That giant sucking sound you hear is the big empty space at the beginning of many sales calls and business 'relationships.' It's the Bermuda triangle of connection and progress; a black hole where the bright star of an insight or an idea might have shone. It didn't have to be this way.
Across scores of seller interviews I conduct in preparing workshops each year, I hear a consistent litany of frustrations and complaints:
The buyer puts us in a box with a bunch of other companies...
They don't really listen to us...
It's all about the numbers...
They're not seeing the big picture...
We don't really get a chance to compete...
But blaming the buyer, your marketing team, fate, God or anyone else makes no sense. You've got the power to fix this yourself. You see, there's a fleeting moment at the outset of the sales discussion that you're not filling with anything meaningful and urgent. Call it the "agenda vacuum." Sometimes the vacuum is there because the rep just didn't do the work, choosing instead to walk in with a canned presentation and 'see what's up.' Other times the rep chooses passivity and caution: "Be polite and find out what the buyer wants to talk about." Or the agenda is something incredibly lame like...
I want to really understand your objectives for the year...
I just wanted to introduce you to our company....
Let me update you on... whatever.
If you don't put something urgent and provocative in front of the buyer in the first 90 seconds of your call, your buyer will step into the vacuum and fill it themselves. They'll fill it with rote questions, flawed categorization, indifference, false objections, a recitation of numerical parameters or something worse. I'll leave you with a tip to help you fill the void. Make this the first sentence of your next sales meeting:
We've looked at your business, and there's one big issue we don't think you recognize. And if it's not addressed, you'll be missing a huge opportunity.
Do the work. Think. Plan. Fill the vacuum.
These ideas were originally posted here in January 2013.
