The best salespeople are those who bring value to their customers! Don't try to sell more, look for the best way to help your prospects.

Your problem is to know and understand your prospect's expectations. This is one of the reasons why it's unthinkable to reach a customer meeting without knowing the uses and needs of the company you're approaching. This information is essential for adapting your approach at every stage of the sales cycle.

In this article, we take you step-by-step through the best practices observed in the best companies for successfully transforming a customer appointment and thus boosting business development.

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1. Divide your customer appointment into 3 steps:

Stimulate interest in your product or service with cold calling

If your sales prospecting method is based on outbound (not to be confused with inbound), your first step is a cold call. This step is essential! It's probably the most complicated to understand, but with the right method, it's the most effective. This step should never be a presentation of your product; it's dedicated to setting up a customer discovery meeting. We give you our advice and methodology in this article: Cold calling: the top telephone prospecting technique of 2024?

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Arrange a discovery call before your demo call.

This is the most important customer meeting in your sales process. Your discovery calls will set the trajectory of your presentation and determine how you conduct the rest of your process.

If your discovery call is well executed, you'll have developed an authoritative business relationship with your prospect.

At Modjo, the sales team always organizes a 15-minute call to understand our prospects' needs and problems.

Advantage no. 1:

> Right from the start, you need to strengthen the customer relationship. This call will anchor the relationship and create a bond with the person. Selling is all about human relations, and to create a relationship of trust, an intuitu personae with your prospect is essential.

Make the effort to listen to your prospect, understand his needs and discover his problems.

On average, Modjo users talk 38% of the time during a customer meeting classified as a "discovery call". This means that the salesperson or sales force speaks only 38% of the time during these calls, leaving plenty of room for active listening, but also for understanding the needs expressed by the prospect's sales manager, sales director, etc.
And yes, that's how you quickly enrich your customer portfolio!

Advantage no. 2:

> You can customize the demonstration of your solution to suit the different uses of your target audience. It's a good idea to present all the features. Unless your solution/product serves a single purpose, it's unlikely that the prospect/company you've contacted will appreciate all your solution's features.

The best way to make a demo a success: focus on uses! Each feature you present must answer a problem.

Example: during a demonstration, when we present our functionality for creating a library of best business practices, we focus our presentation on the issue of onboarding new employees.

Dirty questions: are you recruiting a lot at the moment? What are your integration problems?

Prospect's answer: "I have a real problem with training new salespeople who join the team. I'd like to speed up the training, but I'm not available all day to train them one-on-one."

During my meeting with the customer to present the tool, I'll build on what he told me during the discovery call. Naturally, I'll focus my presentation on the functionalities that can meet their needs. This approach requires a good knowledge of your product and its various uses, to maximize my chances of signing up new customers.

I'm well aware that some sectors don't work exactly like that, but overall, the structure: canvassing, discovery, demonstration, follow-up, is increasingly applied in non-transactional BtoB or BtoC organizations, as an essential component of their sales policy and/or sales activity."

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Use all available resources to find out as much as possible about your prospect.

> E-mail exchanges

> Upstream telephone exchanges

> Information about your LinkedIn account

These are all levers to help you better understand the person you're talking to.
Effective prospecting enables you to find or create a link with the person. In the team, it's quite common in a sales approach to contact prospects who share a common relationship. Playing as a team has a real impact on overall team performance.

2. Our "made in Modjo" tips for validating your customer appointment:

Prove your expertise!

"You're the undisputed expert in your market and you've mastered the best sales techniques."

If the person you're talking to feels you're an expert in your field, he'll be more confident and more inclined to let you accompany him. This can make all the difference in the long run. If you understand your prospect's problems and provide a relevant response, he'll choose your company to support him.

Make your prospect say what you mean!

When you present your solution to them, ask for their opinion on how they might use your product.

"It's functional, what do you think it's good for?"

If the answer perfectly matches the feature's use cases, you've won! Make sure you don't guide the answer, but accompany it. The tricky part of this exercise is directing your thoughts.

Why adopt this strategy? If your prospect understands the benefits of your service/product, objections will be that much easier to overcome.

Objection: "On the other hand, I think the tool is expensive"
Your answer: "I can understand that, but when you told me about the use you could make of it and its impact on your performance, do you think it's worth it?"

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Follow-up on your customer appointment :

Your call's over, you've just completed your next customer meeting to validate the sale. But don't stop there! Now's the time to share a summary of your discussion and the points that were raised, highlighting how these points contribute to your prospect's business objectives.

Our top performers always take the time to send a note to confirm that they understand the issues and the benefits that Modjo will bring to their prospects. This can also raise lingering doubts. Let's not forget customer loyalty: you have to build loyalty right from the start!

Why is this important?

Your contact may not be the final decision-maker. He or she may wish to discuss it with his or her team and the various project stakeholders.

Structured note-taking will make it easier for them to share information about your business activities. It's not necessarily necessary to go into all the details of the call. However, you do need to provide a minimum amount of information, so that your caller is fully informed.

Include the link to your call in your report:

Modjo users use the call-sharing function. Thanks to the sharing functionality directly integrated into our tool, all it takes is one click for the caller to receive a link to connect to the public version of Modjo. They can then retrieve the entire exchange and share it with the various stakeholders, with the added bonus of an automated CRM. A real time-saver for him, and an extra negotiating weight for you.

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Use the data to improve your next customer meeting.

There are a multitude of subtle but undeniable buying signals that can help you determine the extent to which your potential customers are proactively interested in your sales pitch.

The most convincing example is his propensity to ask questions. Whether it's about price, product, next steps or your customers' track record. All these questions show you that he's planning to continue the discussion with your company.

Other signs of interest include words or phrases that can tell you that your prospect is really excited about your product or service, such as: "Impressive", "Congratulations", "That's great", "Nice work", "That's crazy", etc.

The downside: how do you react to these verbal buy signals? Today, technology allows us to create a whole new analysis grid via tools like Modjo. Our tool allows you, for example, to easily measure the effectiveness of your sales pitch and thus adjust your action plan to better manage your future meetings with customers.

Modjo is a conversational intelligence platform that analyzes your sales reps' calls in order to identify the speeches that will make them more effective and relevant during their customer meeting(s).

Of course, no matter how you go about it, even if you're just tracking data on a Google Sheet document, it's essential to be able to measure the relevance of your sales pitch so you can be better in the next round.

At Modjo, we are convinced that a sales team that wants to progress must use data to improve its sales efficiency.

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Better,

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