Skip to main content

Tips on Strengthening Your Advances

We’ve been discussing engagement, advances and how to brainstorm the best advances for your type of sale.  Before moving on I want to offer a few tips you can use to make the advances you’ve come up with even stronger and more effective.  You will find that by simply tweaking your advances, you can increase their effectiveness to a large degree.

Efficient or Effective?

Make Your Interaction as Direct & Personal as Possible – The first tip I’d like to share is to make each interaction as high-touch as possible.  Efficient is not always effective.  With the advent of the internet there are many ways to interact with prospects and clients that do not involve face-to-face contact (e.g., email, internet presentations, conference calls, etc.).

Are You Being High-Touch?

For many applications these are efficient and time-saving approaches.  And they should be used when appropriate. However, communication, understanding, and the development of relationships are all maximized in face-to-face interactions.  You cannot detect facial cues on conference calls and internet presentations that do not include video.

I have encountered a number of individuals that tend to be adverse to live face-to-face interactions.  They seem to prefer to stay hidden behind a computer using email, social media and conference calls.  All of these have there place.  However, you are giving away a great deal of your potential impact when you use these channels over live, face-to-face interactions.

Good, Better, Best

I realize that some business models are essentially built 100% around these low-cost models of interaction, so make the best of what you have.  This is a good, better, best situation.  Use the best, highest-touch option you have available to yourself.  The phone is better than email and social media.  Video is better than phone.  And on-site face-to-face meetings are better than both.

To the degree that you can be directly engaged in personal, face-to-face interactions with your prospects, the strength and effectiveness of your advances will be improved.

Closing Tip:  Use the highest touch option you have available to you for your meetings and you will be maximizing your interactions.

Until next time!

James

Leave a Reply