I been listening to several sales podcasts recently and one of the common tips that they give is that you should make the phone call daily to touch base with your sales prospects.
I have the additional task of building the company's partner base and calling partners on a regular basis is also part of parcel of getting them to help bring me more customers.
Today, a phone call help closed a deal.
Sounds easy yet behind the phone call was some hard work and creative thinking to get the deal.
This deal was considered as one that is handed to me on a plate as it was a maintenance deal to be renewed. For maintenance deals, the customer have already been using the company's solution for at least a year so there isn't the challenge of having to do the whole introduction spill again.
Getting the appointment to close the deal was, on the other hand, the toughest part. This was because the customer was quite busy and had a tight schedule for a meeting. There were times when I called and the customer was too busy to pick up.
So the traditional method of closing the deal was
Step 1 - Get the appointment
Step 2 - During the appointment, discuss the details of the deal
Step 3 - Return to office and submit the quote
Step 4 - Wait for customer's approval.
Here's where the creativity kicked in.
Step 1 and Step 2 were currently the blockers that prevented me from moving forward with the maintenance deal. As such, I decided to try skipping Step 1 and 2 and go direct to Step 3.
The customer did mention he wanted some add-ons but didn't give any details. So I made an estimation on the add-ons, created the quote and emailed the customer before the weekend. I sweetened the deal to include an upgrade to a hardware as the current hardware would be phased out due to some government requirement in April 2017.
Maybe it helped that the quote was send on a Friday and probably the customer had the time to read it over the weekend.
This morning, though, I listened to a podcast from advancedsellingpodcast.com and one of the motivators was to "Go to work and make that phone call". Motivated I was, and I did the phone call to the customer.
I was rather surprise that the customer answered, but i had to keep my cool and treat the call as per normal.
As it turned out, the customer did read the quote and was ready to extend the maintenance. There was a question on the need for the change of the hardware but I was fully prepared for that.
The lesson of the day - Do something different and make that phone call.
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