Triple Your Closing Ratio

-By Chet Holmes International

Imagine I could put you in a giant stadium right now as the presenter, and the entire audience is completely comprised of your most perfect prospects. Are you ready right now? Could you walk out on that stage and present to every one of them and do it perfectly? Now before you say yes, let me make the stakes higher. Before you walk out there, the audience is told: "You had to come, but you don't have to stay. If this person (you) fails to keep your interest, you can simply get up and leave."

Now let me even further complicate the situation by telling you the good news and the bad news.

The good news: At any given time 3% of your prospects are currently in the market to buy your product or service and looking right now to get it. Another 6-7% are open to it, but not currently looking. The other 90% are divided into three nearly equal categories:

A) Not really thinking about right now.
B) Think they're not interested (but might be, if you did a good job at presenting to them.
C) They KNOW they're not interested.

So let's say you sell brooms. And let's say it's a fantastic broom. But remember 90% of the audience isn't in the market for your broom at this time. At least they think they're not interested. That means if you walk out there and start right off saying how great your brooms are, 90% of your audience is going to get up and leave.

So you need to open your stadium pitch (as I call it), with what I call "wow's." This means that all great presentations start off with information that makes your prospects say: "wow, I didn't know that." The focus must be on THEM and things of interest to THEM, not you. So rule number one of a great presentation is that it must be focused on the prospect and not on you (at least not initially).

I've built presentations that increase closing ratios from one out of ten to eight out of ten. I've even built presentations that dramatically increase your ability to get in front of prospects in the first place. How? Let's bring that stadium pitch down to its most practical application; Offer prospects something of value outside your product or service . Something important to THEM.

Let me give you a case in point. I have a client who sells employee benefits and insurance to companies. His sales team would call up a client and say: "We want to come and talk to you about your health care benefits."

Since 97% of prospects THINK they are happy with their current broker, that's a really hard call to make. However, when they created a presentation that pointed out: (paraphrased) "The Five Dangers Facing All Employers and How Knowing What Those DANGERS Are, Can Dramatically Reduce Costs and Increases Profits," it made not just the sale go better, but also getting appointments go much better.

Meaning that information that is of value to THEM, like "Five Dangers Facing You In Your Business," creates what I call a "superior access vehicle." More..

Another client of mine sells telephone systems. Prior to the learning curve in this article, they'd call prospects and ask the prospect: "We want to come and talk to you about getting a new telephone system." Needless to say, the appointment setting process was slow going. However, when they built THE ULTIMATE PRESENTATION, one that offered (something like): "How You're Wasting Money In Nine Major Areas of Your Voice and Data Spending," -- Suddenly, they went from getting three appointments per week (with four salespeople trying all day) to getting 30 appointments per week. This effort is already tripling their pipeline in a single year.

So rule number one, again, for building a killer presentation, is to have information that is OF VALUE to your prospects -- even if they have never heard about your products or services. Information that is above and beyond the product or service you are offering will be considered extremely valuable to them.

Your prospect, when viewing a great deal of bad news, will suddenly feel the need to take some action. Any action they take will make them feel better. In the case of the law book company, every lawyer in the room wanted more information or wanted to purchase the law books outright, after they saw the presentation.

Now don't take this too far. The more the data in the presentation sets up a need for your product or service, the higher your closing ratio. So in the case of the law firm, the massive case law to be studied, created a need for law books that already studied this for you. Plus, we tied the litigation against lawyers directly to the massive case law, so that seemingly unrelated pieces of data, pieced together with other data made the bad news more excruciating.

In summary, your core story can accelerate:

. Training
. Client access
. Decision making process
. Appointment setting
. Closing skills
. Rapport opportunities
. Increased credibility