If your client is not emotionally involved in a survey’s outcome, you can do a Personal Sales Survey, have the results break your way, and still not win the sale.
To win emotional involvement you need to add drama to the process. But survey drama? Many salespeople yawn at the mention of a survey on a sales call. But surveys that sell are different. You must win involvement or doing the survey is a wasted effort. Here are few approaches that work:
1. Survey their passion
What gets your client’s blood pumping? Their competition? New opportunities? Government intervention? While many surveys can seem dull, few things get a client more excited than a survey about the things that get them excited! After you have covered these things add in some questions that advocate for your product.
I once called on a large Japanese component company whose US division could not convince the home office manufacture a smaller scale product. I did a PSS to measure the trend in their market toward the smaller scale components. The survey created huge interest because the US people felt so passionately about it.
When the survey proved the point for the US division, they really pushed the survey results internally, along with the answers to the questions that documented the superior aspects of my product…all the way to the very top of the corporation.
2. Turn the survey into a contest
Here is the pitch, “You don’t think my service offers better customer service? I’ll prove it to you by challenging the service you are using in a survey to an objective audience. We will do a Personal Sales Survey, just for you, and measure either an independent industry sample or the sample of potential customers you are trying to win over. If I lose I don’t bother you for a long time, but if I win you have to give my service a try.”
This is no longer just another dull sales survey, this is now a contest, bring on the shootout, its high noon. Part of the drama is in the possibility of watching your product or service fall flat on its face. But, if you have done your pretesting, you should have a good idea of the results before you start.
3. Discover an opportunity
I once was trying to sell a company on doing a webinar services. The company buyer said, “Josh, Webinars are fine but my audience will never go for them.” I did a PSS. The client’s customers were very enthusiastic about webinars and could not wait for my client to offer them. No one gets excited about surveys for the sake of surveys, but everyone gets excited about a new opportunity. I made the sale.
When you do a Personal Sales Survey, don’t think of it as a survey, it’s an unscripted event where you and your client discover new things together. There is drama in that!