Perfect Pitch: "The hell you're in right now...."

When you engage a new client during the earliest stages of a business relationship, you’re not doing this just for the experience of human bonding. This is a business connection. It will be wonderful if your new client eventually develops into a lifelong friend, but that’s not something you can focus on now. Let’s be frank. For the time being it’s about money. You want to make money for yourself, and you want to that you can make money for your news client as well. That’s how things can move forward.

Toward that end, you’ll want to ask your client some qualifying questions to make sure there’s a possibility for a productive and profitable relationship. Qualifying questions are a well-established element in emergent business relationships and many of the most common ones haven’t changed since at least the middle of the 20^th century.

Here’s a typical qualifying question: “Would you like some information about our company and what we do?”

Here’s another one: "If you felt that our program could help your company improve efficiency, reduce overhead and at the same time, improve quality, is this something that you would want to know more about?" This tries to be more proactive, but is it really just more long-winded?

A long-standing sales myth has grown up around these types of questions. The myth is that they enable salespeople to build rapport with the prospects they encounter on the phone or in person. They’re also supposed to provide valuable tactical information.

But they don’t. Questions like those turn potential clients off and shut down lines of communication. If you doubt this, ask yourself how you would respond to those questions from someone who had just called you on the telephone or had come in to meet you for the first time.

Would you open up? Would you say: “Yes, please share as much information as possible about your company, because I can’t wait to hear it?”

Would you say: “I’m so glad you’re here? I was hoping a total stranger would get in touch with me this morning to discuss the one aspect of my current arrangement that I would change. It’s shipping. We have a real problem with on-time delivery from our current vendor.”

No, you wouldn’t say any of those things. You’d probably say something neutral or vaguely polite – or, if you were having a hard day, you might even end the conversation then and there. But you wouldn’t be likely to share all the information about your situation that you knew and that the salesperson doesn’t know.

That’s because these kinds of elaborate “qualifying” questions are not really based on what the buyer wants. They’re based on what you want, which is to find out if this guy is worth your time and, if so, how can you get him to keep talking. But clients aren’t interested in doing those things for you. They’re interested in their own situation.

So how do you connect yourself with that interest? How do you find out what the client really needs, and also make yourself indispensable to fulfilling those needs?

Here’s what you say. Whether these will be your exact words will be is up to you, but this is the essence of what you want to get across to a potential client as soon as possible.

First you say, “I can show you how to get into heaven, but that’s not the best thing I can do for you.”

Then you say, “Even better than showing you how you can get into heaven tomorrow, I can show you how to get out of the hell you’re in right now.”

Does that sound radical? I hope so. I’ll have more to say about this in my next post.