7
Preliminaries:
Opening the Call
In this chapter I want to examine Preliminaries more closely. To be honest, the Huthwaite research team didn’t find the Preliminaries stage of the call very exciting when compared with the central areas of Investigating and Demonstrating Capability. Perhaps this is our personal bias. At any rate, it meant that we did much less research about this stage than about the other three (Figure 7.1). Nevertheless, even the limited data we did collect showed that successful ways of opening the call in a small sale are different from those which work best as the size of the sale increases.
Figure 7.1. Preliminaries: the introductory or warming-up stage of the call.
How important is the warming-up stage of the call? In our research on Preliminaries we sought the answers to a number of questions, including these:
Is it true that the first impressions made in a sales call are crucial to its success?
Do the openings that work in smaller sales work equally well in larger ones?
Does one particular way work better than others to open a call?
Before examining these questions, I should note that in discussing Preliminaries in the larger sale, this chapter simplifies the situation by talking mainly about first meetings with new customers. As we know, of course, most larger sales involve several calls and are likely to be with customers with whom we already have an established relationship; with some major-account groups I’ve known, less than 5 percent of their calls were first-time meetings with new customers. However, the factors that influence Preliminaries in the multi-call sale have not, to my knowledge, been researched by anyone. It seems likely that as the selling cycle progresses, whether with old or new customers, the impact of Preliminaries diminishes because the relationship has become well established. But nobody knows for sure, and I’d prefer to avoid speculation.
Consequently, I’m going to concentrate on areas where some data exists. Although we don’t have research about the impact of Preliminaries across a whole sales cycle, we do have information about opening first calls on new customers in both large and small sales.
First Impressions
There’s evidence to suggest that people notice far less in the early stages of an interaction than we may imagine. Many of the older books on selling emphasize the importance of a smart appearance and suggest that first impressions will make or break the sale, but most of the recent research suggests that initial appearances are far less important than these older writers have claimed. This is not to say that it pays to be scruffy or unpresentable. A reasonable standard of dress is probably sensible. But don’t believe that tiny details will make a big difference to your sales success in the Preliminaries stage of the sale. As we’ve seen, the far more important and more durable impressions are made during the Investigating stage.
In the early stages of an interaction with another person, we’re usually so overloaded with information that we either don’t notice, or we quickly forget, some quite obvious things. How often have you been introduced to someone and, 10 seconds later, forgotten his or her name? Why should you forget something as important as a name? Because your mind is full of other things, such as what you’re going to say next. You literally don’t have room for all the details available to you. Many potentially important impressions get crowded out in the opening minutes of a meeting.
It’s hard to get accurate data on the importance of first impressions, so let me give you my personal opinion from having watched the openings of many hundreds of sales calls. Over and over again I’ve seen successful calls that started in a nondescript or even awkward manner, and I’ve seen tremendously smooth openings lead nowhere. Over the years I’ve come to doubt the importance of first impressions during the Preliminary stage of the call. I no longer believe that first impressions can make or break your sales success in larger sales.
Now it may be that such things as dress or opening words do matter in very small sales. A friend of mine was raising money for a charity by door-to-door selling of Christmas cards. I believe him when he claims that there was a direct relationship between how his volunteers dressed and how much they sold. One day, he told me, he insisted that they all wear their best clothes. Sales went up by 20 percent. But don’t expect a smart suit and a good opening sentence to add 20 percent to your sales volume if you’re in major-account selling.
Conventional Openings
Since the 1920s, salespeople have been taught that there are two successful ways to open a call:
Relate to the buyer’s personal interests. The conventional sales wisdom says that if you can somehow tap into an area of personal interest, then you can form a relationship more quickly and the call will be more successful. For example, if your buyer has a photograph of children on the desk, discuss family interests; if there’s a golf trophy in the office, talk golf.
Make an opening benefit statement. Begin with some dramatic statement about the benefits your product can offer. For example, you might say, “Ms. Customer, in today’s marketplace productivity is the central concern of key executives like yourself—and our product will contribute to your productivity.”
Our evidence suggests that, while these two methods might be successful in smaller sales, there’s little to show that they help you when the sale is larger. Let’s review this evidence.
Relating to Personal Interests
In one of Huthwaite’s early studies, carried out in part of the Imperial Group, we were trying to establish whether salespeople who built good relationships would, as a result, make more sales. We found that sellers who dealt successfully with small retail outlets in rural areas seemed to rely heavily on personal factors in their selling. We measured the number of times each seller referred to some fact or incident related to the customer’s personal life. For example, the seller might ask, “How’s Ann enjoying her riding lessons?” or “Is Joe’s leg better yet?” In rural areas, where the size of sale was small, successful sellers used more of these personal references than did sellers who were less successful. So we could safely conclude that the old advice is right: If you can relate to points of personal interest, it will help your selling.
