This is a program about listening and learning.
Most successful sellers, consultants and / or influencers believe the key to their success is the ability to communicate effectively with clients, and to develop and grow strong relationships with them. Very few of us are born with these skills and therefore, in order to be successful, we must learn and practice them.

Clients appreciate consultative selling. It helps differentiate you. You learn more non-obvious client needs. You get to provide more added value to the client. It is more fun and fulfilling and you are more successful. To do this requires an in-depth understanding of the challenges, issues, changes and priorities in your clients industry, their enterprise, their department / workgroup, and their personal life. In other words, what their 'real-to-do-list' looks like.

In this module, you will acquire an understanding for 'Total Needs', 'The 3 Kinds of Needs', and participate in a clinic focusing on the clients' 'Personal Crank' and 'Real-To-Do List'.

In this workshop, we talk about the benefits to both you and the client of having structure in your meetings. You will also help to develop a structure for meetings that is truly consultative. While this structure is critical for all client meetings, it can also be used to structure presentations, proposals and even entire sales initiatives.

In this workshop, you will also develop a structured Meeting Plan, a tool that will force you to be consultative in all your client meetings (both face-to-face, and by telephone). The Meeting Plan is the foundation of the Consultative Client Relationship Skills Workshop, and the most critical tool you will learn to use in the three-day program. The Meeting Plan will also be used as the basis for the three main role-plays you will participate in during the workshop.

Diagnosing Client Needs
One of the most important skills to master is the ability to identify, understand and document client needs or requirements. The success of most sales and consulting engagements, is heavily influenced by your ability to properly diagnose client needs.

This workshop is designed to help you understand, develop, and practice asking 'Open-Mind', and 'Open-Fact', questions in order to better understand your clients challenges, problems, issues, concerns, priorities, etc. This workshop also focuses on the listening and note-taking skills required to help you assimilate what the client is saying once you've asked a 'good' question. These skills help to minimize the dangerous, but common, tendencies of selective listening and wishful thinking.

Finally, you will learn and practice a tool to help you clarify the meaning, reason, and significance of what the client has said, to better understand what the client's real need is.

In this workshop, you will learn the self-discipline to counter natural wishful thinking (putting a positive 'spin' on what the client says) and / or selective listening (hearing only what you want to hear) when considering opportunities. You will also learn to how to ask the right questions early in the sales cycle to help you to determine whether or not to proceed with an opportunity.

You will do this through the use and practice of the 'ADD UP' tool for qualifying opportunities. The benefits of using this tool are savings in your time, energy and resources, as well as identifying the opportunities you should win.

In this workshop, you will learn how to present the benefits of your solution or service such that the client knows which of their needs you are addressing. The client also understands the feature and the advantage of your solution or service, sees the benefit of it in terms of 'what it means to me' (the client), and agrees with the benefits.

In this workshop you will also learn how to leverage the benefits of your solution. Most of our solutions have intangible benefits associated with them - that is, benefits that you can't measure and present to the client. The key to leverage is the ability to convert these intangible benefits to hard numbers and dollars that will have a greater impact on your client.

When you get an objection, do you sometimes: become nervous? defensive? address the symptom instead of the problem? answer the wrong objection? And does the client like the process by which you attempt to handle their objection?

Interestingly, clients respond more positively and tend to remember over a longer term, the process by which you handled the objection, as opposed to your actual answer to an objection.

In this workshop, you will learn and practice a process for handling objections through the use of the 'CAT ACT' tool. This tool will help you uncover the real issue or objection, help you get a good answer to it, confirm resolution of it, and sometimes convert the objection into a benefit - with the client actually enjoying the process!

In this workshop, you will learn how to identify the right time to 'trial commit' the client in a consultative, professional and simple manner. You will also learn a process to help you overcome the three most common client 'reasons' to delay making a commitment.

The advantage of this approach is that clients actually like it, it saves both you and the client time, it increases your confidence, and it can help to eliminate the risk of the environment within the opportunity changing against you.

This program is licensed from Effectivation Inc.

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