Many times sales people fall back to the position of asking for ‘just 10 minutes’ when a suspect says no to an appointment request (or even starting with a request for that). That puts us in a very defensive position when we arrive for the appointment.

The objective of most Initial Meetings is for both parties to determine whether it makes sense to enter into a buying cycle or not. If less than 5% of our universe of suspects thinks they are in the market for what we’re selling when we call, we put ourselves at a distinctive disadvantage in telling someone we’ll only take 10 minutes of their time.

What happens is that we feel pressured when we show up because we’re not really sure whether they’ll limit us to the 10 minutes or not, so we just ‘product dump’ right from the beginning, hoping that the suspect will hear something that they want to hear more about and extend the visit.

There are two most likely outcomes for a call like this: 1) They’ll quickly come to a conclusion based on just hearing about features of what we sell that it’s not worth continuing and we’re cooked, or 2) our ability to get back into the normal sequence of determining buying motivations is so out of sequence that it is truly difficult to get back to it. The result is that we wind up presenting some kind of proposal based solely on price without understanding what the benefits to the prospect are. Our closing ratios suffer and since we only have a certain amount of selling time provided to us by the big guy upstairs, we’re doubly wasting our time.

If you really believe you’ve got something of value, then learn how to handle the ‘nos’ you hear and get an appropriate amount of time to conduct an Initial Meeting. Your goal is not the Initial Meeting, it is a sale.

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