Practice the three-foot rule for prospecting

Whether you have an inside sales team, outside sales team, inbound lead sales team or outbound lead-generating sales team, they all have one thing in common, they must have X number of conversations per day, week and month with new prospects to cover attrition and grow the business.

While inbound-marketing lead-generation programs are great if you have the resources to build them, many organizations also must maintain some kind of behavioral plan for their salespeople to sustain a high level of new prospect conversations. However, one source of new conversations that often goes overlooked is the three-foot rule.

The essence of this rule is to strike up a conversation with a person who is within three feet of you to see if there’s a possibility the person could be a prospect for what you sell. Obviously, most people will not be a prospect, but what if they are? In that case, your salespeople will want to be prepared with their 30-second commercial. Unfortunately, many salespeople mistakenly believe this commercial is about them, their business and their features and benefits.

Just as people tune out uninteresting commercials on the radio, they’ll do the same with one that has no connection to them. Therefore, savvy salespeople use a different approach for their 30-second commercial. It might start with a very quick one-sentence description of what they’re selling.

After the salesperson defines what his or her organization does (in one sentence or less), next up in the commercial is a list of two or three pain points that prospects for the salesperson’s company typically have. The big difference with this format and that of the typical salesperson is that the pain points are not about the salesperson’s company, they are about the prospect.

Back to our financial services organization, the pain point might sound something like this: “Many of our clients come to us because they’ve worked hard to their whole life and their retirement horizon is not far off, but when they look at their retirement account statements, they’re concerned they’re not going to have enough money to live a comfortable retirement and the prospect of working far into old age is downright depressing to them.”

Dissecting the pain point, there are some important pieces to include. The first is to share the pain point in third person. If you’ve just met someone, they may be reluctant to admit they have issues, but when you put it in third person, it’s easier for them to be more objective about the pain. Next, we put what is called a “stroke” on the front of the pain point. This is another way of helping the prospect protect their dignity by acknowledging that clients who struggle with these things are not ignorant, stupid or careless.

The next part of the pain point is the actual pain described. You’ll want to use emotionally charged adjectives when you describe the pain. As marketers have long known, people buy for emotional reasons, so use adjectives such as “frustrated,” “worried,” “mad” and “disappointed.” The last part of the pain point typically shares the negative impact of the pain on the prospect.

Once we’ve delivered two or three sample pains, we want to use a technique called a negative reverse to see if the things we shared warrant a continued conversation with the prospect. This form of question from a negative standpoint takes pressure off the prospect and allows them to truthfully answer yes or no as to whether or not they have one of the issues you shared and if they want to keep talking. A good example of this negative reverse could be “Linda, I have no idea if those issues are relevant in your world or not. Worth a few-minute conversation?”

The key thing to remember with the 30-second commercial — or any new-prospect conversation for that matter — is that the goal is not to sell the prospect (unless you are in a quick transaction one-call close, but rather to just have a nice and easy conversation that may or may not progress to the next step in your templated sales process.

Practice your 30-second commercial and the three-foot rule, and you’ll add bonus conversations to your prospecting behavioral plan.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. Contact him at 303-579-1939 or bbolak@sandler.com.

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