How do you engage a prospect who originally tells you, “I’m not interested”?

I often run into prospects who at first tell me they don’t have an interest or a need… but once I get them talking… it’s a whole different story. Sometimes, they turn into my best clients! How do you engage a prospect who originally tells you, “I’m not interested”?

Doyle Slayton

Sales & Leadership Strategist – SalesBlogcast.com Professional Speaker | Author | Social Media | Web 2.0 | TopLinked.com

Turn it into an opportunity for them to be the expert. Ask them if you can buy them lunch and pick their brains to help refine your approach for the next customer (be careful about walking the line between listening and selling). Get them talking. Ask lots of questions. Try to demonstrate knowledge and insight by asking the *right* questions and try to be complimentary about the things that seem innovative or well executed. If it’s relevant, talk about what you or your other clients have done that might be helpful (but not in the context of a sale. This is a “meeting of minds” and not a sales pitch) People love to be the experts and the valued for their knowledge (just look at Linkedin 🙂 A lot of people also react positively to the “Help me, Obi-Wan!” approach that they’re in a unique situation to be able to save you. If you also get someone who’s passionate about their business, you’ll develop a bond and rapport through this approach that you’ll never get by trying to directly sell to them. At the end of the session, *don’t go in for the kill*!!!!! If they perceive it as a sales pitch, you’re dead. Just thank them profusely, ask if they have any additional leads and try to keep the door open for followups. Then look for opportunities to hook up again (a new product or service offering, some new set of questions or ideas, etc.) Treat it as networking rather than sales and build your reputation with the client before jumping back in for the sale. It’s more difficult once you got the “Not Interested”, but it’s certainly not impossible

Is EPM just one more TLA or can it truely transform corporate performance?

Now that everyone has resource, customer, and supply chain management – all that is left is performance. Do you think sophisticated analytic and reporting tools that integrate nicely across the enterprise and not just vertically within an organization can be a key differentiator against competitors or do you think it provides nice charts but corporations still lack the internal governance to turn this into timely, actionable data?

Kyle Smith

Director of HR at MomentumSI

Enterprise Performance Management, IMHO is hollow without the underlying discipline, process and culture. A lot of companies drop in the tools and expect the discipline and data to magically follow. Instead, people waste inordinate amounts of time and effort learning how to “game the system” to get the results that management expects. A lot of organizations “think” that they have the maturity to get value out of these tools, but very few of them actually do.

The majority of “C” level executives make decisions based on gut feel and trust in subordinates. I don’t know of any of them that pore over the output of an EPM system to guide the business. I find it totally mind-boggling that billions are spent on these systems to collect, analyze and report on data that is rarely used by the supposed target audience and often has no direct correlation to the business goals or KPIs. (did we forget about balanced scorecards at some point?).

EPM in a mature organization is unlikely to be transformative since the underlying trees of metrics, disciplines and systems would already be in place. It could certainly allow for a lot of fine tuning. But it would be an evolutionary tool at best.

However, I think that attempts to implement EPM in a less mature organization can uncover the lack of discipline and the gaps in the other supporting systems. EPM as a catalyst can be revolutionary. Senior management would have to be open to supporting the underlying governance and process work required and the implementers would need to be honest about what gaps were uncovered during the design and implementation. Translating corporate strategy down into the various KGIs and KPIs, rebuilding broken and inefficient processes, blowing out the chaff and aligning around what’s important to the business is where the value would come from.

That’s just my opinion, of course.