8
ask without asking
(STEP SEVEN: ASSUME THE SALE)
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
I once coached a man in Melbourne, Troy, who rented furniture to real estate companies staging unoccupied homes. People are more likely to buy if the living room has a sofa and a piece of art and when the bedroom has a bed and a dresser. People want to buy the vision they see, not an empty shell. They want to see it as a home, not just a house. This also helped with older estates with dated furniture that . . . well, smelled like old furniture. It’s worth it to rent new furnishings for a few months to help sell the home more quickly and with less negotiating, just like employing the trick of baking fresh cookies. As we’ve said throughout this book, our desires aren’t rational; we just find ways to rationalize what we want.
However, Troy had a problem with collecting payment from the homeowners. He billed them at the end of each month rented and as such, the homeowners had little incentive to pay him for the final month, after they’d already sold the house and he’d removed the furniture. Or even worse, they would contract the furniture for eight weeks and then want to keep the furniture for an extra week or two. They were fine with the extra fee . . . until it came time to pay. At that point, their phone seemed to go straight to voice mail. It got to the point that he was almost writing off the last month of each staging. It was just a headache.
I said, “Well, mate, why don’t you just charge them a month up front? Bill them before you stage the house. That way, you collect at the beginning of the month. When you pick up the furniture, they’re already paid up.”
He said, “Nobody in our industry does that. No customer would use me if I charged them before I even delivered the furnishings.”
“Really? When did you decide that?”
He just frowned. “I mean, I didn’t decide . . . that’s just how it’s always been done.”
“So, did someone tell you that? Or did you just assume that? And why would these sellers even know that? You told me that for almost all your customers, it’s their first time staging a home like this.”
I wasn’t trying to be a smart aleck. I’ve just found that, so many times in life, we simply assume that things have to be a certain way. We spend our lives living by rules we’ve never tested. Who knows what can’t be done until it’s been tried? Even if “that’s not how it’s done” in your industry, does the customer know that? It’s your business; you set the rules.
When I founded the Small Business Festival in Austin, people told me it took eight to twelve months to secure sponsorship for this kind of event, especially for the first time. And yet I locked in Capital One, GoDaddy, Facebook, the City of Austin, and WP Engine all within ninety days. When people tell me, “It’s always been done like this,” I just can’t give it much weight.
Troy argued a bit until finally I said, “Look, do this for me: Just try it. Over the next two weeks, I want you to lead the price discussion with, ‘So for us to put the furniture in, our standard process is to charge one month in advance. What is the easiest way for you to organize payment? Would it be by credit card or check?’ If it’s a card, say, ‘Great—which one?’ If it’s by check, say, ‘Perfect—can you go grab that for me, please?’ Just try it and see what happens. In fact, why don’t I go with you to your next sales call?”
The week after, we hopped in his car and drove to a prospective buyer’s home. He introduced me as “someone who’s training today” and then proceeded with his sales spiel. I chimed in here and there, but he did all the selling; I was just there to help with the payment arrangement.
I waited until I felt that the homeowner was excited about what he was hearing. Then I took his temperature by saying, “Excellent. So would it be easier for you to provide access to the property for staging on the weekend or during the week? The weekend? Fantastic.”
That was the trial close. By indicating the time for us to start, he signaled that he’s ready to buy. Once I saw that, I knew it was time to present the price.
“Now, industry wide, all furniture rentals are a month at a time”—per Troy—“plus a small staging cost, and for your home it would be $X per month with a $Y staging fee. Now, our standard process is one month in advance, and we need your driver’s license number for security. Do you have a driver’s license? Fantastic, would you grab that for me please?”
While the buyer was going for his wallet, I picked up the paperwork and got on with writing out the contract. When he looked up, he saw me filling out paperwork, and we just moved forward.
“Okay, now, what’s the easiest way to organize payment? Would that be credit card or check?”
As soon as he pulled out his checkbook, I said, “So that will be $2,500 for the first month and the staging fee.” After I got the check, I suggested that using a credit card for the additional months might be easier, versus worrying about mailing checks. I joked that while we’d have to pay the credit fee, we’d be happy to eat those costs to make his life easier. He laughed and gave us his credit card details; we shook hands and left.
When we stepped outside the building, Troy turned to me and said, “That just happened, didn’t it? He didn’t even raise his eyebrows. He just acted like it was normal.”
