Me and my big mouth

Have you ever noticed that you can say too much in a sales meeting. This has happened to just about every consultant I know. You try to sell your services but end up teaching how to do your job. It is difficult enough convincing someone to trust you to provide a service without showing a few tricks of the trade.

I had this guy once who was looking to promote his internet business where he provided self service divorce papers online. He did not want to promote it online though because he knew that sites were offering for free this same service. So he wanted to promote in other ways. Talk about delaying the inevitable, he thought his business would be ruined if it ever got out. His success in the past was by running little word ads in the classified section of papers in the US. The majority of his clients were American and I guess he thought if he puts ads in Canadian papers they would figure it out? Anyways I told him my thoughts of what I would do to promote it. He said why didn't we think of that and I never heard from them again. Well that's one way to get free consulting.

How can you keep from selling yourself out of a job. Here are some easy tips that have worked well for me.

1. Plan Presentations- planning before hand what questions you think will come up. Answer them directly and without hesitation. If they ask for you to elaborate have a prepared answer for that like " If we are contracted to do the work we can go into more detail!"

2. Short Stories-Keep your stories of past examples of jobs short and do not expand on more than you have to.

3. Confidence-Be confident in what you are saying "um's" and "ah's" do not exude confidence. If they ask you a question and you don't know the answer tell them straight and that you would need to get back to them!

Telling exactly how you are going to do it, in an intial meeting will not help you to close the sale. If they say we are not convinced, Say why don't you give me a try, I can show you better than tell you. In the end the value they would get would be much larger than the handshake that says better luck next time.