Interactive Selling

As Featured In R&R

I don’t hide the fact that I go against the grain in my search to improve procedures and systems to super serve clients while strengthening a company’s bottom line. In that quest, a book called, “Close Like The Pros” by Steve Marx, had an impact on me. It's the closest strategy that I have found to date that I totally agree with in terms of real and realistic sales. “Close Like The Pros” is not a sales style, but rather a sales strategy for sales professionals who already understand why and how you should focus on customer needs. The book explains that providing the focus, power, and direction for the sale are important points to make during the sale. Oftentimes, management forces their own sales style on other members of their team and loses focus of the common goals to fill the client’s needs while generating revenue for your company.

Selling is not as easy as people think. It is much more than smiling and dialing, writing the proposals and making one more call at the end of the day. If not done properly, sales prospecting is a waste of time. As the advertising choices in the market become more competitive, buying decisions become more difficult. It is easy to spend too much time working on the prospect, and too little time working with the prospect.

The calls you make after delivering the proposal won’t have the same value as the calls you make before hand. This is where the strategy of interactive selling comes into play. Steve Marx states, "Interactive selling is founded on the notion that the 'Two Call Close' is the great exception, not the typical case."

Interactive selling can mean a lot of back and forth dialogue, questions and answers, along with modification. Interactive selling relocates the delivery of the formal proposal to the end of the process. It is about modifying your uncomfortable follow up calls into pro-active, problem solving, and partnership molding calls.

This strategy is one I have practiced for years. Placing black ink on white paper and pumping out proposals does not guarantee a higher success rate of closing deals. You first have to learn about the client and assess their needs, before putting a proposal together. To keep it simple, interactive selling relocates the delivery of the formal proposal to the end of the sales process where it belongs, not in the middle of the sales process.

You need to focus equally between your selling and the prospects buying, acknowledging that every big decision is the result of a series of logical, sequential, and incremental mini-decisions. The sales professionals that are the most successful understand that they gain power when they empower others. Recognizing that their prospects have the power not just to choose which product, service, or solution they’ll buy, but to help craft it as well.

To achieve interactive selling success remember these 15 points.

1. Selling is tough, but so is buying. Both become more effective when merged into an interactive process

2. Spend more time working with the prospect, than on the prospect

3. Pay more attention to the buying going on than to the selling

4. Your prospect wants to buy. If they didn’t you wouldn’t be sitting in front of them.

5. When you offer true help you’ll encounter no resistance

6. Create a proposal that comes as close as possible to meeting your clients needs

7. More sales are lost early on, because the sales person failed to discover, disclose, or manage expectations

8. Misaligned expectations are rarely forgiven or forgotten between salesperson and prospect

9. Don’t wait to see if the client wants to contract. Lead him there

10. Don’t fear hearing some disagreement when you lay out your expectations. What you should fear is not hearing it

11. Prospects can’t be hurried, but every one can be helped. Turn your prospect’s mountain of doubt into consecutive, logical, incremental molehills of decision

12. Ideas are not worthy of a big buildup. What makes an idea worthy is mutual sculpting and polishing

13. Price is a pertinent topic at various stages in the selling cycle, but budget discussions are often misleading, distracting, and risky-for everyone. Each year in America, billions of dollars budgeted to be spent never are; and billions more are spent that were never budgeted.

14. A YES decision, is not always a fast decision

15. The day you deliver the formal proposal is the day you remove yourself from the buying process. Hold the proposal back until you believe the decision is ready