204: Virtual Selling - We Need A New Questioning Approach (Part Three)

<p>One of the sad things about salespeople is they mostly have no idea what they are doing.  So we transfer that poor understanding of the basics to the online world and then wonder why they are not succeeding.  Kata is a Japanese word to describe a set way of doing things.  In Karate we learn kata and they must be done in the exact same way, every time.  These are best practice modes and the idea is to perfect them.  Sales also has kata, but few salespeople learn them, let alone try to perfect them.  The online world requires new kata built on top of the old kata. You can’t move to the second level, until you have mastered the first level.</p> <p> </p> <p>For those in the minority in sales, who actually enquired about what the client needs, this is only the start.  Again, sadly for many, this is the end of their approach and they don’t know how to go further.  They enquire about what the client needs and then they spend the rest of the meeting time with the buyer, trying to convince them to buy their solution.  They hammer the buyer with slides brimming with information.  The problem with this approach, although much better than the pitchfest quicksand most other salespeople wallow in, is that you become a transactional element in the buyer’s world.</p> <p> </p> <p>Farming should be 80% of the effort and the other 20% spent on hunting for new clients.  Let’s be clear, we are not looking for a sale.  This is a critical point that many salespeople miss.  We are not looking for a sale, because we are looking for a resale. As much as we love our clients and take super good care of them, there will be reasons why they drop out and so must be replaced.  This is why we need to hunt.  In Japan, there are few salespeople who can be successful hunters.  In the online world this problem is really exacerbated. The upshot is you don’t have a big supply of talent to do hunting and this will make it difficult to grow your business. Better to have lots of farmers, who are in good supply and only depend on hunters for 20% of you