You’ve booked an appointment. Awesome. Great job. Now, what are you going to do? That’s what today’s article is about. Let me give you five things you need to know how to do before you go into an appointment.
The very first thing you want to do when you get your appointment planned is to make sure that you get there early. Now I know it seems like it’s probably common sense, and you probably think that it has something to do with just giving a first impression, but that’s not true. Yeah, that’s great. And it’s certainly something you want to do, but at the end of the day what you want to do is make sure that you have plenty of time to do recon in the lobby of this prospect. The longer you can be in the lobby without it being weird that you’re just sort of hanging out there all day, the better off it’s going to be because you’re going to learn about how this company promotes themself. What they think is important in terms of their value. You can see their mission statement. You could see a safety policy statement, And you can see all of the accolades and awards that they have brought in over the years. A secondary benefit of this is you can engage in conversation with the person that’s there at the reception desk because you want this person to be your ally going forward. The more you can learn about them, the better off you’re going to be because it will break the ice every single time you go in to meet with this future client.
The second thing you want to do is you want to make sure you take time to build rapport on the front end. You should have researched this person you’re meeting with and be able to have common ground before you ever walk in the front door. You should have things that the two of you can talk about that have absolutely nothing at all to do with business or the task at hand. But keep in mind there’s a delicate balance of what’s enough and what’s too much. You don’t want to put yourself in a position where this person is twiddling their thumbs, tired of small talk, and ready to get down to brass tacks.
The number three thing you need to do is you need to make sure you ask educated, open-ended questions. Educated open-ended questions are an excellent way for you to talk a little and listen a lot. You need to make sure that your prospect knows that you understand their business, but you want to understand them. There’s a difference between understanding an industry and understanding a specific company. You can demonstrate industry knowledge through your questioning, but you only understand a particular company through listening. Make sure that you are asking open-ended questions that you have planned, and you will learn way more than you ever thought possible.
Number four, you want to make sure you let them know you understood what they said. Ask great follow up questions that you have created on the fly. Now I’m not saying you have to make these things up that second. I want you to think about what the possible answers would be and come up with those questions for follow-up before you go into the meeting and then pick which ones you want to use. By demonstrating that you understand how they answered the question and asking an insightful follow-up question, you only build more credibility. How do you prepare for this? Well, truthfully, think about how an attorney might go about preparing for a deposition. If you’ve ever been through a deposition before, you know that they have a series of questions that they ask. After each of those is a series of follow-up questions, they have anticipated asking based on what your answer may be. Do the same thing. Anticipate what their response may be, have the follow-up questions, and roll with it. You will have credibility from that prospect at that point.
Number five and the most important, in my opinion, is book the next appointment. I never leave a meeting without booking the follow-up appointment. It takes all of the animosity out of the process. Don’t worry about getting them on the phone, or whether they’re going to respond to your email. Book the next appointment before you leave the meeting you’re on. If you do that, you will win more than you will lose.
These are five great tools for you to use when you go to a prospect meeting. If you do all five of these things, you are going to kill it in commercial insurance.
Until next time: Kill or get killed!
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