Rattling Bedroom Windows and Falling
Lamps
Thanksgiving is over and I have a
legitimate excuse for not posting for almost 2 weeks. I had intended to write last
Monday after the last of the fowl flesh had been devoured, but I felt so out of
sorts I feared some form of bird flu may have mysteriously gotten into my
system.
I fantasized briefly about a bunch
of gobblers getting together at the old Tyson Turkey Town and becoming aware of
the fate awaiting them. My mind saw them in a final act of defiance all making
a suicide poultry pact and ingesting tainted turkey chow knowing their revenge
would be served postmortem.
But alas, as I awoke this morning, a wind with the force of
a small tornado came from deep inside and nearly ripped the blankets from the
bed. The windows rattled and the lamp fell from the nightstand in my
haste to exit. Instantly I felt the pressures of the world had lifted from me my
demeanor brightened and I became my old self and I knew guru-isms would be forthcoming.
Let’s proceed.
HOW TO IDENTIFY CLOSING
QUESTIONS
As
promised, today the Guru is going to show you how to identify those questions
from prospects that tell you when it is time to stop talking about who you
know, what terms you offer, how many awards you won or any of the other stuff
that YOU feel illustrate the value of your offer and simply get down to it.
These types of questions are commonly known as “closing questions”.
One
of life’s greatest contradictions, (to me at least), is:
No
prospect will EVER tell you when you have sold them and they are ready to buy
Every
prospect will ALWAYS tell you when you have sold them and they are ready to buy
“So
G, how am I supposed to deal with a statement like that? Which is it”, you may
ask.
Again,
and always, the answer is you have to listen more than you talk.
In
every aspect of the human condition we all expose our true motivations only to
those willing to see them. Our feelings and our true selves are
determined by things that happen to us and things that are said to us in our
formative years.
There
is a lot of debate about what time frame our formative years actually start and
end with but for our purpose it doesn’t really matter. It is enough to know
that, (allowing for some POSSIBLE exceptions), everyone’s personality was
developed as a young child and stays with them throughout their lifetime. As we
mature, social influences may modify our actions and how we communicate but the
basic motivations remain. Let me elucidate.
You
may have just received an invitation to modify your lifestyle from the Infernal
Revenue Service, yet when you pass an acquaintance you smile broadly and when
asked, “ how are things going”?, you reply, “Great, everything is good”.
But
if that acquaintance happened to be a guy like the Guru, he would have noticed
that just before you saw him your chin was resting against your chest, your
shoulders were drooping and your usually laid back greeting was just a
little too enthusiastic. The Guru would know that in spite of what you said,
everything was NOT good and that something troubling was on your mind.
Online,
we lose the benefit of the visual and the verbal takes precedence but the song
remains the same.
There
are a lot of great books on sales and salesmanship, and over the duration of
the Ask The SEO Guru’s lifespan, I’m sure he’ll be discussing and recommending
several, ( How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie is a
classic that will never cease to deliver! There is a good reason it stays on
the top of every salesman’s recommended reading list. READ IT! http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671723650),
but there are two books that the Guru would recommend today that you won’t find
a lot of SEO,( or sales), gurus recommending. It has more to do with the
WHY’s people do the things they do than the HOW’s of what to do when they do it.
Both
of these books are old. One I read when it first came out and the other I just
recently ran across. I recommend them today because they are old schoolius
maximus and I believe when it comes to the sales of technology products and/or
online services old school sales concepts coupled with online proficiency is an
extremely powerful tool.
Of
course the internet is changing everything and I’m sure it is going to even
alter basic human behavior at a formative level, BUT, the vast majority of
people in a position to be a prospect of yours was born before 1990 and that
means that old school, (pre-web), psychology will still be the driving force
behind their personalities. THAT is what makes that combination of old school
sales techniques and tech savvy so powerful.
#1. Power – How to Get it and How to
Use It by Michael Korda (1975)
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=5267117&matches=45&author=Korda%2C+Michael&browse=1&cm_re=works*listing*title
Out
of print and hard to get but it dramatically changed the Guru’s life and has
made him far more money than the meager cost of the book. I had read several psychology
books and papers prior to this one and pretty much knew we were all neurotic to
say the least, but this book taught me how to see what motivated the decision
makers in a company. Not all decisions come from the CEO, and even the
ones that do usually come only after a decision has been made by someone else.
There
is an entire world of mental wrangling involved in virtually every aspect of
this process and if you don’t understand the different motivations of those who
have power compared to those who want it and those who only THINK they have it,
you are going to be asking yourself what went wrong with your sales approach A
LOT!
The
second recommended reading for today is:
#2. Games People Play: The Basic
Handbook of Transactional Analysis. by Eric Berne (1964)
http://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-Transactional-Analysis/dp/0345410033
This
one is a little cerebral for my tastes BUT it is short and concise, which is
good because your time should be spent learning a little, then selling a lot,
learning a little more, then selling a LOT more. The best thing is it
identifies specific actions and statements and explains the true motivation
behind them.
Ok,
so what we hope happens is that the prospect says, “well, you’ve done a great
job of explaining the benefits of your service to me and you have overcome
every objection I had so, let’s write it up”! And believe it or not, it
does happen like that sometimes but not enough you could live off of it.
Far
more often, if you have covered the preliminaries and asked your qualifying
questions to discover the prospects primary objections and you have
overcame those, your prospect is likely very close to being sold on you and
your offer and he will tell you but in so many words.
He
will have a few,(usually only one and usually minor), questions that tell you
it is time to ask for the deal. When you hear these questions, answer
them and c lose.