I said, “Mate, that’s because we acted like it was normal. That was your ‘standard process.’ I didn’t try to explain why we did it or really call attention to it at all. When he said he preferred weekend delivery, he’d already made the subconscious decision that he was buying. Everything else was just details. By the time I asked for payment, it was almost an afterthought.
“If he would’ve said, ‘Now just a minute. I’m not ready to make a decision just yet,’ I could have easily said, ‘Oh, no, you misunderstood. I’m only asking, as we have to look at our crews’ schedules to see their availability. I’m just getting all your information recorded to save time for later. See, we had a client just like you one time . . .’ and gone straight into one of your clients’ success stories.”
As it was, we assumed the sale . . . and assumed rightly.
HOW TO HANDLE PRICE
“Look, I just need to know how much this is going to cost.”
Ever take a phone call where that was the prospect’s opening line? I’ve had emails asking straightaway how much I charge for business coaching. But you can’t have an effective discussion on price until prospects understand your value.
That’s why price comes last.
You have to get through establishing trust, asking questions, providing stories, and handling objections before you share how much you charge. With Troy’s client, I didn’t present price until I took his temperature and saw that he wanted what Troy was selling.
If your client asks about price or how much it is going to cost at any point before you’re ready to discuss it—whether at the beginning of the meeting, while you’re explaining the agenda, or at any time during your stories—all you have to say is, “[Name], we’ll certainly get to that, but at this stage I’m still going through the process of understanding exactly what will work for you and tailoring a solution that will fit your needs perfectly. We will get to price in a second, I promise, but is it okay if I ask you a few more questions first? Excellent.” And back to your script.
Alternatively, you might say, “Is it okay if I finish explaining how this product/service worked for [past client] so I can confirm that what I’m suggesting 100 percent fits what you’re looking to achieve? Excellent.” And back to your script.
As I said back in Chapter 2, when delivering your agenda, make sure to include when price will be discussed. By doing so, just like I showed you in the Pollard Institute example, potential customers will feel confident that you know what you’re doing and will be far less likely to jump the gun.
Why put off price until the very last?
If you lead with price, then every feature or benefit (individually) you present will automatically be gauged against that price: Is that worth what they’re quoting? I don’t think so. Now you have forced yourself into the position of wrestling with prospects’ logical mind instead of appealing to their emotions.
If price comes last, you get the benefit of the compounding effect. If you mention price too soon, you are relying on one specific feature or benefit to tip the scales, as opposed to allowing them to build on each other to the point that, when price is mentioned, the prospect’s line of thought becomes, I can get all of this for that? Sounds like an amazing deal!
If you quote before knowing exactly what prospects need, then you’re chasing a moving target. Suppose they need something that costs more than your standard price or what you had anticipated. You’d need to increase your quoted price. However, they would feel cheated: You said it would cost X, but now you’re saying Y.
There really is no win for you mentioning price sooner.
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room. We all know price is a big deal, right? Wrong! Price is a big deal only if you make it one. You just finished reading the story of how I discussed price in Troy’s example. Notice how little time I spent on it. It was almost as if I were just talking about what color the moving trucks were, an almost inconsequential fact. The words I used also came across as somewhat indifferent.
If you give price more attention than it deserves, you will come across like it’s a lot of money. Your tone and demeanor might make them think, Hmm, maybe I should think about this before jumping in . . .
Present your price just as if you were talking about anything else. Of course, I know it’s nearly impossible to feel indifferent about price. As a matter of fact, in talking about this book and how to address pricing, someone told me that I could write a whole chapter—heck, a whole book!—just on pricing and how to present it.
I could—but it’s really not that big of a deal. Your price is the price. Say it and move on.
If you can’t get past the idea that you’re asking for a lot of money, you have to desensitize yourself to the number. For example, a good friend of mine owned a karate studio in a low-to middle-class neighborhood. He hired local high school kids to go door-to-door selling a yearlong program that cost $3,500.
Think back to your time in high school. I don’t care when you graduated, $3,500 is a lot of money. For these kids, it was no different. They did amazingly well pitching the parents on the program, its value, and the structure. When it came to price, though, they almost stuttered as it came out of their mouths. He realized that the kids were terrified of saying a number that big.
He set out on a mission to desensitize them to it. Before the start of business, he’d get the kids to practice saying to each other “thirty-five hundred.” Not “three thousand, five hundred” but “thirty-five hundred.”
