There’s no sugar-coating this: I am a lousy salesman.
I cannot tell a lie. I won’t promise a customer anything I’m not certain I can deliver. I’m completely uninterested in small talk, and I don’t remember details about someone I’ve met unless I get them into a database. By every measure the sales books use, I’m hopeless.
I have had potential clients sitting across from me with the checkbook out, ready to pay a deposit — and by the time I finished giving them a realistic picture of what they were in for, the checkbook was back in the pocket. Some went off to reevaluate whether to move forward at all. Some, I’m fairly sure, decided I was some kind of thief jacking up the cost and the schedule to shake them down. All I’d done was tell them the truth.
I’ve had salesmen work for me who felt my pricing was killing their ability to close. I never found a way to make them understand: I don’t need a deal closed on price. Any blowhard can do that.
What actually closes
Here’s the thing about erecting steel: it’s my domain. I’ve been doing it my entire life, and metal buildings are my comfort zone. If a client wants to hear where I stand — on their building, their schedule, their site, the things that will go wrong and how we’ll handle them — he’ll find I can go on forever, and he’ll probably wish he hadn’t gotten me started.
And when I get to interact with a client on that level — serious, practical, no pitch — that client ends up entirely convinced he wants me on his project. I haven’t sold him anything. I shared what I know and what I’ve been through, and the experience did the talking.
He still might not sign. If he’s got it in his head that he can get it done for substantially less, sometimes he goes and finds out. That’s his education to buy, not mine to prevent.
The standard
I tell my representatives: in the end, I want every client to feel like they wish they could afford me.
Even when they don’t go with our proposal, we keep in contact and offer our help at any turn. No hard feelings, no door slammed. A surprising number of those contacts come back around with serious opportunities and referrals — and that’s worth far more than winning a beat-down, low-margin job that wastes my crew’s capacity right now.
None of this works, by the way, unless you hold your price. I wrote about the day I learned that lesson — the checkbook stories only turn out fine because I stopped needing every checkbook.
One footnote on the database thing. I said I don’t remember details about people unless they’re in a database — that’s real, and it’s why my estimator can stand in a conference hall, look up every dealing we’ve ever had with a company, and walk up to the contact sounding like he remembers everything. The memory is in the system. It’s the one part of salesmanship I ever got good at: writing it down.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology