Avoid chasing your prospects and, instead, have them chasing you by using this simple "Time" trick that keeps all things in perfect balance.
Early on in my career in sales, I was supporting a more seasoned sales rep who was teaching me the ropes. She was fairly seasoned and navigated the sales process like clockwork. She knew what questions to ask, how to strategize, execute, and win. We hardly ever deviated form the process we'd both established together.
Until one day in Austin, Texas.
We were visiting a prospect who wanted to see a demo of our software solution. I was assigned to deliver the demo and handle the technical questions and objections, while she would handle all of the business questions and objections. The demo meeting was schedules for sixty minutes, which was quite normal for us. It was enough time for her to present our solution slides, for me to demo the product live, and still have time for questions and discussion at the end. Typical, right?
Well, not exactly.
On this particular day, it just so happened that another client, also in Austin, Texas, heard we were going to be in town and decided they wanted us to stop by and talk about an upgrade. This meant that they wanted to by an additional amount of software license for the year, which would add to our "win" column for the quarter. As anyone in sales know, an upgrade from a KNOWN CLIENT is always a higher priority than a NEW PROSPECT.
The problem in this case, however, was the fact that our known client was only available to meet with us at the exact hour that our meeting with the new prospect ended. Now, that would not have been a problem if both the client and the prospect were in the same building or in the business complex area because then we could end one meeting in one office, walk over to the other office, and start our next meeting.
But that was not the case.
In fact, our prospect and our client could not have been located further away from each other if we planned it out ourselves.
Therefore, the sales rep and I decided to inform our prospect that we would only had time to meet for fifty minutes because we had a hard-stop at ten minutes before the hour. The client agreed to that and said it would be fine and we proceeded with the meeting, per our plan.
Then, exactly at fifty minutes into the meeting, my sales rep turns to me and says "Okay, Mav, let's go!", which would have been fine if we were actually finished, but we weren't. In fact, I was just starting to get some great questions from the prospect and the lightbulbs were starting to go off in their heads. They were actually starting to see some value in what we were showing them and then, here we are, abruptly stopping the whole meeting to leave....because we said we would....and we all agreed. So we packed up our laptops, stood up, and started walking out the door.
And then what happened next was so unexpected and completely wonderful.
The prospect stood up with us and followed us out the door. They continued asking us questions about our solution and we continued to provided answers. They rode with us down the elevator and even followed us out to our car in the parking lot. As we were backing out of our parking space, they followed along side the car asking us to roll down our window. They asked us to send them a quote as we quickly drove away. It was unreal.
But what was even more unreal was the next week, we sent our prospect a quote and they sent us a PO before the end of that week. We couldn't believe it.
We later realized that it wasn't our presentation, demo, or product that enticed our prospect to give us their business. It was the fact that we were in demand and needed to leave earlier than expected to meet our next client. When we got to the end of our scheduled meeting time and then abruptly needed to leave, that is what created a sense of urgency because, instead of staying longer to finish the meeting, we were subtly implying that our time was slightly more valuable than our prospects. They agreed to meet us for sixty minutes, but we could only stay for fifty. The ten minute gap made all the difference.
Now think about that for a moment.
How many times have you met with a new prospect and agreed to meet for sixty minutes, but then at the end of the meeting, you realized you weren't finished yet and decided to ask your prospect for a little more time? What message are you sending them when you ask for more time? In some ways it's on the verge of being inconsiderate and almost disrespectful because if you needed more time, you should have either asked for it upfront or planned and prepared better to make sure you did not go over the allotted meeting time, right?
Now think about the message you COULD be sending if you always have less time than your client has available to meet? You are basically saying without words that your time is more valuable than your prospect's time and that is important because, after all, they are still a prospect. They are not a client yet. Therefore, it seems fair that you might treat them accordingly and put your other existing client's needs ahead of your prospect's needs because your clients are already paying customers vs your prospects, who have not yet decided to buy.
Needless to say, after that experience in Austin, Texas, anytime the sales rep and I had a meeting with a new prospect, we would always say we only had fifty minutes to meet and after that fifty minutes, we always abruptly stopped wherever we were in our discussion, pointed to our watches, stood up, and started to leave. And if the prospect was serious, they would follow us out the door, just like the first time. And if they didn't, then usually that clearly indicated they weren't serious to begin with and we save ourselves ten minutes of our precious time.
To best part of this discovery is that several years later, I read about this same sort of "time trick" in a book called, "Pitch Anything" by Oren Klaff, who referred to it as "creating a Chase Frame". It validated what my sales rep and I had discovered. In that book, the author suggested that you always want to make your clients chase you, not the other way around. The reason is because when someone or something is "coming at you", our natural instinct is to retract and pull away. However, when something you may want is in front of you and then it suddenly "moves aways from you", our instinct it to try and grab it before it's gone. We want to "chase it" before it gets away. We can't help ourselves.
In Summary...
Just remember, prospect instinctually want to chase after you vs having you force yourself onto them. Therefore, it's in your best interest to always have a little less time available to meet with them they they have to meet with you. Then, when you run out of time, simply leave. If they are serious about you or your product, they will follow you.
Comments