Selling Skills – Gaining true Commitment Incall effectivenss (ICE)
Finishing of my in call effectiveness series I want to talk about gaining true comitment in your calls.
The weakest points in any sales call and presentation is the agenda setting and pre call objective and of course the close, asking for the money!
Quite frankly too many people are too afraid of just asking for the business and they have spent all this time doing a great call only to be in such a state of rapport that they feel they cannot close.
Let’s look at it from the three P’s again:
Purpose – Strengthen your ability to ask for and recognize true commitment and how to respond appropriatley
Process - Asessment of your own field information, observe, create and discuss examples, role play with your team or line manager and practice getting true Joint commitment.
Pay Off – Increased level of confidence that the customer will move to action. Use a collection of powerful commitment questions and responses.
So let’s look at gaining true commitment
When we talk about Joint agreement we talk about what the customer is going to do to take action and give you a sale and also what you as a sales executive need to do to facilitate the sale..
The sales flow would go something like this:
Summarize all relevant agreements throughout the call first then:
1. Ask the commitment question – ‘Will you’…
2. Evaluate the readiness to move to action (negative ) – then Identify (Unclear) -then Clarify
(positive) – then Specify
3. Specify the commitment ‘How will you’….
This is where closed questions are really good, it’s a simple yes no answer:
- ‘Will you’?
- ‘How about’?
- ‘Are you ready to’?
Active verbs can be used in a different context of the business outcome for example:
Expand, Try out, Continue, Start, Switch, these are all ways to get:
- New business
- More business
- Maintain business
Evaulate a customer’s readiness to move to take action
1.How does the customer react? – is it verbal or non verbal?
2.What does this mean? – Your confidence level
3.How will you react? Idenify – Clarify – Specify – DO NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS!
Verbal signs for commitment would include:
words such as ‘Yes I like it’, ‘Maybe’ , ‘I’ll bear it in mind’, ‘I’m already using it’ – hear if they are willing to take action they will usually as ask a question , make a suggestion or express a concern.
Addressing each commitment level
1. The neagtive situation
Use IDENIFY – You may have a potential major objection therefore refer back to what was discussed in the call and any partial agreements made.
Make sure you know what is the objection is it because there is: no need?, no hurry?, not convinced? This is a test in actual fact if you are at this sitauation you did not get across the value proposition and you did not get partial agreement in the call earlier.
2. The Unclear situation
Use CLARIFY - Ask clarification questions:
- Rephrase your commitement question
- Check what information the customer is missing
- Help the customer to idenify the patients
The positive situation
Believe it or not this situation often has the weakest close and call to action. Often sales executives don’t really push the business along and I have seen great calls go to waste if they get a response that they are already using it. This is where specificity is king. sometimes digging deeper will uncover; that in the mind of the customer their perception is that they may well use your product all the time, but when probing further they actually only use it a small amount.
So here’s what you do:
Use SPECIFY – Specify the commitment: How will you…
- Ask and agree
- where you will use the product?
- How much of the product will you use?
- When will you buy the product?
- What do you need from me to get more use?
Use the ICE series to really look at how you sell and change up your patterns we need to re-evaluate our sales calls as we always get into bad habbits and easy comfort zones. These tips and tricks will add simple yet effective changes to your presentations that you can apply in small steps and see the results.
