Five Keys to Drawing a Sales Circle

A fine line exists between convincing a prospect that you want her business and bugging her so much that you chase her away. Though you would like to do so, you can’t make the prospect’s decision for her. However, you can do the next best thing by providing her everything she needs to make an informed choice—which is to select your service.

An advertising maxim likens this process to forming a circle, which you can start, but only the prospect can complete. This applies to you first customer and your fiftieth one. Your job is to arm the prospect with key pieces of information and to make her feel comfortable in making a decision. If you’re using any phrases similar to the ones below, however, you’re trying to complete the circle for her:
- We’re the smart choice.
- Our service is simply the best.
- Our company is the worldwide leader in (fill in the blank)
- We’re so much better than our competition, it’s embarrassing.

Never tell the prospect how great you are. Rather, give her the facts to draw that conclusion. At the other extreme, there is danger in not going far enough, which means you haven’t provided sufficient information. As a result, the prospect can’t reach the conclusion you want because there is too much effort, too much left to question, and too little comfort with you or your service.

Your job is to draw a circle until it’s nearly complete and then hand the pencil to the prospect. The circle begins when the prospect realizes she has a need. The line arcs as you build her interest in your service and then reaches its logical conclusion when the prospect realizes the best way to address her need is by choosing you.

Five easy ways to form a circle
Forming a near circle requires a set of tools that you can draw on for each situation. Here are five basic ones:
1. Testimonials
As a new company, testimonials can about you, from relationships you formed in other positions. It seems like a no-brainer, but third-party validation is such a powerful, yet often under-utilized, tool. Never say anything good about yourself when you have someone else happy say it for you.

2. Mini-case studies
As soon as you've established your first customer, use them as a case study. They are another strong form of third-party validation which help overcome your company's newness. A mini-case study should contain two or three paragraphs that briefly tell how a customer leveraged your service to solve a problem.
Here’s a simple format:
Challenge > Solution > Result
Powerful case studies should mention a return on investment, such as savings in time or the elimination of stress.

3. Trials
Let the prospect give your service a brief test drive. Quite often, a prospect’s time is much more important to her than the cost of your service. If she takes time to try it, she’s serious. Another tip: Arrange with the prospect a specific stop and end point for any trial to ensure she tests your service in a timely fashion. If a prospect has an open-ended trial, she is less likely to feel any urgency.

4. Third-party information
Prospects choose you as much as they choose your service. Prospects—human beings that they are—love getting information about things that interest them. For example, you could say, “Ms. Prospect, I just came across this article that I thought you might find interesting. I know it’s a subject that’s near to your heart.” It’s another way to show you’ve taken time to understand how her business works.

5. Listening skills
It’s natural to be so excited about your service that you can’t help but talk on and on about it. But as much as you want to talk, the prospect wants to talk more. And she wants you to actively listen, which can be the quickest way to making a nearly-complete circle. If you don’t listen, you won’t know which testimonial to share, or which mini-case study compares best to the prospect’s situation. Tip: Record yourself talking to a prospect. Even if it’s just one end of a phone call, it helps to review how you conduct a conversation. As painful as it may be to hear yourself, you will know quickly if you’re listening well or possibly talking over the prospect.

In the end, relax a little. Prospects sense when you’re overly eager to gain a sale and to move them along faster than they want to move. They can equally sense when you’re comfortable enough to let your tools work for you. Soon, the prospect is ready to complete the circle, and you’ve earned the business.

Know Your Numbers, part 2

You'll likely find cold calling a necessary evil unless you already have a handful of solid leads when you start your company, or until your first customers begin to refer others to you.

Outbound plusses:
· If you reach a prospect, or at least a suspect, through cold calling, then she may not know


anything about your competitors.
· When you do your research (always do research before a call), you may catch the prospect


just as she is thinking about buying. It often happens.
· If the prospect has not thought about buying, you get the opportunity to educate her a


little, helping her to identify a business pain that she may not have realized she had. When


she pictures the solution to that pain, perhaps she’ll envision no one but you.



Outbound minuses:
· Nobody likes receiving cold calls.
· You don’t like making them.
· The sales cycle could be longer because the prospect is in less hurry than the inbound caller


to make a decision.
· The prospect, only mildly serious about buying anyway, may never make a decision, other


than the decision to do nothing.
· You really, really don’t like making cold calls.
· The prospect really, really doesn’t like getting them.


