Yesterday at our weekly role play for Sales on of our new and talented trainers was up to bat. She’s not a new trainer, but new to our team and fairly new to selling. She’s not used to a complimentary session being her way to show a client the value of training and then converting that prospect to a new client.
She has three complimentary sessions over two days and we want her to be successful with them. So we had her go through some ‘real’ play with other trainers in the room. These trainers were themselves- not making up a client- so obviously know a lot about training- but also for various reasons need coaching themselves (don’t we all!?). For our new trainer these are sometimes the most intimidating clients, yet a lot of our actual prospects do think they know what they’re doing, and therefore are hard to sell.
What got her stuck was that she wasn’t listening closely to both what was said and what was not said. She took the client’s statement that he wanted flexibility and power at face value. But she didn’t know what about that was important to him or how long he’d been wanting it. She didn’t ask how he knew he didn’t have any or when he’d know he did have it.
The last missing piece for her came when she had a client who finally agreed the money was worth it, but wanted to think it over. The trainer didn’t know what to say.
SOLUTIONS:
1. Keep asking…what do you mean by power? How are you measuring that? What’s it going to feel like for you when you have it?
By digging deeper what we found out was that it was going to lead to self confidence, a sense of achievement, optimal physical conditioning that will spill over into the rest of his life. Once we knew that, we’d had a more meaningful conversation with this prospect. We could paint a better picture, understand what we needed to do, and yet we also were able to let him know based on an injury he told us about that getting it the way he’d tried to might not be what was right for his body, but that we could make a progressive plan, determine if it was working or if we needed to change – before further injury occurred. He was sold!
2. She got stuck- but was thinking…if this person leaves I’m afraid that she won’t do it; she won’t get more excited at home, she’ll put it off, and won’t make any progress so it’s obvious she wants to change.
SAY IT OUT LOUD! That kind of honestly is the best thing to use! Why would you ever keep that in? Tell them! There is a reason you came in today. If you leave, we both know you’re not going to be more excited at home alone. Something else is going to come up and get in the way of you getting your goals. How are you going to feel in three months if you don’t get started today? And what if you do…how would that feel if you’ve taken control of feeling better, knowing what to do when you walk in, you’re getting more energy and better quality of sleep? Put yourself first, right now!