How Re-Engaging Prospects’ Emotions Increases Post-Trade-Show Close Ratios

Recently I was asked a question by an executive from a medical device manufacturing and distribution business. His company invests heavily to attend domestic and international trade shows. His salespeople close quite a few sales at the trade shows, but their success rate in closing sales after the trade shows is below five percent. He asked for suggestions to improve his salespeople’s follow-up sales performance.

Here was my response to this executive’s question

The fact that you have a relatively low (post-trade show) follow-up sales ratio makes sense. Buying decisions are made when emotions are engaged.

When your salespeople work with doctors at trade shows, the ones who buy probably get excited about your products. They perceive benefits to their practices, their patients, and themselves personally. Their emotions are engaged and they can justify a buying decision, so they buy.

Once the doctors return home, what do your salespeople do to rev their emotions back up? If your salespeople can’t re-engage the doctors’ emotions, a purchase becomes very unlikely.

I don’t know how good a job your marketing materials and salespeople do of identifying the following:

The specific problems your products address
The quantified impacts (in terms of dollars or percentages and time frames) of those problems, and
How your products will improve the doctors’ practices

Most marketing materials and product training programs focus heavily on features and benefits, and completely overlook the problems that the product solves. Unfortunately, features only have value when they solve one or more specific problems. Benefits are what happen when a problem has been solved. If your salespeople don’t understand the problems your products can solve, they are not going to deliver feature and benefit information as effectively as they could.

Here is another issue - different prospects are concerned about different things

Some doctors are primarily concerned about the comfort and health of their patients. Some are primarily concerned about having a practice that runs smoothly and efficiently. Some are primarily concerned about making money. Some are primarily concerned about having more time to spend with their families. You get the idea.

If your salespeople aren’t already doing it, one of their key objectives should be asking questions to identify what each doctor wants most from his or her practice, and why they want it. Can your products help that doctor get more of what they want most from their practice?

Your salespeople should also ask questions to identify whether each doctor has any of the problems your products address, and how these problems impact the doctor both personally and professionally. It is relatively easy to engage someone’s emotions when you ask penetrating questions that cause them to re-live the discomfort, pain, and frustration caused by their problems and concerns.

Once your salespeople have identified specific business problems and quantified impacts, they should paint GLOWING WORD PICTURES

These word pictures will help doctors visualize how wonderful their lives will be when your company’s products make their problems go away. The word pictures should include real-life examples of the results your products have produced for other doctors. The more your salespeople can quantify these results, the greater the impact.

For any given doctor, either they have the problems your products can solve, or they don’t. If they DO have one or more of those problems, either the impact of the problems is significant enough to justify investing in a solution, or it isn’t. If the impact of the problems IS significant enough, the key becomes emotion. If your salesperson can engage the doctor’s emotions, they are likely to buy. If their emotions are not engaged, they are NOT likely to buy. Does that make sense?

My experience has also been that many organizations have real difficulty identifying the business problems their products and services can solve. When they try to do it, they usually get bogged down in features and benefits.

Special training may be required to help your marketing, training, and sales personnel understand the differences between business problems, features, and benefits. Once they have learned how to identify business problems and quantified impacts for a few products or services, it will be relatively easy for them to repeat this learning process for the other products and services in your company’s portfolio.

Conclusion

If you want to increase your post-trade show close ratio, your salespeople need to engage their prospects’ emotions. The best way to do this is to make sure your marketing materials and salespeople do a great job of identifying:

The specific problems your products address
The quantified impacts (in terms of dollars or percentages and time frames) those problems have on prospects’ businesses, and
How your products will improve a prospect’s life, both personally and professionally

If your salespeople learn to use this process to help prospects re-live the discomfort, pain, and frustration caused by their problems and concerns, your post-trade show close ratios should increase substantially!

—————————————————————————

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: Why Most Salespeople Don’t Perform and What to Do About It. His company, 80/20 Sales Performance, helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com

April 7th, 2007