Moving straight to point, here are the 007 points that’ll help you become a great business professional at Impact.
- Speak with Confidence. Not arrogance. The client should perceive a Kind Confident Potential Partner in you. That’s why our business team is not called sales or business development. It is partnerships, who form long term mutually beneficial partnerships and work hard to add lasting value to their partners. Their success is our success.
2. Listen Intently. Listen to Just listen and learn. And identify their needs. Ask open-ended questions and honestly listen to them as if every word is a word of wisdom. The world lacks true listeners above all, and it is a great super-power if you are or become one of them.
3. Prepare Well. Everyone loves a person who comes in a meeting well on time, well prepared, and knows his company, product, industry and even about the relevant work of the client.
4. Speak Benefits. Not features. Most people are so married to their products that they love to share the features. Now features are only as good as the benefits or the value ad they provide to the customer or end user. One very important thing here is to either show a need, relay a fear to be addressed, or show them an incredible future after usage of the product and a not-so-one in its absence.
5. Build long-lasting relationships. Business is built on two fundamental principles. The first one is a continually evolving product experience which adds increasingly innovative value to the customer. Second is the relationship between the service giver and the client ie. service receiver. If every partnerships professional at Impact aims at creating, building and maintaining genuine long-lasting real relationships with their clients, half the battle is already won.
6. Care more for the Client than about the Cheque. Where most sales teams go wrong is in their focus on monthly goals and targets over meeting client expectations and experience. This results into month-end conversations, mindset biased by only individual goals & incentives and eventually work-stress. What is needed inturn, is a deep care for client experience and a focus and over-fulfilling their expectations. When you care for your clients, and work to solve their issues, they will automatically care back — the result of which will be more sales and stronger relationships.
7. Always be Closing. A fundamental truth in sales, is that in 90% of the times you will have to make the Ask. Not once, not twice, but an average of 5 times. No client, at the end of your meeting, is going to go like this — ‘We would love to do this. Here’s 5 Lacs for the product. Does that work, or would it cost more? Can we begin next week?’. On average, a salesperson has to make the Closure Ask 5 times to seal the deal. Where most people go wrong is that they focus and learn the sales pitch and presentation so well, that they consider its delivery a success in itself. In doing so, they devalue, or worse forget, to make the Closing Ask. Always make the Ask. It may be something like this — ‘So in case there are no other bottlenecks, let’s plan to launch early next month?’ ‘So the 3 next steps would be a… b… and c. getting the MoU and other partnership documents signed off. If all else is good to go, I’ll share these them by tonight. ‘ or ‘I recommend we launch in March, as the Dandi March dates go well with it. What do you think?’
These are some of the core fundamentals that I have personally tried to live with in all my business conversations. Now knowing them and living them are two completely different things. If you have read so far, you already Know them all. But living them would need a lot of practice and conscious work on your business-selves.
May the 007 principles live with you!
Cheers,
Ishan
