Sales Training Series #15

Insights from recent trainings

Welcome back to another Sales Training series!

These posts are intended to give you insight into what it’s like to train with me while providing actionable tips you can use in your day to day.

Note: I intentionally keep the descriptions of my clients vague for privacy reasons.

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What we’re covering today:

- Identifying missed opportunities to take control of the Frame

- Selling a software that implies the end user isn't great at their job

- Optimizing the sales process for digital consultancies

- How your Framing can elicit the opposite effect on your Linkedin profile

- Getting the prospect to open up to you in the first 30 seconds of a meeting

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The “Frame Grab”

In every sales meeting there are opportunities where the Frame is up for grabs.

I call these opportunities “Frame Grabs” .. The Frame is ripe for the taking.

And whoever wins the Frame Grab gains the upper hand in the meeting (control, status, etc.. assuming they don’t make too many mistakes and lose it later on!)

One opportunity for a Frame Grab is when the prospect asks you some variation of “Tell me more about…?”

A harmless question on the surface.. but underneath the surface lies all the potential mistakes you can make while trying to answer it.

The more open ended the back half of the question i.e “Tell me more about how your service works”, the more enticing it will be for you to over share, and the more likely you’ll say something that turns them off.

Another factor to consider is the earlier the prospect asks the seller this question in the meeting, the more detrimental it is for the seller to lose the Frame.

That’s because momentum is so easily gained and lost in the first few minutes of a meeting that it will create a snowball effect down the line making it harder to regain the upper hand later on.

“Tell me more about your product / service” early in the meeting before context is established is a different beast than “Tell me more about how the xyz feature will work in our environment”

Point is you can address all of this without losing Frame.

Sellers need to discover what the prospect has in their mind first when they thought to ask the question so the seller can then make sure the information given is relevant and within context.

Everybody wins when it’s done this way.

But sellers don’t do it.

9/10 salespeople answer the “Tell me more…” question before first understanding the motive / cause / intent of the question.

This creates a new Frame where either:

1. the prospect asks a barrage of follow up questions and the salesperson dutifully answers the question they think the prospect is asking instead of the real one

2. the prospect isn’t happy / satisfied with the answer and doesn’t voice their concerns leading to unresolved issues and negative sentiment (lowering the odds of a closed deal)

Take the case of a recent training I did with a Founder of a small tech company.

He is very passionate about his product (important context)

But his sales meetings can hardly be considered “sales meetings”.. They are more like 30 minute product pitches / demonstrations.

His enthusiasm, passion, and expertise shines through and the prospect eats it right up..

But then most of his calls end without clear next steps. And of course most of those deals go nowhere.

And the ones that do close take a lot of back and forth in order to close (draining his time & energy)

How you should answer the “Tell me more…?” questions depends on when the question is asked and why it is asked.

In this case, my client was often getting the question in 2 distinct parts of the meeting:

Frame Grab 1

*first 30 seconds of meeting*

Prospect: Yeah I heard about you guys through [mutual connection].. and thought the product was cool and was interested to learn more about how it could work for us

“Learn more about how it could work” falls under the “Tell me more…?” type of question

Frame Grab 2

*surrounding his solution usually mid-meeting or during the demonstration*

Prospect: The [technical feature] is interesting. Can you tell me more about it and how it actually works?

In both of these cases, the seller (client) answers with long winded answers that were sort of all over the place.

We even clocked one of his answers at ~70 seconds

I’m surprised the prospect wasn’t put to sleep by the end of it.

Here’s how we fixed it: