Every sales call is an opportunity to practice your craft, to improve upon your skills in these foundational areas. As you focus on achieving the four goals of every sales call, you naturally become more and more adept at them, until you achieve excellence. Excellence expresses itself in great sales calls.
I have two rules for planning a sales call:
1) You must plan to do all four things
2) You must plan to do each as well as you can, given the constraints of time and the situation.
Visualize a sales call as being organized like a dart target. Imagine the dart sphere being divided into four quarters – each representing one of the four fundamental goals of a sales call. Then, imagine the rings – large on the periphery of the target, but increasingly smaller until they end in a tiny bull’s eye in the middle.
You understand that you have four darts to throw, and each dart that sticks closer to the bull’s eye scores more than those on the outskirts of the target.
So it is with a sales call. You have four goals, and you can achieve each with various degrees of proficiency – i.e. closer to the bull’s eye. For example, you can connect with the customer when you both acknowledge how miserable the weather is outside. On the dart target, that’s the very outer ring of the target, where it doesn’t count very much, if anything. On the other hand, you
can share some deep common bond that you discover. That’s a dart that sticks much closer to the bull’s eye.
You see then, that each sales call is an opportunity to accomplish four objectives, and to accomplish each as deeply as possible.
The best understand the power of a sales call, and plan to wring the greatest value they can out of every sales call. This is a way to do it.
