1. Being genuinely interested in your prospect’s personal and professional opinions will do as much (perhaps more) to develop rapport as identifying his personality style or discovering if he is a football, baseball or hockey fan.
2. It’s just as important to disqualify a selling opportunity as it is to qualify it.
3. What the prospect wants and what the prospect actually needs are rarely the same.
4. The prospect’s problem is never what he thinks it is.
5. It’s more important for the prospect to discover that he has a best-fit problem for your solution than it is to demonstrate that you have a best-fit solution for his problem.
6. When the prospect says “Money is no problem”, it is guaranteed to become one.
7. A prospect with a budget and a strong reluctance to spend it is no different than a prospect with no budget at all.
8. The objective of each encounter with a prospect is to either pave the way to the next step in the selling process and eventually a buying decision or to end the process.
9. When a prospect states that he can’t make a decision, he just did.
10. The financial investment to obtain your product or service is often less significant than the other investments the prospect must make to implement it.
11. Identifying how and by when a prospect will make a buying decision is just as important as discovering who is involved in the process.
12. If you wait for your customers to voluntarily provide you with referrals as a reward for the exceptional service you have delivered, you’ll be waiting a long time.
