Opening a conversation
Continuing our new series of sales tips, Bob Apollo discusses five things to bear in mind when preparing for your next significant sales conversation.
How we plan and prepare for a sales conversation has a huge impact on the outcome.
Preparation:
- Everyone must benefit – Every participant must go away from the conversation thinking “that was a valuable use of my time”.
- Put yourself in your audience’s shoes – This requires that we ask each person what they want to get out of the conversation.
- Agree the objective(s) – Based on what we’ve been told, we then need to summarise and agree the overall objective(s).
- Agree the agenda and timeframe – We then need to agree the agenda, how much time is available, and how that time will be spent.
- Provisional next step – Finally, and before entering the core of the conversation, we need to pre-agree what will happen next after this conversation if the agreed objectives are achieved.
