How to not start a sales conversation
When you meet with a buyer for a sales conversation, it’s really important to start out right.
Those first few moments have a massive influence on how the conversation will go, and it’s your job and duty to curate the conversation.
And that starts with your opening statement, which in many cases is the friendly:
“How are you doing?”
And while it’s friendly, it’s entirely the wrong way to start.
Why?
Because there’s no end to the answer, it’s a completely ambiguous question, and literally, any answer is valid.
This often leads to those unproductive and random status updates that tell you nothing useful, and that effectively cause your buyer to lose time, talking about nothing relevant to the job at hand.
Where the job at hand is: identify whether or not this person wants to buy your work.
So if you have 30 minutes with them, and you don’t start outright, you might already be ten minutes in, before you ever get to the meat & potatoes.
So instead, because you do want to be friendly, ask:
“How have you been?”
It’s a subtle difference, but the outcome is impactfully different.
Because “How have you been” is a time-bound question, and the answer ends in the here & now.
Instead of letting the buyer come up with whatever thought or idea that comes up, it invites them to reflect and report on what has happened, up to this point in time.
The result?
A friendly opening, but with a clearly identifiable end-point, after which the two of you can get down to business.
And that’s a far better way to serve a buyer in their decision-making, than asking a question that invites them to waffle on.
Not “how are you”, but: “how have you been?”
And if you want personal insight and training on how to have sales conversations that work and get you results, let me know…