But it was a different story in the large urban stores, where the average sale was more than 5 times the size. We found no relationship between success and reference to personal issues. Therefore, it seemed that relating to the buyer’s personal interests might be a less effective technique in larger sales. But I wasn’t particularly satisfied with this study; for a number of technical reasons, we had to be cautious about our interpretation. For example, the rural salespeople generally had longer tenure and a lower turnover rate. This meant that they had been on the job longer and had thus had more opportunity to find out personal things about their customers. And the rural customers themselves were less busy than their large urban counterparts, so they had more time to talk.
Nevertheless, this study raised some questions. It was possibly true in the 1920s, when the theory was first put forward, that people bought from those they related to personally; friends did business with friends. But even in the mere 15 years I’ve been studying selling, I’ve noticed a distinct change. Fifteen years ago buyers would tell me, “I buy from Fred because I like him.” Now I’m much more likely to hear, “I like Fred, but I buy from his competition because they’re cheaper.” It seems that personal loyalty is no longer an adequate basis for doing business.
There’s another reason why it may not be successful to open the call around a personal point. I once worked with the central purchasing group of British Petroleum. On the wall of his office, one of the buyers had a picture of a racing yacht. “I keep it there because it improves my efficiency,” he told me. Puzzled, I asked him to explain. “I get salespeople coming in here every day,” he said, “wasting my time by talking about a lot of nonbusiness issues. Obviously they’re fishing for some personal area that will catch my interest. But I’m a busy professional purchaser—and I couldn’t get through the day if I wasted time on conversation that isn’t directly business-related. So I use the picture to increase my productivity. When new sales reps visit me for the first time, they usually say, ‘What a beautiful picture. You must really enjoy sailing.’ I reply, ‘I hate sailing. That picture’s there to remind me how much time gets wasted out on the water. Now what did you want to see me about?’”
Perhaps that’s an extreme case, but I’ve heard many other professional buyers complain about salespeople who try to open calls by cultivating areas of personal interest. The last thing a busy buyer wants is to tell the tenth seller of the day all about his last game of golf. The more senior the people you’re selling to, the more they feel their time is at a premium, and the more impatience you’re likely to generate if you dwell on nonbusiness areas. And there’s another reason. Many buyers become suspicious of people who begin by raising areas of personal interest. They feel that the seller’s motives aren’t genuine and that it’s an attempt to manipulate them.
I’m not saying that you should never begin a sales call by talking about a buyer’s personal interests. Sometimes, particularly if the buyer takes the lead in raising an area, it’s the right thing to do. And as we’ve seen, in smaller sales there can be an overall positive impact on sales success from raising personal issues. But as a general piece of advice, I suggest that you be careful not to overuse this method in larger sales.
The Opening Benefit Statement
Many sales-training programs teach that the most effective way to begin the call is to make an opening benefit statement to catch the buyer’s interest with some potential benefit of your product or service. So I might say, “Mr. Wilson, for a busy executive like yourself, I know that time is money. And I’m sure you waste a lot of time looking up telephone numbers and dialing calls. With the Rackham Autodialer I could help save some of that time for you.” If it’s well done, an opening benefit statement can sound positive and businesslike. But is it an effective way to open calls?
Although the idea of the opening benefit statement is quite old—I’ve been able to trace it back 30 years and it might even go back further than that—its great popularity as an opening was brought about by the Xerox Learning Systems program, Professional Selling Skills (PSS). This program was very widely used, and its developers claimed that research showed that calls were more likely to be successful if they started this way—using, as they called it, an Initial Benefit Statement. I haven’t seen the detailed research, so I can’t comment on its validity. But I do know that the investigation on which the program was based took place in the pharmaceutical industry—where the average call length was a mere 6 minutes. If you’ve only 6 minutes of buyer time, then I could certainly see why you would need a punchy way to get straight into the substance of your call.
But would the same be true in larger sales, where the average individual call length is 40 minutes? Huthwaite set out to investigate this. We watched just over 300 calls, noting whether or not the seller used an opening benefit statement. Then, using the procedure described in Chapter 1, we divided the calls into those which succeeded and those which failed. If opening benefit statements made calls more successful, as the PSS program claimed, then we should expect to find that the calls which failed had fewer opening benefit statements than those which succeeded. This is not what we found. In our studies there was no relationship, one way or another, between the use of opening benefit statements and the success of the call.
Why should this useful-sounding method, the opening benefit statement, not be related to success in some way? We decided to look more closely.
What we found was this. The most effective salespeople we studied opened each call in a different way. Sometimes they might use an opening benefit statement, but frequently they would use some other starting point. Less effective people were the ones who tended to open each call in the same way. So those sellers who began every call with an opening benefit statement were likely to be less successful than those who just used the technique occasionally.
Larger sales mean multiple calls—often several on the same customer—so it’s particularly important not to use a standard opening more than once with the same person. I can recall how impressed I was with a salesperson from an office products company when he first called on me. He began with a classic opening benefit statement: “Mr. Rackham, you’re a busy executive and I’m sure you’re wondering whether it’s worth 15 minutes of your time to talk with me. But if, as a result of that 15 minutes, you could save your company several thousand dollars, I’m sure you’d agree that it would be time well spent.” So I gave him 15 minutes and was sufficiently impressed with his product to invite him back the following week to talk to us again. At the next meeting, with my office manager present, he began, “Mr. Rackham, I know you’re busy, but if I could use 15 minutes of your time to show you how I could save your company thousands of dollars,...” The very opening that had made such a positive impression the first time around now sounded mechanical and irritating.
