Opinion: Connecting with clients on areas of shared personal interest is worth the effort.
Opinion: Connecting with clients on areas of shared personal interest is worth the effort.
What is engagement, or, better stated, how can you engage other people to become interested in you and your product or service?
Dale Carnegie, who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People, says by becoming genuinely interested in them. And he’s partially right.
The reality, and the secret of engagement is that both people must be mutually engaged and mutually interested, and both people must be intellectually stimulated and emotionally connected. Otherwise it’s just a conversation that will be forgotten, unless the salesperson is taking notes.
The key to deepening a sales conversation, or any conversation for that matter, is to connect emotionally. Favourite teams, kids, and university create emotion when spoken about, and the feelings and or situations are mutual.
The secret ingredient of engagement is emotion. Emotion is a key link to rapport, relaxation, and response. Emotion takes conversations deeper and more open. The desire to talk and reveal becomes more intense. It pushes you to trade stories and discover similarities.
To help you get the picture of why engagement and emotional engagement are so important, and how to start the process, I am offering two examples and scenarios.
1) Find the link
What do you have in common with your prospect? That will build rapport and lead you to a sale faster than anything.
Contrary to popular belief, ‘customer types’ don’t matter. My favourite type of customer is one who has a wallet with a credit card in it. Oh wait, that’s everybody.
Here’s the challenge. If you spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what type of person you’re dealing with, and then all of a sudden discover you both like model trains, or your kids both play soccer in the same competition, or you both went to the same university, or you both grew up in the same town, or you both like the same sports teams – you will most likely make the sale no matter what type of person he or she is.
The reality is, having personal things in common leads to a friendship, a relationship, and lots of sales – enthusiastic, emotional engagement at its core.
2. Find the memory and do something memorable
If you can find one thing about the other person, and do something creative and memorable about it, you can earn the appointment, build friendship, create smiles, and make a sale.
I was courting a big client in Milwaukee. Found out the guy liked chocolate and was a Green Bay Packer fan. The next day I sent him a Packer hat full of chocolate covered footballs. The next day I was hired. Was it a coincidence, luck or genuine engagement? I have no idea. I just continue to do the same type of thing as often as I can, and continue to make sales.
I was courting a big client in Seattle. Found out the guy was a baseball fan. Sent him a Louisville Slugger baseball bat with his name engraved on it. Needless to say I hit a home run (sorry for that).
To establish the ultimate long-term relationship and to be memorable in the service you perform, you need personal information about your prospect or customer; information that provides you with insight, understanding, and possible links. (And lots of sales.) The difference between making one sale and building a long-term relationship lies in your ability to get this information.
The more information you have, the better (and easier) it is to establish rapport, follow-up and have something to say, build the relationship, and gain enough comfort to make the first sale, and with consistent follow-through, many more.
If given a choice, people will buy from those they can relate to – people they like, people they trust. This stems from having things in common. If you have the right information, and use it to be memorable, you have a decided advantage. Or you can decide it’s too much work and you can make the sale without it.
That decision gives the advantage to someone else – your competitor.
Jeffrey Gitomer is an American author, professional speaker and business trainer, who writes and lectures internationally on sales, customer loyalty and personal development.
