When your time on earth runs out, it is irrelevant how much money you have in the bank. You can’t buy yourself more time.
So ultimately, all you’ve got is time. All you can sell is your time and all someone can buy from you is your, or your company’s time. Selling a service is simply selling the time of an expert who can do something to a higher quality, with the right tools, in a shorter time.
In your initial conversations with a new prospect, it can be tempting to tell them all the great things that you and your company can solve. You may have heard people talking about selling “features and benefits”. Unless you’re selling a commodity product, can someone actually buy what you’re selling in those initial engagements? Or is it that all they can buy from you is more time to discuss the problems at hand?
In the first conversation, all someone can buy from you is a second conversation (time). It’s a lot easier for someone to buy additional time from you, in exchange for their own time, than it is to sell a complex, multi-faceted business solution. Be clear that that is all they can buy from you today. It takes the pressure off. Get good at selling time and you’ll sell more, more often and more people will buy the end solution.
Respecting time
If time is all we’ve got to buy/sell then it wouldn’t make sense to respect it, would it?
Do you have a plan for what happens if someone doesn’t show for a meeting? What do you do?
Some people have hard and fast rules that they operate to in the interest of respecting and protecting their time from timewasters, without damaging their “ok-ness”:
This is an Adult-Adult approach (read more about Transactional Analysis here). No one’s time is more valuable than any other person’s. This is why we shouldn’t be graciously thanking Chief Executives for their time. They are investing their time in a conversation with you because they have a problem that is worth that investment to solve. If you can’t solve it, you have an obligation to save them the time by calling it early, shaking hands and parting as friends.
How might you set up a complete cold conversation to take the pressure off, and make it clear that all you’re selling is time?
How about a short Upfront Contract?
“It will take two minutes for me to explain why I’m getting in touch, and then you can decide whether we continue to talk. Is that fair?”
And if they agree to that contract then be ready to clearly, concisely explain why you’re calling them, specifically.
“The reason I’m calling you specifically is I’ve been working with another CTO who was frustrated that she couldn’t keep her team focussed on the projects to support the business’s strategy because of the outages and breaks that they were being distracted by, at all hours of the day. That’s not something you’ve experienced is it?”
In bold is the emotive pain that you expect to resonate with them, based on your research up to that point.
And the next thing to sell is? … Time. If it resonates, all you’ve got to sell is more time to fully qualify that pain is something you can solve. It would be too early at this point to presume that your service solves their problem. Your service might be something they’ve already tried. You need more information and for that, you will need more time. Typically 60 to 90 minutes is the investment you’re looking for. If that’s too much… are they really likely to buy a 6 or 7 figure solution to solve that pain? Probably not… so you’ve protected your time.
Some will, some won’t, so what? Next!
Keep it simple: you can only buy, sell and lose time.
