Sales Minute

Fresh off the one-and-only Shred Summit, which was held in Chicago in October of 2007, Pepper Graham of Total Training Services and Total Product Destruction, Jay Burns of Crown Shredding and a 2004 Shred School graduate and I had the opportunity to make the short drive to South Bend, Ind., the home of the beloved Fighting Irish, winner of more College Football National Championships than any other school.

While at Notre Dame, we also had the opportunity to meet Coach Charlie Weis, who was also Pepper’s high school basketball coach in New Jersey in the mid 1980s.

I have had some time to reflect on this experience, and I can’t help but relate this once-in-a-lifetime meeting to the world of sales and marketing.

We were obviously excited about meeting Coach Weis and discussed our "pre-call planning" on the ride to South Bend. We decided we would handle this meeting in the same way a salesperson should handle a sales call in that we would ask Coach Weis open-ended questions and just shut up and listen to his responses, letting the prospect (Coach Weis) do most of the talking.

For the most part, we handled the meeting with Coach Weis effectively, allowing him to do 80 percent of the talking. It was a great experience, and we found the coach to be a down-to-earth kind of guy.

However, I also managed to upset the prospect (Coach Weis) during the meeting when I brought up the team’s 1-6 record at the time. The coach was not pleased with me, and rightfully so. Sinking in my chair a little, I shut up and listened. The coach was very insightful about Notre Dame and provided details about his future plans and his charity work.

I know you are thinking, "What the heck does this have to do with sales?"

The moral of the story is that prospects tend to get upset if you bring up what you perceive to be their "problems." Potential customers rarely want to talk about their "problems," but they will tell you all day about their "challenges" if you take the time to ask them.

Prospects do not want you to tell them the "bad news," but through some powerful questioning, there are ways to educate them on the implications that could arise if sensitive information fell into the wrong hands.

By asking the right questions and listening to your prospect’s responses, you may learn interesting and insightful information and potentially land a new client. n

Ray Barry is the president of Total Training Services, which operates Shred School in Spartanburg, S.C. He has helped and trained more than 150 companies in the document destruction industry to grow their businesses. Previously, he was the VP of sales and marketing for a shredding company that was named twice in Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in America. Ray can be contacted at raybarry@totaltrainingservices.com. For a photo of Ray, Pepper and Jay with Coach Weis, visit www.SDBmagazine.com.