Sales - Making Prospecting a Habit

Sales, Chinese Food, and Visualisation

It’s dinner time and you are famished. You weren’t hungry for Chinese food until someone said the trigger words “Chinese food” and now you can’t get it out of your mind! So, with an intense craving that you didn’t have 10 seconds ago, you pile into the car and head down to that new Asian hotspot everyone is talking about.

After being seated, the drinks order is placed and the menus opened quickly. Reading the food options and their creative descriptions, you are just as confused as everyone else at the table. What the heck is ‘Bang Bang Ji’ and ‘Dou Ban Yu’?

Just when you think you’re reading the names of Star Wars villain, the manager walks over with different menus: menus with pictures. Suddenly, the problem is solved. Interpretation of each food option is easier now that you can see what you are ordering.

Someone has done your thinking for you and helped you to visualise your choices.

Arriving home full of MSG, you flip the TV remote and catch the last few minutes of the game. The clock is ticking away when a timeout is called in the network breaks for a commercial. It’s an ad for a Nissan Maxima. ‘Vroom, vroom’ goes the sparkling car, zipping across the screen and coming to a screeching halt just as the announcer says, “Now you can get a Nissan Maxima for $249 a month. See your local dealer today.” Despite the fact that you are not in the market for a car, you think to yourself, “$249 a month? That’s not bad!” and your mind starts mentally replacing your perfectly good vehicle.

Someone has done your thinking for you and changed your thought process.

Both of these examples are demonstrations of a sales pitch where the selling party has done more than just spit out a description and a price. They’ve painted a picture using colours instead of a black and white description. They’ve helped the potential customer to visualise and in doing so, changed the conversation from, “Are you hungry?” to “Doesn’t this look delicious?” and from “Do you need a new car?” to “Imagine this bad boy in your driveway”. The result is the desired action: a purchase.

The work of a graphic arts profession may as well be referred to as that of a ‘visual’ arts professional, since the result of our work is a sight to behold – if the customer can’t visualise the outcome, we are confusing in the same way ‘Bang Bang Ji’ reads on a menu.

We need to do our customers’ thinking for them. We need to change the conversation.

For example, let’s say your prospecting efforts are rewarded and finally, the customer picks up the phone and says the magic word: “Hello?” Quickly getting over your astonishment, you state the purpose of your call: To help the company with their marketing through the various solutions your company offers. But your excitement is short-lived as the client responds, “We don’t have the money for marketing at this time. Thank you for calling.” Click! All that hard work, and nothing to show for it.

But let’s back up and try again…

What if you had prefaced the sales pitch with a ‘menu’ of sorts? Let’s suppose you put a flyer together that listed three different price points: $499, $999, and $1999. Each dollar amount represented the cost of a different combination of printing products. $499 might buy 100 colour copies, five posters, and a banner. For $999, the customer could add 500 postcards and the cost of postage. The $1999 option might include things like promotional products, presentation folders, and five hours of design time.

If the flyer were put together in such a way that the recipient could see a photo showing the contents of each price point, not only is a follow-up phone call more likely to be answered, but the subsequent conversation would be less about “We don’t need marketing” and more about “I like the middle option, but can I make changes?” Now you are in the desired conversation (as discussed in a previous article entitled “Because it matters”)

What if you created some content and posted it on your website? Case studies in the form of YouTube videos could be included, describing how you helped with a product launch. How about a white paper entitled, “Five money-wasting mistakes companies make at trade shows”? Incoming calls from prospects who had viewed this material instantly become top-tiered opportunities because they identified you as the solution to a problem they are having. You did their thinking for them.

One of the most useless and frustrating answers to the question, “Can you describe what you’re looking for?” is this: “I don’t know what it looks like but I’ll know it when I see it.” What exactly does one do with that information? “Okay, I’ll tell you what I would do. I would spend hours creating multiple solutions and throw them all against the wall. You let me know if any of these ideas stick. Deal?” The only thing that people know for sure is their current business need and the solution presently in place.

Salespeople would be well advised to carry with them a portfolio of samples and stories. In addition to bringing a pad of paper and pen to sales calls, a three ring binder containing print solutions gives the rep a chance to be anecdotal and to paint a picture for the prospective customer.

The concept to ‘Do your customers thinking for them’ is particularly true when it comes to digital printing. Contrary to what the vendors once told us, there is no untapped market. No one was waiting for digital to be discovered and lines did not form out the door moments after the installation of equipment that for print to occur from an electronic file. What it took was education and visual prompts.

Another way to get this thinking to work in your favour is to help your ‘third party sales force’ to conceptualise and sell what you offer. For example, suppose you wanted to sell to event planners, an interesting vertical market that buys a fair amount of printed material. Simply calling to introduce yourself can only come across as, “I print the kind of things that you provide your customers. Can I give you a price?” Again, the wrong conversation results. But what if you sent pictures of ideas that they can bring to their customers? By doing their thinking for them, you are aiding in the sale and helping the end-user to see something that they otherwise may never have visualised on their own. This approach works for ad agencies as well.

The next time you are sitting at home watching television and ad comes on for a car or truck, take stock of the emotion that hits you during those last five seconds when a lease price is shown on screen. Unless you are already in the market for a vehicle, you may have been annoyed to see an interrupting your viewing. But in that last segment of the ad, you are likely to have the exact kind of reaction that was intended by marketing - desire.

You can create desire of your own, but you will need to start talking in colours!