Do you want fries with that? You just gotta ask!!

Old folk law says (or some sales trainer from my past) that Mac Donald’s servers are the best sales people, and why’s that? Because they ask EVERY SINGLE TIME - ‘do you want fries with that?’

The law of the sale is, that’s if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

However the key to the sale is knowing how many times to ask, and knowing your audience to grade the ‘way you need to ask’!

I have always thought of myself as more of a consultant since running my own business, even though the end product of this 'consultative approach' is ultimately the sale, be that of magazine space, online adverts, lead generation, Jiujitsu Club memberships, club 18-30 holiday packages (now that’s a whole other story!) or any other job from my 20 years of working!

Where my business is today I see myself as ‘wanting to help other businesses’ so ‘being a salesperson’ doesn’t fit my self proclaimed role any more. I see myself as an outsourced lead generation planner for my clients and ‘most’ of them see me that way. (I hope and think!)

I have two examples of asking at the 'right time' and then the 'wrong time':

On the tread mill a few months ago doing my 10 minute warm up my PT Toby stood next to me

Just starting his first business as a PT in January 2022, full of energy. Across the road I could see a nursing home. ‘Why don’t you go in there and offer a group class for the residents’ he laughed for while and we carried on our session.

The next week I came in ‘I did go in there’ he said, and they said they were actually looking for someone now and I’m booked in for a weekly slot at double the rate I get for PT’ing people!!

Just ‘asking’ meant that he got income for his business he never thought he could have.

Within weeks he had popped in and ‘just asked’

5 nursing homes, each of which turned into regular clients paying double or more than his other income. It seems that any time he ‘asked’ there was never a bad outcome…

He did say when he was taking a class the other day, Frank Sinatra music playing on his beat box, he told them it was his 25th birthday that day and 96 year old ‘Jean’ came over and flashed a bit of boob and said ‘Happy birthday young man’!! Now ‘that’ is priceless!

In my industry I believe if one of my clients described me it would include; super enthusiastic, cares (a lot), very fast paced, wants to get involved, passionate about work and life. (I could be dreaming here, but this is what I would hope I portray)

Generally to get these vibes off me, or anyone you need to speak on the phone or face to face, be that a teams meeting, or (like in the olden days) actually seeing each other in person!

Recently I emailed a client saying how excited I was about some leads (the product my company provides) and they said they might be interested but

would get in contact in a few weeks time when they had space. 3 weeks passed and this certain supply of leads was absolutely obliterating any conversions needed so I reached out and asked the client if there was any movement yet as they were working really well.

The client wrote back at that point asking questions about them so I fed back info, saying about the expected conversion and how many we had available etc and said if they wanted a trial we could run the campaign for a few weeks, at which point the client replied saying that if/when they want to trial they would get in touch and that they didn’t like pushy sales people and usually they would back right off now as they felt they were being forced to buy the leads.

I was in total shock, in my head I was being efficient getting back to them 3 weeks later for a ‘check-in’, I was Uber excited as I knew 100% the leads would make them some serious money so they would be happy with the service we would provide. Also they had come back with questions a few times so I got Green Flag Vibes.

I replied saying that my aim is never to be pushy, and that my enthusiasm must have been misinterpreted over email and that I would leave it for them to contact me.

Lessons to learn:

• Emails can be read differently to the way you mean!

• The impression you ‘hope’ to give ‘may’ not be the impression you are actually giving!

• Even though I would be really impressed by a consistent sales person checking-in at regular intervals, there are some people that aren’t.

• Before having ongoing email backs and forth, getting to know a client over the phone or face2face gives them a better understanding of how much you care and might alleviate them potentially thinking you’re just after the sale.

I did take a look at myself and think, if I was my boss, if I worked for me, then I would say:

I would rather you work hard and sometimes risk being seen as pushy than never following up a potential new client, as so many opportunities could be lost by treading on egg shells.

The only advice I would give would be to:

let that client get to know you so they understand your motives which are excitement for their success, just so happens their success might also be our success too.