Sales

4 Tips for Better Value-Added Sales Calls

January 15, 2014

Are your sales calls truly worth your customer’s precious time? Sales trainer Dave Kahle shares four tips for making sure your calls are net-gains that meet your customers’ expectations and earn their respect.

“My customers seem to have less time available for me than before. They are harder to see, and when I do get in front of them, they often seem rushed or preoccupied. What can I do about this?”
Sound familiar? It’s a question that I am hearing more and more often. I’m sure you’ve had it run through your mind a few times.
No matter what you sell, it is likely that your customer has more to do and less time to do it in than ever before. As a result, there is just not enough time in the day to get everything done, and some things have to go. A long, leisurely conversation with a sales person is often one of the first things on the chopping block.

The Rules for Sales Interactions Are Changing

I believe we are at the beginning of a new trend — a trend with awesome implications for sales people. It used to be that being viewed as a “value-added” vendor was a desirable position to occupy in the customer’s mind. That meant that the product or service you represented brought your customer more value for their money than the offerings of your competitors. It was why they did business with you.
Notice that the focus was on the product or service you represented. The process involved — the sales calls you made on the customer, and the discussions you had with him or her — were simply viewed as a means to an end. It was what both of you did in order to get to the exchange of money for your value-added offerings.
Those were the rules, and customers and sales people understood them. These rules of sales interactions are deeply ingrained — so deeply, in fact, that many of us cannot conceive of the profession of sales being done any other way. It is what we know, and how we have made our living.
But the rules are changing. We are at the beginning of a new paradigm for the field salesperson. The new paradigm is this: Today, not only must your product or service bring value to the customer, the time you spend with the customer as a salesperson must bring value, as well.
In other words, the sales process itself must bring value to your customer. Your customer must gain something from every sales call. He or she must see a reason for spending time with you — a payback for the time they invest.

How Much is Your Customer’s Time Worth? Is Your Sales Call an Equal (or Greater) Exchange in Value?

Of course you have your own agenda and objectives for the sales call. You know what value you want to gain from the meeting with your customer. But what about your customer? What is he or she going to gain from investing that precious 30-45 minutes with you? In today’s always on and “do more with less” world, your sales call, itself, must bring the customer some value.

Are you blowing it with your buyers?

doh 3 Keys for Overcoming Sales Resistance


Here’s a way to visualize this emerging new rule:
Suppose you were to make a routine sales call on a regular customer. At the end of the call you filled out an invoice, handed it to him and said, “Okay, John, that will be $150.00 for my time.” In other words, you charge him for the value he received by talking with you. Would he pay your bill? Would he have derived enough value from the time he spent with you so that he would gladly pay you for it?
Yes, that illustration may seem a bit over the edge. Most industries are not at the point — yet — where they will charge for sales calls. But keep in mind when you ask for your customer’s time, you are asking for something very limited and very precious. If you take 30 minutes of his day, he has invested 6.25% of his workday in you. He has a thousand other things he could have done in that time. What did he get for that investment with you?
The point is this: If you are going to be successful in the Information Age economy, you must focus on bringing something of value to your customers every time you ask them to invest their time in you. You must view every sales call through the perspective of the value you can bring to your customers. A sales call is no longer just about the objectives that you want to achieve, it is also about the objectives your customer wants to achieve. It’s as if you present that $150.00 bill at the end of every sales call and expect to be paid.

4 Tips for Transitioning to Better Value-Added Sales Calls

So, how can you adjust to this new standard? Here are some proven practices that will help you make the transition:

1) Understand your customer’s situation as thoroughly as possible before you take his or her time

Your customer expects you to know something about his business, his customers, his processes, and his problems before you have a conversation. That means you must spend more time before a sales call gathering information about that customer. Gather useful information from the customer’s website, ask around your company to see what other colleagues might know about the account. If you don’t know that the customer is qualified and worth your time, you will be wasting his.

2) Think through the sales call from your customer’s perspective

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What are the big priorities she has to deal with today on top of taking the time to talk with you? What problems is she facing, what opportunities? How can you bring her something that will simplify her job, help her overcome her problems, or reduce the amount of time she spends on your project?
This is a simple little technique that can make a huge difference in your performance. Before every sales call, stop and think about this question: What will the customer gain from the time he/she spends with me? If you can’t articulate some gain for the customer, consider not making the sales call.

3) Prepare something of potential value for every call

Try to bring something to every sales call that your customer will find valuable. This can, of course, be your latest and greatest product or service, providing that it really would help them. Or it may be an idea that you have found for a change in their processes, or a new way to implement something they have purchased from you in the past. Maybe it’s a copy of an article that you thought might help them. It can even be as simple as a good question you share with them that gets them thinking about their business in a different way.
This is a long-range strategy. After a few such calls, your customer will come to respect you and look forward to your calls, knowing that you’re not there just to work your own agenda, but rather he will come to expect to gain something from your sales calls. Don’t expect an immediate payback, but stick to it for the long haul and you will start finding it easier to make appointments and get time with your customers.
If you allow this principle to guide you, you’ll recognize that there is another side to the coin. If you have nothing to leave the customer that will be of value to that customer, you probably shouldn’t make the sales call. Don’t take his time.

4) Be a resource

One of my clients suggested that salespeople need to be the “customer’s search engine.” I couldn’t agree more. Strive to be the customer’s most trusted and most knowledgeable resource, their source of information, not just about your product, but about the whole category of things that you sell, their applications, and their advantages and problems.
Share information that is bigger than just the product or service that you sell. If you do, then your customer will look forward to your calls and view them as valuable.
I realize that this is a change in thinking for a lot of sales reps. But it’s a change that is here, whether you want to make it or not. Your choice is to be a leader and thus gain a significant edge over your competition, or wait until the rest of the market adapts and leaves you behind. The choice is yours.
Editor’s note: A version of this guest post from Dave Kahle, President of the DaCo Corporation, originally appeared on his blog as “One of the Emerging New Rules for Sales: The Value-Added Sales Call”.

Image by Raindog808

President

<strong>Dave Kahle</strong> has trained tens of thousands of distributor and B2B sales people and sales managers to be more effective in the 21st Century economy. Has authored ten books, including Question Your Way to Sales Success and 11 Secrets of Time Management for Salespeople and his latest, How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime. His books have been translated into eight languages, and are available in over 20 countries. He is also the President of <a href="http://www.dacocorp.com/">DaCo Corporation</a>.