... Continued fromCover
if I leave you one of our laundry bags right now and put a $20 credit on your account so that way, you (or your spouse) can try the service with no risk. Go ahead and put some clothes out next week, and when you get them back, look at them and if you (or your spouse) don’t love the quality and service, simply leave the empty bag out on the porch on your next pickup day and we will grab the bag and close your account. This way you can check out the service risk-free. How does that sound?” This worked like a charm. So why did it go wrong the second week I tried this script? Frankly, I made a very common mistake most entrepreneurs make. In the second week of training the new script, I got impatient. Instead of first asking for the sale, letting the prospect say no, hearing them out on any and all objections, handling the objection, and then doing the whole acting part, appear to come up with a brilliant idea on the fly, give them new information, add in a risk-free guarantee and then an incentive, I skipped those steps on week two and went straight to offering the discount and trying to close. Removing these steps actually ended up hurting my conversations and raised the cost of the sale because I was offering the $20 in free cleaning to everyone, even those who would have signed up without the incentive. Are you guilty of skipping steps in your sales process? What about follow-up with your leads? Are you nurturing those leads with new additional information, benefits, features, and offers and then asking for the sale again? Be honest: If I personally came and reviewed your lead- nurture campaigns, sales process, follow-up systems and processes, and customer onboarding campaigns as well as customer nurture and sales processes, would there be a lot of work to do? I can teach you all the coolest ways to generate a lead or say these three major words to close more sales. I can tell you the perfect color to use to make people buy more from your website. But when it comes down to it, most of that stuff doesn’t actually matter if you truly don’t understand that all of the non-selling actions you take, all of the helpful and useful information you provide, all of the personal information you share that helps people like and trust you is really what makes the difference. That is what moves your prospect closer and closer to becoming a buyer so that when you do send out that offer or get the person on the phone and ask them to buy, or whatever your process is, you close more sales. It may seem counterintuitive, but I promise you time and time again, both in my companies and many others I’ve worked with or am privy to the behind-the-scenes details, this is how they all function. On the flip side of the coin, all of the companies I’ve owned that have struggled, friends of mine who are struggling now, all go straight for the close, and if you don’t buy now, they simply move on to the next “hot lead.” –Shaun
trying to figure out what happened. Why is it that the new script didn’t work? Was I saying or doing something different than the previous week?
It finally dawned on me what went wrong.
The week I discovered the new script, when I went out and knocked on doors, I gave my normal pitch, which went something like this:
Me: Hi, I’m Shaun with Dry Cleaning Butler; we offer a free home pickup and next day delivery dry cleaning service in your area. Do you guys use dry cleaning or laundry services? Homeowner: We do. Me: Great, you’re going to love our service. We offer free home pickup and next day delivery of both dry cleaning and laundry service in your area. Here are our prices, and as you can see, they are very similar to the prices charged by other cleaners in town, etc. How many times per month do you guys use dry cleaning or laundered dress shirts?
This would go on until finally I asked them to buy. That was super simple — all we did was take down some of their information and give them a laundry bag to use for the service.
Once I asked for the sale, one of three things would happen:
1. They’d have some questions. 2. They’d want to talk with a spouse. 3. They’d say they were not interested.
I handled whichever situation arose and moved to the next house. If they wanted to talk to a spouse, I marked them down to do a follow-up. When I came up with the adjusted script that worked so well the first week, I realized that if someone was interested in the service but didn’t talk to someone or think about it, they clearly just needed a little more info and a small push because this isn’t a complicated decision. After handling any objections, or they were still a no, or they wanted to talk to the spouse and wanted me to come back, I would literally go into acting mode and pretend I was going to walk away and end the conversation. I’d even do a half turn like I was leaving and then turn back as they were closing the door and say, “I have an idea. What
2
www.newsletterpro.com
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker