Why business owners buy
Everything that happens before a price is ever said. He does not need you to discover he has a problem. He lives there. He needs you to tell him something he did not already know.
They are not the same call
Run meeting rules on a cold call and you get hung up on, because you are doing surgery on a guy who never asked to see a doctor.
Run cold call rules in a meeting and you never close, because you just booked another conversation nobody needed.
THE COLD CALL
- Job: earn the meeting
- Minimal pain
- Zero pitch
- One value drop, one soft qualifier
- Ends on two specific times
THE MEETING
- Job: earn the money
- Deep discovery
- Pain in dollars
- You may say nothing about yourself for 15 minutes
- Ends on next steps, on the call
Why you teach before you ask
Naming his problem puts him on defense. Naming a change puts you both on the same side of the table looking at it.
Three beats, in order. Build them once for your niche and they never change.
Beat one: name the change
Five years ago most of your jobs came from somebody's neighbor. Today a guy needs a roof, he has never bought one before, and he is not calling his neighbor. He is on his phone for an afternoon and he builds a short list of three, and by the time anybody talks to a human being that list is already closed.
Beat two: winners and losers
People do not move to gain. They move to not lose.
The roofers who show up in that afternoon are booked out. The ones still waiting on referrals are not getting fewer referrals, they are getting the same ones they always got, and the growth is going somewhere else. The quiet part is they usually cannot tell you when it started.
Beat three: what good looks like
Describe the destination, not your service.
What you actually want is boring. A predictable number of homeowners every week who already know your name before they call, so your calendar is not a coin flip based on the weather.
The four layers, in order
Implication is the layer everybody skips and it is the only one that makes anybody buy. Situation and Problem make you sound interested. Implication makes him do arithmetic he has been avoiding.
Consequence questions
The layer after Implication. Implication prices the problem today. This prices the problem if nothing changes.
If nothing changes and you are sitting exactly here twelve months from now, what does that look like for you?
Is that something you are okay settling for?
IMPLICATION
- What is it costing you
- A fact
- People live with facts forever
- Creates awareness
CONSEQUENCE
- What does this look like in a year
- A picture
- Nobody wants to live in that one
- Creates urgency
The math, out loud, in his numbers
Do it in front of him. Write it where he can see it. That number is the whole sale.
That math is about his problem. Not about my price, not my ROI, not what he gets back from hiring me.
The number that moves a business owner is the one that is already leaving his business whether I exist or not.