You Didn’t Get The Client?
By Adam Radzik
Consultant to Professional Firms

You make what you think is a good presentation to a prospective client and the client thanks you but hires another firm. What a disappointment! You wonder to yourself, What did I do wrong? Sometimes you ask the client to tell you why they picked the other guy but most of the time you get an answer that doesn’t reveal much.

So after you’ve been busy writing and speaking on the subject, you finally get an opportunity to make a presentation to a desirable client (and we don’t get many opportunities to be up at bat each year) and you aren’t able to close the deal. It is absolutely demoralizing!

One of the questions you need to ask is what is your closing percentage? No one closes 100% of the time, and if they tell you that they do, they either haven’t done it for very long or they are acting like fishermen describing their h-u-g-e catch. But what is a reasonable closing percentage? This is a question I have been asked many times, as I have been coaching professionals on the marketing of their services for over 20 years. I would say a good closer closes about 70% of the time, and a very good closer closes about 80% of the time. If your closing statistics fall below these numbers, or you just want to improve your percentages, read on.

Professionals who don’t close often enough have not prepared enough, have misread the concerns of the prospect, did not overcome the target’s potential objections and lost the war of words. Business is a form of war – economic war. The weapons are words. Simply put, the other side said better words, and the potential client bought those words. If you want to close more, you have to get better words.

Professionals who wish to improve ask me to accompany them on their presentations to prospects. In addition to the problems listed above, I have observed professionals who talked too much, didn’t sound confident, acted overly aggressive and pushy, were not believable, rarely smiled, and didn’t share what made them unique and worth hiring above the other candidates.

The problem is that professionals have never been trained to market or sell. As a result, they often perform far below their real potential. One-on-one training from a skilled marketing coach can change all that.

Finally, a true story. I went out with my client, a professional who was trying to sell to another professional. To my surprise, my client hardly said a word throughout the entire hour and fifteen minutes. “Why didn’t you talk about the service you were trying to sell him?” I asked, mystified. “I was always told to be a good listener,” he answered. Once I explained how he should handle the interaction in the future, he immediately adopted my advice and was able to exceed his goal that year by more than 600%.

If you would like to learn more about sales coaching, contact SIC today!