

Find Out if You're a Scale-Up Entrepreneur with This Two-Minute Test - adityar
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/are_you_a_scale-up_entrepreneu.html

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mindcrime
_The sales process is just starting when the customer first says no._

I'm going to go "no" on this, and add that I think this is misguided thinking:

Now to be fair, I'm hardly an experienced sales-person, so I may be proven
wrong. But a lot of the sales material[1] I've been reading and working on
applying lately suggests a different approach. Instead of focusing on your
product and going into "presentation mode" right away, and finding yourself in
the mode of having to "overcome objections" the idea is to "Always be leaving"
(not "always be closing") and focus on actually diagnosing the customer's
needs and actively seek to disqualify them if they don't _actually_ need what
you are selling. If they do, you go through a guided process of diagnosis,
something akin to the way a doctor diagnoses a patient: you think your doctor
is going to try to sell you some angioplasty because they're running a special
on it this week, without even checking to see if maybe you really _do_ just
have heartburn?

Further, if you buy this approach (no pun intended), part of the idea is that
the diagnosis process keeps the customer involved and you actually get them to
take ownership of parts of the process... so that, when you get to the end, IF
the need actually arises, you won't usually encounter much (if any)
objections, as the answer will be obvious.

Of course it'll never be quite _that_ easy in practice, but I'm planning to
start applying this model and see how it works for us.

[1]: <http://www.masteringthecomplexsale.com/>

