It’s time for…Curiosity and…

It’s time for…Catching up

It’s that time of the year. Daylight savings time has begun, the grass is showing a bit of green, and Uncle Sam is looking for some of yours come April 15. And that means it’s time to round up those missing receipts for all those tax-deductible items like the repairs on the van, tools and any equipment you purchased, and that record of the miles you drove for business, to name just a few.

It’s also time to begin thinking about your seasonal customers and getting them restocked and un-mothballed for the start of their season. Likewise it’s also time to consider what you need to do to either stay on track for your budgeted new sales – and if you’re behind the curve, deciding what’s necessary to make the course correction to get back on track.

And lastly, it’s time to think about all your current customers and where you need to shore up any weaknesses that might expose you to competition…Like that bistro who really isn’t all that thrilled with the glasses you’re producing, or the nursing home whose linens are a bit less white and bright than they’d like – and that you know you can deliver.

Yep. It’s that time and it’ll be later than that in a blink of our eye if we don‘t start now.

Curiosity and …Establishing Interest

Even as kindergarteners we understood that if we wanted to make a new friend, starting off on the wrong foot was a bad idea. And in our grown-up world nothing has changed in that respect either.

But avoiding the negative isn’t nearly enough when it come to making a new sale. There to better our chance for success we have to achieve a positive feeling right from the get-go.

That’s why that first step in selling (achieving favorable attention) is so important. If we can fashion that short opening statement or question well enough, we might just conjure up the thought in the prospects’ mind of … “If I listen, I might benefit”. If we can achieve that desirable state of mind early on, we may not be assured of making the sale, but we can be certain that they’ll listen.

Of course once we’ve aroused that curiosity, we have to be able to back it up. That means that our presentation has to directly exploit that idea and explain it so that the initial curiosity we created is transformed into real interest. And if we achieve that step, then the sale may just be in hand.

Next up: Smiling and success