· You successfully get the prospect thinking she needs what you're offering, but she decides


to see who else out there offers something similar.



Some mix of inbound and outbound calls is essential to most any new company’s survival. Diligently track your numbers and results so you always know where and how to focus your efforts.



Here’s an example of the ratios you should track:



Inbound inquiries > Appointments > Proposals > Sales
Outbound calls > Appointments > Proposals > Sales



Also, track the sales cycle (time from call to sale) for each prospect, as well as the total initial value of the sale. For example, does it take two weeks to make a sale from inbound inquiries, but six weeks to make a sale from outbound calls? If you’re lucky, you’ll find that the inbound inquiries, though fewer, will generate more revenue in a shorter amount of time than a higher number of outbound calls.

See Other Entrepreneurs as Hot Prospects

On your first day in business, you may think, “Wow. We are the newest business in the world. Every other business has a head start on us.” That may be true for about two seconds. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 1,569 businesses start every day. By the time you complete your first week in business, nearly 11 thousand businesses will be younger than yours. That’s 11,000 businesses trying to reel in their first customers, too. By the time you complete your first year, more than a half million companies, most of them tiny, one- or two-person operations, will be newer than yours.

Somewhere in the half million or so new businesses may be the perfect first customer for you. Think about it. If another entrepreneur thinks her newness should not prevent anyone from doing business with her, why shouldn't she be eager to do business with another startup? Nobody can empathize with you more than another new company, whose founder understands all too well what it’s like to be small and desperately seeking paying customers.

If you call on any young company, the introductory call should be easier than most. “I’m Ernie Entrepreneur with Ernie’s Hi-Tech Denture Technologies. We’re a new company, too, and we may have a solution for your…” You will find instant empathy and, perhaps, an instant prospect.

Something else those companies have in common with you is a tight budget. Maybe they can't afford what you ‘re selling. Maybe—probably—you can’t afford what they’re selling either. Perhaps then, each of you could benefit from what the other has without spending your meager funds. Therefore, you can work a trade. You quickly line up a customer—one with a special understanding of your newness and customer void—who can also provide you something you need but cannot afford. Voila. You both get your first customer.

Here's a partial list of services provided by potential trade partners that might otherwise be luxuries in your early days:
· Professional marketing advice
· Advertising services such as business cards and brochures
· Computer networking and security
· Software development
· Web design
· Cleaning services
· Sales consulting
· Clerical Services
· Accounting
· Legal advice
· Office and conference space

If your trade partner has very few customers yet, you can bet she will be eager to act as your reference, provided you reciprocate. Also, it is another form of networking. Her prospects, which call you seeking a reference, can also be good prospects for you. Your prospects can be good prospects for them. You both have a lot at stake, and a lot to benefit from working together.

Even companies that are a couple years old are still new, still a startup. (Look back two years from now and see if you don’t still think of yourself as a babe in the woods.) Such near-new companies will still have a fresh understanding of what it’s like to land the virgin customer. They can lend a sympathetic ear, too. But they may also have something even nicer: money. You get the nice combination an understanding prospect and a check that won’t bounce.

If you can't go back...

Maybe you can’t go back to your former employer. If this is a perfect time to start your own company because you lost your job after angering or alienating everyone you ever worked with, perhaps you should consider a profession that does not require interaction with human beings. Perhaps muskrat keeper at your local zoo. If that’s not the case, however, you may still have a good chance of landing customers as a result of your former employment. In fact, you may actually have multiple chances.

Let’s say that Phil was laid off from his marketing job at Dweebco, International. He had been part of a six-person marketing team that was scattered to the wind when financial setbacks forced Dweebco to eliminate its marketing department. While his team members took jobs with other corporations, Phil decided the time was right to start his own marketing consulting firm. The first prospect on Phil’s list was Dweebco. Even though they couldn’t afford to pay a full-time marketing staff, they might still need marketing help. In fact, Phil suspected, they probably needed it more than ever. Dweedco would get the service they need without paying benefits and everything else to a full-time employee. Phil would get to charge a higher rate than his old salary
Suppose, however, that things at Dweebco had gotten so bad after Phil left that the company went out of business. Phil still had five ready-made prospects: his former colleagues. Their new employers were in a much better position to use Phil’s services. They were in a hiring mode, which meant Phil was in the right place at the right time to help meet additional demand. Phil contacted his former colleagues who then recommended him to their new employers, as well as other companies that had a connection to.

