Planning your Contact Objectives
Persuasion, Selling and business development continues throughout your assignment. That said, before any contact eith a customer – phone or face-to-face – you need to review your understanding of their situation.
Out of this review will emerge ideas which could form the basis of the next meeting In setting up a meeting, you will want to get agreement with the client on what you can do to help. This is your “Call Premise”.
You will test your other ideas during the call. Once you have established the starting point for the meeting, you can start planning the call as a whole.
The most critical decision is what call objective to set. Your objective should be reasonable but ambitious. Above all it must seek commitment from the contact. You must try to get actions s/he will take after the meeting. These might be actions that require him/her to invest resources such as people, time, or money. You should make it a discipline to write down your call objective and to take it with you to the meeting. You should write it in the form:
“At the end of the meeting, I want him/her to agree to
Here are two examples:
- “I want him/her to initiate an internal review of the benefits to his/her company of using me to help them implement an ITIL compliant Service Support and Delivery function”
- “I want him/her to send two/three of his/her key people on the course
Both seek commitment in the form of action.
Using Call Objectives in the Call
In the initial “Objective Setting stage of the call, you must:
- Seek his/her commitment to your call objective – discuss in a business-like fashion what you each want to achieve
- Ask him/her if s/he will be able to commit to the actions
- If not, explore with him/her what s/he can commit to
Here are some examples of this objective-setting phase at the start of the call. The example is from an external supplier; you should be similarly focused if your clients are internal.
Please be careful how you interpret it. It is meant to bring out key points you can use as a Consultant. Whilst somewhat obsequious, it is not meant as a primer for double glazing salesmen.
- “My purpose in coming to this meeting is to get your agreement to use my organisation to undertake for £5,000 a review of your management information systems, have an agenda which focuses on this. Can we agree this is what we jointly are working towards in this meeting?”
- “To improve the quality of information, we typically review with the key people the relevance of what they currently receive – does it really help them run and strengthen their part of the business? By the end of this meeting, I should like you to authorise us to carry out a review of your current situation.
- “At the end of this meeting, I would like you to agree that my organisation will be included on your shortlist, and that you and your Director will visit our Service Management Centre next month to evaluate our BSI 15000 and ITIL “compliance” credentials.
- “At the end of this meeting, I would like you to agree to introduce me to the other senior managers involved in this decision. Is that acceptable to you?
- “During this meeting, my aim is to convince you that we have the best match to your requirements. At the end of this meeting, I would like to get your agreement to this assertion and to then agree how we move forward to become your partner in developing this system. Should you not be convinced by my presentation I would like to agree with you the areas you still have doubts over and an action plan to resolve the doubts in your mind. Is that acceptable?”
People often shy away from this fundamental activity on the grounds that their proposal may be rejected, but remember that your clients have limited time. If they have agreed to meet you, they expect something to come out of it. They also expect to be asked to take decisions.
Without agreement on an objective at the outset, the call will be second-rate and is likely to be a waste of time, energy and money.
Finally, in the “Commitment” stage at the end of the call, close on your objective. Test if you have done enough to get his/her agreement to the action you set out at the outset.
Using time to create urgency and gain control
When setting objectives you should attempt to influence timescales and get control. You achieve this by starting with his/her timescales. You identify the cause of a problem and then work backwards to today. You show him/her that, based on your previous experience, the timescales will be very tight and that decisions are needed sooner than perhaps s/he expected. A possible time-scale objective might be:
“At the end of this meeting, I would like to agree on a timetable and joint resource plan to achieve your goal of a ‘live’ system by March 1st 2019.”
At the end of the meeting, you should map out the various milestones needed to achieve this and close him/her on committing to get to the next milestone defined by you (ideally involving him/her in an investment of some sort). Once you have identified the call objectives and passed this hurdle in your initial two minutes of the meeting, then you can get down to the real business. That is the business of identifying needs and emphasising how your product or service will meet those needs.
A useful; persuasion /selling tool to help you here “is getting to benefits”. By using SPIR (sometimes know as SPIRFAB)