Here is a reliable OOH selling principle: During any given sales meeting, the prospect should be mostly talking and the salesperson mostly listening.
A general rule of thumb is that the prospect should be talking about 70% of the time. Typically, in most OOH sales meetings the opposite occurs. We feel compelled to talk about as many features, benefits and unique selling points of OOH advertising as time permits…in an attempt to “get the prospect’s interest.”
If the prospect merely wants to know all of those things about OOH advertising, they can simply visit your website or read your marketing materials or frankly “Google” it on the internet. They certainly don’t need to invest time they don’t have to meet with us to find out about those things, it’s not necessary.
Selling is not about “telling.” It’s about helping the prospect (or many times your current client) relate how OOH advertising can satisfy their wants and needs. It’s also about helping them discover needs of which they were previously unaware. How do you accomplish this? By asking thought provoking questions and then listening…really listening.
Let’s examine the difference. Telling sounds like this:
Our digital boards have the advantage of greater flexibility to adjust campaigns in real time for our advertisers. In a study done just last year it was revealed that 70% of consumers recently noticed digital billboard ads. Yakkety, yakkety flexibility. Yakkety yakkety high visibility.
Informative? To a degree. Thought provoking? Not really. You might as well have handed them a brochure and conducted a read along. Professional OOH selling requires that you ENGAGE the prospect. You can educate and stimulate interest by means of thought-provoking questions much more effectively than you do by citing the features and benefits of OOH advertising. Here is an example of an engaging question:
“If you had a way that you could advertise your breakfast specials during the morning commute time and even rotate different breakfast specials during that time slot AND have the ability to shift and do the same late morning with your lunch specials…what kind of impact do you think that may have on bringing in the undecided, impulse diners?
Informative…and thought provoking! This kind of question engages the prospect by highlighting a specific potential problem- difficulty appealing to impulse diners. It stimulates a conversation about how beneficial it would be to target those impulse diners specifically with daily specials and by using different content depending on the time of day. It gets the prospect talking.
When the prospect is talking, shut your mouth; don’t interrupt. You can open your ears or you can open your mouth, but you can’t do both at the same time. Let the prospect finish, then ask questions or make comments. And don’t think about what you’re going to say until the prospect is finished speaking. If you are thinking about what you are going to say, you are not listening!
You can lose a sale by talking too much. But you’ll never, ever lose a sale by listening too much.
Need help with sales skills or coaching to take your out of home company to the next level. Learn more about OOH Sales Mastery at oohmastery.com or Contact Dan Nausley at dan.nausley@sandler.com, 423.702.5579.
Lisa & Dan Nausley and Reggie Piercy of Sandler Chattanooga have developed the OOH Sales Mastery Program after more than a decade of training/coaching thousands of OOH Operators across the country in sales, leadership, and executive coaching.
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