We Just Don't Know Until We Elicit
by: KenrickCleveland |
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I'm sure you've heard the old English idiom, 'the devil is in the details.' Involved in any plan or scheme are often things that will take the most thought or time in the long term to smooth out. The same goes for criteria elicitation. Sometimes we need to get deeper than the surface answers we're getting from our prospects. We need to explore the details and definitions of exactly what it is they want.
At the foundation of all sales is your prospect's criteria. To use a sports metaphor, eliciting their criteria is like rolling that ball down with no gutter balls. Further defining their criteria, getting the details, is like getting a strike each and every time.
Here's how definitions work.
I've done a lot of trainings and had many students in my coaching club. Everyone has their own specific reason for coming, yet many of them have very similar sounding criteria. If I have two students who tell me that the reason they're at the training is because what's being taught is very important to them in their sales, well, that's the surface criteria.
If you ask them, "Is this important to you? Do you really want to learn this?" Both of them will say yes.
When you ask the first person they say they're there because they want to learn new skills. And so your follow up question is to ask what that means and they say that they want to see a list of skills and they want to participate in exercises using the skills so they can learn them.
The second person when you ask them what's important about what's being taught in the training, they say, it's to be recognized. That's a completely different criteria. When you ask what that means, they might say, they want to have the class participants recognize their skill and they want to be recognized by the instructor as skilled.
So these two students are willing to pay for and participate in this training, but the similarities in their criteria re: the training being important to them, are backed up by radically different definitions.
If you've ever taught in front of a group, you'll know what I'm talking about. In any group you're teaching, there will be a section of people that probably know your material and maybe reasonably well, or at least think they do. There will be a group of people that are thinking, wow, I'm really in the presence of a master who I've studied for years.
You'll also have a majority of people interested in really simply looking to gain knowledge for the sake of knowledge and value that above all else.
It is very important that you begin to understand that every time you think you know what someone wants, unless you ask the questions, you don't know what they want. You're not on target or on track and until you elicit both the criteria, the meaning, and the definition, you are missing the boat.
Knowing criteria is an awesome start. And if you want to bowl strike after strike, the key is to learn how to define their criteria.
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About the Author
Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of wealthy clients using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques.
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