Use a Prospect Logbook to Close Deals

Habe in den BDM News 10/2006 von Paul DiModica eine interessante Idee zum Thema “Der Kunde liefert die besten Argumente” gefunden, das sogenannte Prospect-Logbook:

… One sales technique to increase your sales communication success is called a Prospect Communication Logbook. When speaking with prospects and their team members, they often make specific declarations during your discovery on how your product or service offering can help their business. It is not uncommon for prospects to say, “If this goes well, we could drop our overhead costs 12%” or “I think this project is going to help us increase our revenue.”

These statements are key sales tools that you can use to close more deals. But if you do not document who said them and when, they lose their impact during your sales closing process as being more hearsay than business facts.

To use client buying statements as sales tools, always document the person’s name and title, as well as the date and time of the statement in a Prospect Communication Logbook. As long as prospect team members have not said the information supplied to you is confidential between you and them, you should use these statements as specific selling tools during your sales cycle.

When developing your prospect’s proposal, you should always include a succinct, conclusion page on why the prospect should buy from you. Inside this conclusion page, insert statements made by the buying team documented in your Prospect Communication Logbook including the dates, times and comments that were made. This approach communicates a first party (the prospect themselves) confirmation of your offering’s value and is a value forward selling method that turns their observations into a 3-dimensional value perception that they will believe.

Why does this work?

Often management teams and their supporting staff describe cost justifications and value acceptance during their discovery period to buy. But if you as a salesperson cannot specifically annotate exactly who said what and when it was said, it becomes wasted buying testimonials. By inserting this amount of detail in your conclusions page, it makes it difficult for prospects to argue with their own team’s conclusions.

A lead into this section of your conclusion page would start like this:

“During our conversations and discovery with your team, the following comments were made to us including:

- Ringo Smith on October 1st said, “If this goes well we could drop our overhead costs 12%”.
- John Smith on October 5th said, “I think this project is going to help us increase our revenue.”
By listing 7-10 comments made by the buying managers and their supporting team, you are allowing them to sell themselves through their own words in your conclusion. …

Ich finde das ist eine gute inhaltliche Ergänzung für die von uns propagierte “Warum wir?” Schlussseite in Ihren Angeboten.
Ich meine allerdings, drei Zitate genügen.

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