There’s another reason why the opening benefit statement may be ineffective. Successful salespeople talk about their products or services late in the sales call, but we’ve seen that less successful people begin talking products and solutions very much earlier in the call. I remind you of this point here because it raises one of the dangers of using opening benefit statements. Take this simple example:
SELLER: (using opening benefit statement) Mr. Buzzard, we at Big Co know how important it is to produce professional-looking documents in a business like yours. That’s why we invented the Executype typewriter. Using a special new system, the Executype gives a far finer finish to your documents than you can get from conventional word processors.
BUYER: (asking the questions) Oh. Does it use a daisy wheel?
SELLER: (drawn into giving product details) No, it’s an ink-jet process.
BUYER: (still asking the questions) Ink jet? That must be very expensive, Ms. Simpson. What does it cost?
SELLER: (forced into a price issue early in the call) Er...well, it is a little more expensive than conventional methods, but it’s also got...
What’s happened here? By making an opening benefit statement, the seller has been trapped in two ways:
She’s been forced to talk about product details too early in the sale, before she’s had an opportunity to build value by using SPIN questions.
She’s allowed the buyer to ask the questions and has therefore allowed him to take control of the discussion.
Neither of these traps is irreversible. If she’s smart, Ms. Simpson will recover the call, take over the questioning role from the buyer, and turn attention away from the product and back toward the customer’s needs. But at the very least, this isn’t a good way to begin the sale. Yet I’ve personally seen many calls start this way because the seller used an opening benefit statement.
A Framework for Opening the Call
So far, much of this chapter has been negative—how not to handle the Preliminaries stage of the call. Let’s turn our attention to the positives. What does Huthwaite’s research recommend as the best way to open calls? Obviously, as I’ve suggested, variety is important. There isn’t one best opening technique. But there is a framework that successful people use.
Focusing on Your Objective
Let’s examine the objective of the Preliminaries stage of a call. What’s the purpose of your opening? At its very simplest, what you’re trying to do is to get the customer’s consent to move on to the next phase—the Investigating stage. You want customers to agree that it’s legitimate for you to ask them some questions. In order to do this, you must establish:
Why you’re there (but not by giving product details)
Your right to ask questions
Obviously there are many ways to open the call, but the common factor of most good openings is that they lead the customer to agree that you should ask questions. In doing so, good openings keep you from getting into detailed discussions of products or services. Early in the call you want to establish your role as the seeker of information and the buyer’s role as the giver.
Making Your Preliminaries Effective
Preliminaries, as we’ve seen, don’t play a crucial role in the larger sale. The most important test of whether you’re handling Preliminaries effectively is whether your customers are generally happy to move ahead and answer your questions. If so, then you’re probably handling this stage of the call acceptably. Don’t worry about appearing smooth and polished—some of the best salespeople we’ve studied have seemed nervous, self-conscious, or hesitant in the early minutes of the call. But do be concerned about these three points:
1. Get down to business quickly. Don’t dawdle. The Preliminaries stage is not the most productive part of the call for you or for the customer. A common mistake, particularly for inexperienced salespeople, is spending too long on pleasantries. As a result, the call runs short of time—the customer has to stop just when you’re getting to a critical point. If you find that your calls often run out of time, it’s worth asking yourself whether you’re getting down to business quickly enough. While there’s no exact measure for how long it should take to open a call, I’d be worried by anyone who consistently spent more than 20 percent of the call time on Preliminaries.
Don’t feel that you’ll offend customers by getting down to business quickly. A complaint I frequently hear from senior executives and professional buyers is that salespeople waste their time with idle chatter. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the complaint that a salesperson gets down to business too quickly.
2. Don’t talk about solutions too soon. One of the most common faults in selling is talking about your solutions and capabilities too early in the call. As we’ve seen in previous chapters, offering solutions too soon causes objections and greatly reduces the chances that the call will succeed. How often do you find yourself discussing your products, services, or solutions with the customer during the first half of the call? If it happens frequently, then it may be a sign that you’re not handling the Preliminaries effectively.
If, in your case, it’s usually the customer who is asking the questions and you’re in the role of providing facts and explanations, then it’s likely that you’ve not sufficiently established your role as a questioner during the Preliminaries. Ask yourself whether your call opening establishes that you should be asking the questions. If it doesn’t establish this, change the way you open calls so that the customer accepts that you’ll be asking some questions before you talk about the capabilities you can offer.
3. Concentrate on questions. Never forget that the Preliminaries aren’t the most important part of the call. Often, when I’ve been traveling with salespeople, I’ve noticed that they waste time before a call worrying about how they should open it when they could be using that time far more effectively to plan some questions instead.