Will Knowing Your Deal Trigger Earn You A Ferrari In 3 Years?
Tales of super sharp sales-ship abound online. Sadly far too many involve the kinds of frauducts from the Internet Marketing cancer. Which gleefully snatches cash from home laptop get-rich-quick hoodwinked hopefuls.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see BBC News promote a perhaps more real sample. It was as backstory to an epos provider. Under the shameless clickbait headline, The salesman who could afford a Ferrari when he was 24.
His key change from flailing battery-hen mobile phone corporate contract sobbing cold caller to supercar owner is recounted;
It dawned on him that the reason no-one was interested was because their existing contracts weren’t due for renewal.
So instead of trying to sell phones in the first instance, he would instead ask companies when their current contracts were due to run out.
He’d write this down, and soon built up a long list of forthcoming renewal dates.
Phoning back at a time when firms were indeed looking to upgrade their handsets, [he] says he started to win order after order.
“I was 500th out of 500 members of staff on the sales list, then all of sudden I was 200th, then 50th, then number one”.
If only it were that straightforward. It’s difficult for any successful seller to take this at face value. How would such a simple vital opportunity opener be shrouded from view?
What were management doing? How did knowledge of this supposedly stellar tip not flood across the sales floor? How many deals ever came home when this timing was not present?
Even more startling, what margin must have been made to enable such a vehicle to be bought? Precisely at a time when corporate packages ceased in preference of personal purchase.
Still, let’s not allow facts to spoil a sales truth.
I once sat in an East Coast office whilst an American cold called Californians. He solely sought when a particular type of project may be next due. An enterprise ideally improved with wares he plugged.
In the room I suggested that by the time any such began it’d be too late already. Asking when they’d start would produce a never nearing horizon. And why would anyeone volunteer potential sensitive intel to a stranger.
He, like our phone chap above, was on the right lines. Yet I felt could get more specific. Tighten up his rather vague questioning. Remove the tendency to be left dangling in open-ended false hope.
A contract renewal date is a hard piece of data. The actual assessment of which can be (is) done a long way in advance. They seldom arrive unannounced. Even when they do seem to creep up, it’s amazing how easily they can be slightly extended. Kicking the can down the road.
Yet when it dawns a decision must be made.
In all probability, the solution you sell encounters similar trammels.
Find that trigger. Drill into it. Get to spot it the day you suspects do. And maybe drive away your own “Ferrari” in three years.