When you work for someone else, you are essentially a one-person company existing to serve your employer. If that company hired you once, they should want to hire you again--as an outside vendor--if the you left on good terms.

Borrow Credibility

My business partner met a budding entrepreneur at a party last weekend. The guy was the marketing/sales "arm" of a start-up company that developed a web-based storage system for medical records. So far, the company consists of the sales guy, plus the person who developed the software. And neither has left his full time job yet. My partner asked a blunt question : How would the sales guy convince medical offices to trust highly sensitive information to a new product developed by someone working in his basement at night? The new entrepreneur hadn't thought it through that far.

You need instant credibility, which may mean borrowing some. That could come in the form of a strategic partnership with another person or company that is already highly respected in your industry. It may mean starting as an entrepreneurial arm of an established company. You could build your dream within a viable business, while leveraging a bit of their image--and money. A few years down the road, you could spin off into an independent company.

Another way: Grab credibility by certification from a known brand, such as the kind Microsoft offers software developers. Then you can say: "Our people are Microsoft-certified and have expertise in the latest Microsoft web hosting products.” The prospect will hear: “Blah Blah Blah Microsoft blah blah blah blah blah Microsoft blah blah blah.” And then they think, “Hmm. I’ve heard of Microsoft. These people are OK is they’re Microsoft people.” That is, unless the prospect is a Firefox nut.

Pay Attention; Look Ahead

All your prospect wants to know is, “What’s in it for me?”

His needs come before yours. If you can meet his requirements better than anyone else can, and he likes you, you both win.

You don’t have to have a bucket-load of customers to show that you understand the customer’s problem. In fact, the prospect may be more likely to think you care if your bucket is bone dry. You have to pay attention, listen, and do your homework before you say anything about how perfectly your service matches the prospect's needs.

It's possible, however, that your service doesn't match his needs. Let’s say your company develops a special type of X-ometer that will turn the X-ometer industry on its ear. You meet a prospect and develop a great rapport. You ask lots of good questions and begin to develop a true sense of the prospect’s challenges, which, come to find out, can't be fixed by even the best X-ometer. The prospect’s problem is Y. You don't know jack about Y.

You could still try to sell the prospect on the great advantages of X in hopes of prying a little revenue out of the deal. Or you could demonstrate your interest in helping him solve his problem, even if you’re not the one who can solve it.

That would mean no immediate sale for you, which is pretty painful in the early days of your business. But two things can happen:
1) You develop a reputation as a company that really knows how to listen and how to solve problems. Prospects like that. Some will become customers.
2) If you refer a prospect that needs Y to a company with expertise in Y problems, the Y people are more likely to return the favor.

Nobody can afford to wait around while prospects that might need something a year later develop fuzzy feelings for you. But you have to work on getting your next customer while you’re trying to get your first one.

If honesty isn’t the best policy, it is a close second.

OK, I lied. Honesty is the best policy when you try to land your first customer. Telling the truth may seem like such a simple thing, but it's often overlooked. You’ll hear lots of advice about working hard, working smart, never giving up, and so on. But a commitment to the truth often gets left out.

We all want to be truthful in our business, but honesty can become an early casualty as we try to persuade a teetering prospect to commit. We start hedging the length of time we’ve been in business. We count our spouse and children as staff. We include the UPS guy as an employee. We set steaming mugs of coffee at empty desks when visitors come. We suddenly have phantom customers. I mention honesty at the beginning of this blog for a good reason. The integrity of your venture will color everything else you do. If that’s not enough reason, truthfulness can also help you land Customer #1.

Before you call on your first prospect, make a pact with yourself to accurately represent the depth of your company. This does not mean you have to loop a sign around your neck that says “We are a tiny company.” In fact, you should always present your story in the best possible light. The best possible light is the truth: You’re new and you’re small. Being a small, new company does not have to be a liability. More than a half million new businesses open their doors each year in America. If the rest of us were afraid to become their customers, commerce in this country would grind to a halt.

If you convince yourself that your company’s size is one of its strengths, and in fact may be one of your greatest assets, many of your prospects will believe it, too. No, not all prospects will want to do business with a company that's just two minutes old, but many will be open to it. And why not? By golly, your size is your strength. If you need convincing, I can give you two compelling reasons without having met you. More on that next time.