Bachelor Episode 3- Listening is hard...

Do your sales and marketing efforts make your prospects want to snap crackle pop?

If your sales team isn’t armed with strategic questions, and held accountable for acquiring that data… chances are strong your prospects think your brand is annoying. Episode 3 is all about a life skill that unfortunately most sale teams never pick up. Listening is a skill that requires insane discipline most of the time. I’ve found listening can be even more challenging when you’re excited, nervous, unhappy, or uncertain, which are all emotions a salesperson faces in the first five seconds of a cold call, discovery meeting, negotiation, and follow up.

The girl's communication with Peter showed how few of women were quality listeners. The majority of the episode focused on Peter trying to “open up” and learn more about the women which turned into “me focused” surface level corny conversations. Multiple conversations reflected long winded stories about the past, and ending without gathering information from Peter that could help them outperform the other women. In the end most of the girls blended in making it hard for Peter to differentiate any of them. This was their opportunity to learn more about Peter and understand what’s most important to him, what his motivations and fears are, what he likes to do with his free time, what’s most important to him in a spouse/partner, how he evaluates his relationships, what his deal killers are, etc.

Did you see the UPS store commercial where the sales person never stops talking about her capabilities? It seemed like she could have fit in with the girls no problem!

Sales teams without proper training and accountability suffer from the same mistakes. Sales people notoriously enter a meeting with the mindset it’s all about them. Sales people are looking to impress the prospect, and focus on what are they going to say rather than ask. The end result of this debacle is a prospect who feels like they didn’t learn anything, plans to avoid the salespersons follow up, and will most likely hold this poor experience against the next sales person who reaches out. Although it’s a massive issue that the buyer and salesperson is not benefiting from the conversation, I think another equal consequence is the lack of buyer data feeding back to leadership. If sales people are asking the right questions and effectively gathering information, they should be the ultimate source for improving your lead generation, appointment setting, sales tools, and follow up conversion success.

 With our team, I train and expect our sales team to capture the following 5 data points: 

1.  Who does the client exist to serve? (Who is their customer?)
2. How is the client evaluated? (What are their motivations?)
3. What is the client working to achieve? (What is their goal?)
4. What has the client done so far to achieve that goal? (How have they approached solving the challenge)
5. What results have they seen? (How are they measuring solutions, and how successful have they been?)

 I’ve found these 5 Data Points have worked for multiple organizations/industries, and the data gathered has been instrumental in helping them build out their lead generation tools, presentation assets, follow up strategies, and client retention.

Related: Are you running into issues aligning your buyer data with items that directly improve your lead generation, trade show, customer events, presentations, and client retention? Private message me your challenges and I’d love to share ideas in my next article.

P.S. Not all the ladies failed the questions test. I’ve got to give big kudos to Kelly and Alaya for asking great questions that unlocked awesome information from Peter. Kelly’s question resulted in Peter asking her to stay and that she was one of the big reasons he was feeling confident about Bachelor. I know Alaya isn’t well liked at the moment, but she’s been the best in asking questions which reflect an ultimate confidence and have Peter second guessing his decision. I think we see her real soon.