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Excerpt
Sean: What are some of the best tactics, not strategies, but tactics that you carry with you in closing deals?
David: So first off it goes into the mindset. You gotta go in there with “this is a sales process.” Even if you’re meeting your mate for a coffee, you either meet him for a coffee you’re meeting actually him as a sales professional. And if you’re a sales professional, you need to have the focus mentality. Yes, you should smile. Yes, you should be happy, but you need to be a doctor of staff.
Try going walk-in to your doctor’s and he’s got his music, and he says “Yes! What’s in bruv? nice to see you – blah blah blah.” You don’t care if it was your – mate if you’re going to see your doctor, you’re going for a reason. You want the professional and your doctor will ask probing questions. Your doctor isn’t there to make you happy. He’s there to help. And we have a lot of salespeople out there we have to start with, you know, our mindsets, right?
We’ve gone with knowing what we want out of that. Everyone’s clear. Pre-qualification is everything, absolutely everything. And the reason I say about the friendship thing before, I would jump on a strategy call with someone unless I know what the call’s about. And a lot of people don’t like that.
I’ll ask a series of questions to pre-qualify, one to make sure I can help. Two, to make sure I want to work with you. And three, to make sure that you’re confident and I’m going to sign up for the phone call.
So having this pre-qualification is a friendly, informative chat. It doesn’t have to be serious. Do you want to have a direct question? Well, what do you want to know or what you’ve been working on? What are you doing at the moment? How are you selling them? What are the main struggles you’ve got? What are big goals you want to achieve in the next year but you haven’t, or what are you currently turning over? Imagine I keep my fingers now I’m in the room with you right now. And you’ve got me for a day for free. What would you set me to work on to help you get more deals, whether it’d be an action, or things like that, what would it matter, right?
If you won’t answer those questions, you’re after just some free tips and I don’t blame you, fair play for the hustle. Fair play for the hustle, but you’re trying to go back, there’s something that would do that. Contact coaches, try to get a little bit of this, like phoning a chef up, trying to get a recipe for each one, and now you’ve got a cookbook.
With that, it stops a lot of that. So then you have a stage where I know that you’re committed. I know you’re open to it. This is before the strategy goal.
So we have to have a structure for what we do, having your pre-qualification. I think that was about eight questions I’ve given you, then changed those questions up. And once you’ve got your questions, break it down into a clear order, but it’s a smooth transition because no one wants to be felt like they are – no one wants to feel like they’re completing a survey.
It gives us a clear idea of where we are. So pre-qualification is so vital because you want to know what is a viable prospect. Two, you want to know the facts that you need to get help from us. And three, it also takes you down the path you’ve taken out a lot of the potential objections later.
It’s all structured, no more pushing sales. It’s just direct. Knowing what to say and when.