Here is The Secret
The
secret to being able to identify closing questions compared to the prospect
merely voicing a concern or objection is ----- it will be a question he has
already addressed.
This
is the concept that you can easily learn and apply to let you know when your
prospect is ready to make a decision. There are almost as many variations of
closing questions as there are prospects and it would be silly for me to try to
give you every possible variation. It makes much more sense for me to give you
the easy to get concept and then you can apply it to the specific questions as
you get them.
So
what I mean by, “it will be a question he has already addressed,” is that
somewhere early in the conversation, (usually within the first 30 seconds of
the prospect speaking), a comment was made that tips you to the prospect’s primary
concern.
I’m
going to give you a broad example even though I hesitate because it is
important that you remember not to look for the exact phrase being repeated but
rather you get the general idea and recognize the theme of the context.
The
prospect may say to you:
We’ve
been working with another SEO and waiting over 6 MONTHS, (he’s telling
you time is a major objection), and we’ve got NOTHING! (he’s telling you
he feels like he’s been ripped off. The trust objection).
So
if you’ve been listening, you would know that in your presentation you want to
be sure to point out how you will conduct a thorough review, (feature), so that
you don’t waste time and he can see results fast, (benefit that overcomes the
time objection). And that seeing your regular reports, (feature), lets him know
what you are focusing on but it’s the results he can see, (benefit that
overcomes the trust objection because you can’t deny results), that make it a
win-win.
From
here the conversation may take several minutes, (personally, I’ve never been
good at those aluminum siding kind of sales presentations that take
hours. I’m like the impatient fisherman. If I haven’t caught anything in
about 10 minutes, I’m ready to pack up the tackle and beer and go
somewhere else.), and you may talk about all kinds of things but as soon as
your prospect says something like:
so
how long before we see results
OR
how
often do you send the reports
DING
DING DING DING DING
THAT
is your closing question. You know because you have already answered those questions
and he is asking because you have removed all the other minor objections,
you’ve covered the obligatory stuff that he already knew, he likes you and he
likes your offer and he is telling you he is ready for you to ask for a
decision.
I
want to point out two things here.
#1.
I know I keep repeating myself here but it’s because it is important.
This is a concept and not a procedure. If you tell yourself you didn’t get the
sale because the prospect never said what the Guru said he would say, then you
don’t get it and I’d advise you not to throw out those classifieds because
you’re going to be needing another job pretty soon.
#2.
When a prospect asks a closing question, it doesn’t always mean he’s ready to
make the decision to sign on the dotted line. BUT, it does mean he’s ready to
make a decision. It may just be that he’s ready to make the decision to ask
another closing question. That is a good thing because as long as you’re not
hearing “no”, you’re moving in the right direction.
In
my next issue, I’ll give you some tips that close the deal. I’ll give you some
specific examples but more importantly I’ll give you the concepts that explain
why it works. That will conclude this series on how to become the worlds’
greatest SEO salesman and we’ll get back to more SEO centric stuff.
I
know that I make it all sound so easy but that is only because it is. There are
a million little intricacies that come into play in virtually every sales
situation. That is what makes it interesting, exciting and fun. And while every
person and every situation is unique the game is always the same.
In
case you’re wondering why I’m telling you all my sales secrets, it’s because I
WANT to make selling tech services easy for you because I want you to sell more
and hire me as your outsourced staff. I went to India to build an outsourcing
company because after 11 years in the trenches I know that for almost every shot
you get to secure another paying client there are a lot of services the client needs
but you either don’t have the resources or the inclination to provide them because
it is a pain in the ass. BELIEVE me I understand.
The Hard Part Of SEO
The
hard part of SEO is not getting the clients. In my 35 + years of sales, I have
never seen a stronger market more ready to buy than the market for online
promotional services. Selling SEO is not the hard part. Having the
resources to provide all the pieces needed to provide the most value to the
client is.
I
know from experience that a LOT of you reading this now have lost sales or at
least potential income the client was happy to spend because you lacked the
resources to actually provide all the services you knew the client needed.
Being
in the trenches everyday for 11 years,I know what it takes to recruit, train,
supply, manage and pay enough people to be in a position to offer a wide range
of services like design, copy writing, press release distribution, social media
promotion, link acquisition, custom scripting, database design, custom
enterprise solutions, etc, etc, etc. Each of these things could be a deal
breaker and in today’s market you need to be able to offer these types of
services with confidence or too many times you will either provide poor
quality, (which could cost you more than just money. It could cost you your
reputation), or have to let the prospect seek out your competitor. I can
help.
We
are now at 18 full time employees in India our American copywriter! We now have
6 in the SEO department, 1 full time designer, 2 customer service reps, 2
.asp developers, 6 php coders and a managing director. And we’re growing. I’ll
be back In Ahmedabad for another two month stay at the end of this month and we
will be adding a java department.
We
are all good at one or more of those things or we wouldn’t be in this business.
BUT, now you can be good at all of them and stop losing sales or leaving money
on the table by making my staff your staff. I WANT to help you to sell with
confidence by offering the resources you need at a price that can make you and
your clients money. A win-win-win.
I
can’t be all things to all people and there is no guarantee that we’ll be a
good fit, but I can guarantee that if we are a good fit, I’ll show you how to
sell more with less stress and give more value to your clients. If it
doesn’t work out all you’ve lost is the time it takes to email me and discuss
it. But consider this – what if I’m right?
Peace
Y’all
The
SEO Guru
Quit
sittin so close to that TV before you go blind!