“That’s thirty-five hundred pillows . . .”
“That’s thirty-five hundred feathers . . .”
“That’s thirty-five hundred giraffes . . .”
They just practiced and practiced until the price meant nothing to them; it was just a number. It took about a week of this routine, but he saw an amazing difference: The price tag of “thirty-five hundred dollars” just rolled off their tongues, and sales skyrocketed.
If you charge $15,000, get practicing. “That’s fifteen K. That’s fifteen K. That’s fifteen K.”
If you have a payment plan, practice that too: “That’s twelve-and-a-half K—seventy-five hundred llamas up front, and two simple monthly payments of twenty-five hundred llamas.”
If you charge $8,400: “It’s eighty-four hundred monkeys—that’s four equal payments of twenty-one hundred monkeys.”
Keep going until your price means nothing.
DON’T TREAT SALES LIKE GLASS
The “greats”—Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and others—live by the idea that you must be persistent. “It takes seven noes to get a yes,” and other quotes like that tell us that we are supposed to keep asking, keep pursuing, and keep badgering our customers until they finally give in.
Well, a thick-skinned extrovert may have no trouble hounding someone until they finally relent, but for most of us introverts, that’s just not congruent with who we are.
In selling door-to-door for Ozcom, I couldn’t afford to revisit a store five or six times just to make a twenty-dollar commission. Between petrol and parking meters, I would barely break even.
Even when I started my own telecom brokerage, sales commissions were only a couple of hundred dollars. If our salespeople made four or five appointments a day, and it took five appointments to make a sale, and assuming they had an astounding ratio of closing one in every two customers, that would be five hundred dollars a week—at the very best.
I had one sales guy named Grant who did an amazing job at developing rapport. Customers loved him. But he never closed a sale on the first meeting. Never. He’d go back again, then again, and then again. When he finally did close, some of his deals were huge, but it took forever to get there.
I said, “Grant, why aren’t you closing more quickly? Obviously, you can sell these big orders. Why does it take you five appointments to sell $1,000 worth of commission?”
He said, “Matt, the way I see it, if I sell an average of $1,000 over five meetings, I make $200 each meeting. It’s the same amount of money, and I don’t have to feel pushy.”
“But wouldn’t you rather sell $1,000 in one go? And then instead of going back another four times, sell $1,000 each to other customers? Wouldn’t you rather use five visits to make $1,000 each than one at $200?”
Obviously, yes, but he couldn’t get past his mental image of being the pushy salesman, as well as his fear of losing the sale if he were perceived as one. He treated each potential sale like glass: If he wasn’t careful, he’d break it.
The thing was, he didn’t need to be pushy. I’d developed the sales script specifically for introverts like him and me. In the script, he was supposed to say, “Okay, now I need to ensure that you qualify for this. Do you have an ABN? Fantastic, would you like to go grab that for me? Excellent.”
Rarely did anyone ever have that on-hand, so they’d have to get out of their chair, walk down to someone else’s office, get the number, and come back. Often, just this little nudge to action is all they needed to help them make the decision. When they returned, I (or whoever was running the script) would be filling out the paperwork to get things rolling.
This is the social equivalent of Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object either remains at rest or in motion until acted upon by an outside force. The very act of the person getting out of the chair puts the sale in motion. Once things are in motion, it’s easier to let them stay in motion than to dig your heels in and call a stop to it.
It worked. Everyone in my brokerage company used it (by mandate; if you worked on my sales team, you memorized the script I’d worked out that I knew worked and delivered consistent results, regardless of the person or personality). So why was Grant having such a hard time?
When it came time to ask for the ABN . . . he just stopped. When I asked him why he felt he was being pushy, he said, “It’s just—I worry about losing the sale. I feel disingenuous about asking for their ABN, and I think they can see that.”
“Okay, Grant, here’s what we’re going to do. First, you’re going to treat sales like rocks, not glass. They’re not going to break. Second, because you spend so much time with each customer, you have only a few in your pipeline at any one time. You’re afraid of losing even one of them because it represents a big part of your potential commissions. Third, here’s a new rule: If the customer doesn’t sign up, you can’t go back and you get only one more meeting with all your current prospects.”
He said, “What? What do you mean?”
“If they don’t sign up that day, you can’t go back. I don’t care if they call back the next day and say they’ve changed their mind and want to buy everything you sell—you can’t go back.”
Grant said, “That’s gonna cost me money, Matt. I can’t do that.”
