At this point you have contacted your prospects and they have now become leads. 97% of the time you will not be able to sell your services during the initial contact with you prospects. Therefore I prefer to schedule another appointment to close new clients. The location depends; initial I only worked with offline clients within a relatively close radius so I could do meeting in person. However as my business grew and I began expanding my offline business I started to close clients over the phone as well. Both are viable options its just a matter of how aggressive you want to be in closing leads.
How to Prepare
Now that you’ve made appointments it’s time for you to begin preparing for your meeting. First be sure to follow up with the business owner sometime before to confirm your appointment. Once you start to prepare for a meeting you need to get yourself in the right mindset. Personally I am naturally a very confident person so it doesn’t take much for me. Regardless if you are confident or not, you MUST be confident in your abilities. You are the expert and have probably invested years and thousands of dollars investing in your skills, so have confidence in the services you have to offer.
Next you need to do some more in depth research on your leads. You should have some basic information about the business from your prospecting stage, now its time to take it up a notch. The amount and type of research you do depends on what services you are offering. But some basic research that you can include are things like: competition analysis, website analysis, keyword research etc. You can also include any information about additional services you may offer i.e. mobile search per month, video rankings or social media errors.
Once you have completed client research you should prepare a nice document which the client can review while you presenting. When I’m meeting with a new client I like to bring the following things
- Client questionnaire
- Professional information packet
- Any contracts needed
- Ipad or Netbook Laptop
The Meeting
When you start the meeting with a prospect the best thing to do is start building some rapport. When it comes to your offline business and managing clients rapport is your secret weapon. Rapport building starts with this first face to face meeting and continues throughout the entire time you provide offline services. Here are some great questions to ask to start building rapport during your first meeting:
- Tell me about your business
- How long have you have you had it
- So what did you do before starting this? How did you like it? Etc. (this line of questioning just helps build some personal rapport between you and the business owners)
- What are you goals for your business
- What are the biggest problem you have with you marketing efforts
- What are some areas of your web marketing that you would like to see improvements in your marketing
- When it comes to investing in new marketing efforts what are some of the criteria that you use
This line of questioning will help you build instant rapport with any business owner. You want to get the business owners talking about themselves, in so doing this will make the business owner like you!
After your initial rapport building line of questioning it is time for you to present your information. The information you present should be specifically created for that business and show how you can help their business. This also shows that you are an expert in the field of internet marketing. You can find lots of templates to use when presenting certain services to business owners within the Warrior Forum.
Close
Before you begin to sell its important to note that you should NOT be selling your services instead sell what your services can do for the business. With that in mind there is a very effective way to close the business owners. This method is known as the “logic close.” This means that after you have presented all of the information it’s simply a forgone conclusion that the business owner will purchase your services. You simply have to present the solutions from your presentation with some of the problems the business outlined earlier.
Personally I like to do this in the form of MORE QUESTIONS. For example when offering my SEO services I will go lead into my close the following way.
“John based off the information you told me it sounds like:
- You are the type of business owner that wants to get more leads on a consistent basis for your business, right?
- Your business could also benefit from increased customer loyalty, correct?
- Finally you want to stop wasting money on ineffective marketing and increase ROI, right?
“Well great John then it sounds like you would be interested in our Premium SEO services”
What’s Next
That’s it. The local close is simple and effective and what I use every time. Once you have your meeting set up you must prepare for the meeting. Get into the right mindset and have confidence in your services. Before your meeting you will also need to prepare some sales material to help show your product or services. During the meeting remember to build rapport with the business owner right away. Once you’ve developed some rapport simply present your information and move into the close.
Before you begin meeting with clients you should thoroughly practice a sales meeting. Also go through a couple of scenarios with someone just so you can get more acclimated with the process. The more comfortable you are with your sales presentation the more new clients you will close.