What do you do? It’s a simple question that you need to answer so that prospects can buy from you and others can recommend you. You will have to answer this question when you make your sales introduction at business meetings, chamber of commerce meetings and other networking events. I see all too often that when salespeople and business professionals introduce themselves they are not helping their sales.
They talk too much in their sales introduction.
You have a limited amount of time, often 60 seconds, to introduce yourself in a business setting. Too many people make the mistake of talking too much. Then they say the wrong things about their business. Here’s an example.
Let’s say you were a watch repair company. How many people in the chamber of commerce meeting want to know how you fix watches with all its tedious detail? Unless it’s a group of engineers, I would say no one. Most people who wear watches care about just one thing about the repair. They want a watch that tells accurate time. From a customer service standpoint if people take a watch in for repair, they want it returned as quickly as possible.
Instead of telling the audience about how large your inventory is, how many people you have working for you and other pieces of information that describe your work, only say what all that information means for a customer. Yes, listeners need to know you repair watches, but only in a way that they care about.
You would say, “I’m John with Company X Watch Repair. I repair watches quickly and precisely so my customers get their watches returned better than they brought them in. After my work, their timepieces tell accurate time for a long, long time.”
They identify the wrong prospects.
The probability that a prospect is in your group might be low. If that’s the case your objective with your introduction is for the listeners to be able to identify a good prospect for you from the people they know. You don’t help yourself when you say, “A good prospect for me is someone with a budget.”
You are making it almost impossible to get a good prospect when you identify the entire universe as a possible prospect. Why? It’s harder for people to think in generalities than it is in specifics. Instead of saying that everyone is a prospect, think about who you would like as your ideal prospect. Who are the businesses you enjoy working with? What types of people are easier for you to work with? Those are the people you should say are your prospects. Be as specific as you can. Include why they are good prospects for you.
You could say if you were a CPA, “I work with growing companies because they need my experience to reduce taxes and increase profits. I work with my clients so that they’re even more profitable.”
The goal of an effective introduction is to get people curious enough about your work to come up to you after your introduction to learn more about your work. You will bore people and convince them that they know all about your work if you’re talking too much about extraneous information. They won’t come up to you after. You won’t get referrals when you make it harder to refer people to you.
The next time you are asked what do you do, I hope you tell them what you could do for them. That will get you sales.
So what do I do? I work with salespeople to get them more appointments and sales when they’re at the appointment. Let’s talk!