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When Your Prospect Goes into Hiding
How many times has this happened to you? You
have a prospect that you've already spoken with and when it's time
to follow up they don't take or return your phone calls.
What's up with that? What's up is a lack of
compelling reasons for them to buy - now. You may have
provided them with some compelling reasons, but those are yours, not
theirs. You may believe they were interested and they might
have been - before. But in order to assure that your prospect
is able to maintain their interest from one meeting to the next,
they must have one or more compelling reasons to buy what you have
or you'll be in chase mode again. What is a
compelling reason? It's a motivator that creates urgency.
Interest in your product or service, a feature, a bell or whistle is
just that. Interest. But interest won't cause a prospect
to open their checkbook or meet with you a second time. There
must be something more compelling than interest.
Like what? Like the mounting cost of an
unresolved problem. But make sure your prospect is the one who cares
about that money. Someone may tell you about the money being
lost but if it isn't their money it may only be a fact - not an
ongoing painful reminder of the problem.
What else? Downtime can be a compelling reason, but only if your
prospect is the one getting the calls from screaming customers
threatening to take their business away if the problem doesn't get
fixed. Anything else? Fear is a great one.
But be careful here too. There are several kinds of fear.
The only one that is compelling is the fear of something bad
happening. But even that isn't enough unless your prospect
would be unable to cope with the consequences of that event.
Anything can be a compelling reason. The key,
as stated previously, is that it must be compelling to your
prospect. Identify the compelling reasons why they would by
something, and even better, why they would buy from you, and you'll
keep your prospect coming back for more.
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How
to Become a Sales Superstar