the gatekeeper. Most sales interactions require laying a bit more groundwork before you can simply ask, “Do you have the authority to make this decision?” A sales manager, for example, might bristle at the question, even if her boss will eventually make the final decision. A husband at a car dealership might become irritated, even if it’s really his wife who manages the finances. In complex sales, such as enterprise software, you might have to go through several layers of management before you finally get to speak to the top dog.
As such, qualification comes after rapport and questions so that you don’t kill the sale before you’ve even begun. Then qualification allows you to determine if you can go ahead and close the sale or if someone else is the decision-maker.
While working on this very section, I had a great call with a gentleman who had a million-dollar detox tea company. He’d called because he wanted to increase his online sales. We discussed how many online companies used a person to build their brand around. People like to buy from people, not from faceless companies. Facebook has Zuckerberg, Apple had Jobs, Progressive has Flo, and Virgin has Richard Branson.
I said, “If we were going to create a personal brand around your company, would that be you? Or would that be somebody else?”
He said, “Oh, no, that would be my wife. First, she’s better-looking than I am, but second, she’s super into nutrition and is always really excited about sharing her experience with the world.”
As soon as he introduced the fact that his wife would make the ideal spokesperson, it was obvious that she’d need to buy in to this idea, too. That is, I’d just identified another key decision-maker in this sale. That changed my tack from trying to sell him to getting him excited about putting his wife on the phone so I could sell to them both.
I remember joking with him, saying, “She sounds perfect, but to ensure we’re all on the same page, I suggest we set up another call with all of us to plan our way forward together. Plus, if you’re anything like me, if I were to make a decision like this that involved my wife, I’d want to check in and make sure it was okay first!”
Being a smart husband, he agreed.
PEOPLE LOVE TO QUALIFY
Here’s the shiny other side of the “qualifying” coin.
Not too long after learning that I needed to speak to the right person, I learned how to kill two birds with one stone. I found a way to be seen as a consultant and get to the decision-maker at the same time by using this line: “Hi, my name’s Matthew. I’m here on behalf of Ozcom to talk about a savers package that’s just being released in your area. I’m just here to see if you qualify for that. Are you the right person to speak to?”
Now, people love to qualify. Everybody likes to feel that they’re good enough to get into the club, the pool of applicants, the inner circle, or whatever it is. Qualifying puts an air of exclusivity around whatever it is you’re offering. I’ve even had prospects say, “I’m not interested in education”—or changing telecom providers or business coaching or whatever I was selling—“but I’m happy to see if I qualify.” And then they wound up signing.
It doesn’t matter if everyone qualifies (as with the telecom plans I sold) or if there are criteria only a select few meet (as with a Black MasterCard). Everyone wants to feel like they’re part of the in-crowd.
Now, with your sales process, I’m not suggesting that you should tell every potential customer that they may not qualify to work with you. The principle here, if it’s appropriate, is to introduce the idea that they may not be “good enough” to do business with you.
What we’re really keying in on here is the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality, as well as the primal fear of loss. We absolutely hate losing something. Study after study shows that, given two choices, people overwhelmingly—sometimes even irrationally—choose to keep what they have instead of taking a tiny risk for a far greater reward. That is, we’re more motivated by the fear of losing something than we are by the near-certainty of gaining something, even if it doesn’t make logical sense.
Basically, you want to play a professional version of hard-to-get. You don’t want to be desperate. You want to raise the question of whether it’s even possible to work together. Not everyone qualifies, and the better you get at sales and your business overall, the truer that becomes.
When I began introducing myself this way, business owners immediately pegged me higher than just another door-to-door salesman. I wasn’t trying to sell them something, per se; I was there to see if they qualified to buy something. This small change in word choice resulted in a huge change in perception.
If the first person I spoke to was a gatekeeper, the result was the same as before: They’d say no and then go get the boss. They didn’t know what was going on, but they knew it was above their pay grade.
They’d go to the back office and say, “Hey, there’s some guy here to see if you qualify for something.” The business owner would immediately be intrigued and come out to see what they may or may not qualify for. Even better, I was automatically elevated from being seen as a salesman to being seen as something else (ideally, a consultant). Again, very simple, but very effective.
It’s a lot easier to get customers’ attention by making them feel exclusive or even elite than by being a typical pushy salesperson.