Let’s stop for a moment and talk about one of the most fundamental things you have to keep in mind as you learn how to use all of this: You have to be willing to risk things getting worse before you do better. You may not be getting great results doing things the way you do them now, but at least you feel comfortable doing them that way and at least you’re getting them consistently, right?
When you start changing things up, you won’t know what you’re doing. It will feel uncomfortable. Just like moving from an automatic car to a manual. Eventually you will have greater control, but for a while it will be a bit jerky. Learning to ski felt unnatural (standing on two sticks that want to point in different directions, throwing yourself down a slope . . . just writing this, it sounds crazy), but I enjoyed it once I learned how to do it. You can’t get better until you change something.
I said, “Grant, you have to trust me. This is going to get you paid, not the other way around. I mean, these customers like you, but eventually they need to buy or go with someone else. And, well, let’s face it: They are at work to work, not hang out with you.
“Look, let’s just do this as a one-week experiment. Are you willing to try this just for one week, with the potential outcome being that you sell as much as the other guys and potentially much, much more?”
He nodded.
“It’s not necessarily about being more pushy, Grant. I don’t know what’s going to be different for you. You may become indifferent, feeling that you’re not going to get the sale, because most people don’t sign up with you on the first meeting anyway. That lack of desperation may help the prospect feel like you’re more relaxed.
“On the other hand, knowing that you have only one shot to get it right, you may do a more thorough job of figuring out what the customers really need and translating features to benefits for them. I don’t know. But I do know this: If you have to push to make it happen, you’re doing it wrong.”
We practiced the sales team’s script until he’d nailed the “I need to ensure that you qualify” part. He went out and closed almost every one of his new sales calls with just one meeting. Then he called his big prospects back and asked if he could go through everything with them again. He treated each one like it was a new sale. Bam!—a $10,000 commission deal! Grant made more money that month than any other rep and kept that winning streak for six months straight.
In a sales team that relies on a system like mine, if one person is over-performing, you need to figure out what they’re doing and replicate it. If they’re under-performing, like Grant, you want to figure out what’s wrong and fix it.
That one change took him from the bottom of the heap to the top. It didn’t matter if he was selling to the owner of a small shop with one mobile plan or pitching a complex sale to a CEO with twenty or thirty mobile plans. He’d still organize the entire deal, from meeting to signing, in one day.
(This isn’t unique to Grant. I have clients who sell $10,000 courses and $25,000 products in one call. The record for the cadre of self-employed service professionals I coach currently stands at selling $75,000 from an unplanned, in-bound thirty-minute phone call from someone the service rep had never met before. And he’s done it more than once.)
FIND A WAY, NOT AN EXCUSE
I’m not suggesting that you never follow up with a prospect. You don’t necessarily have to institute the rule for yourself that I did with Grant (though the experiment obviously propelled him to success). However, I do need you to realize that selling five figures’ worth of products and services from a single phone call is not only possible but normal—and that if you don’t do it in your first meeting, someone else may come behind you and do it before your next chance.
You can’t use the excuse that your industry or product or market is different. I sold a five-figure sponsorship for Small Business Festival to Capital One in just one meeting. I had another meeting where I sold over one hundred people into a nationally accredited training program. Sure, there was a lot of paperwork, but we went from “Who is this guy?” to “Yes, we’ll put all of our teams through the course” in just one sitting.
Speaking of paperwork, don’t let it be an excuse, either. In one telecom sale, I happened to walk into a gas station where the owner kept his office . . . for all forty of his other gas stations. I sold him telecom plans for all of them. He said, “Okay, well, fill out all the paperwork and bring it back.”
My response: “Do you have a table? I can do them all right now.”
He was surprised for a moment, but said, “You can use a cafeteria table, I guess.”
“Perfect!”
I sat at the gas station dining booth for three hours filling out the paperwork for all forty locations. Once I was done, I marched into his office, we laughed about it, and I signed one of my biggest deals ever at Ozcom. If I had left, he could have changed his mind, but after seeing me work so hard filling out all his paperwork . . . what was he going to do but say, “Let’s do this!”
You may not have found a way to seal the deal in one meeting, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Again, the beauty is that you don’t have to push harder. You don’t have to be aggressive. You don’t need to be anything other than you. You just need to experiment until you find a way that feels natural for you. Trust in the process, assume the sale, and they will come.
But what do you do when they don’t?