Each time I interview a new person for a marketing position, I always ask them this question, “When selling, is it more important to you to make someone happy, or is it more important to you to get their business?” If you haven’t done sales before, you may be surprised to learn this is not a trick question. I am specifically looking for one answer, “To get their business.” Yet after interviewing close to 100 marketers over the course of my career, I’ve only received the correct answer from one candidate – and he got the job!
You may be thinking, “What? But I want all of my customers to be happy.” I want all of my customers to be happy too, but the problem is, until you’ve got their business, they’re not your customer. They are getting their products or sevices from someone else, and if all your marketer or salesperson is worried about is making them happy (or worse yet – meeting a daily quota you’ve set), with the hope that they will get the person’s business down the road, you’ve probably got the wrong person leading the development strategy of acquiring new clients.
I have had to let more than one of our marketers go during my tenure as marketing director because they couldn’t get out of the habit of only being a professional visitor. They would eagerly bounce into business after business, dropping off brochures and magnets, sometimes taking goodies, but they failed to meet with the decision makers or to truly ask for and bring in new business.
If your marketer is satisfied with simply leaving a brochure and goodies at the front desk and counting a 2 minute in-and-out sales call as successful for the day, you probably aren’t seeing a true return on investment for their salary. On the other hand, if they are satisfied spending 20-30 minutes in a business learning the life story of a potential client, but they never apply what they’ve learned to get someone to say, “Yes, I’ll give you a chance,” you probably also won’t be seeing a good return on your investment in your marketer.
A great marketer, like any salesperson, has the mindset of walking into each business with one goal – to build the relationship and ASK FOR the business. If they don’t get the commitment, or they can’t get past the gatekeeper, they don’t stop there. They go back and strategize on what they can do different and how they can approach the person more successfully the next time.
Top 3 Signs You Might Be a Professional Visitor
- You continually visit clients you already do business with, instead of drumming up new business.
- You leave each meeting uncertain if the person will utilize your services because you failed to ask them to use you – and get feedback on their response.
- You continually talk about superficial things, but you only briefly talk about the services you offer and how they can help the potential customer (typically because you haven’t asked the customer the right questions to be able to show how you can help them).
Top 3 Signs Your Key Performance Indicators & Critical Drivers are Wrong
- You are more concerned with meeting a quota of daily business visits instead of tracking the number of new leads, where they are at in the pipeline, and the number of new companies signed each week/month/quarter/year.
- You are more concerned with the number of community events you attend instead of the number of new leads you obtained from those events.
- You track client numbers and trends, but you don’t take time each week/month/quarter/year to analyze what you can do differently to improve those numbers, and then implement the things you’ve strategized.
So ask yourself, or your marketers, “Did I hire (or am I) a professional visitor or a professional marketer/salesperson?” If the answer is not the one you’re hoping for, then provide sales training to your team. Most often, a person is a professional visitor because they are afraid to ask the harder questions – usually that fear steams from a fear of rejection or a need to be liked.