Do you find it hard to get the information out of a prospect that you need to be able to effectively book an appointment with them and pass the information onto your sales team so that they can do a better job of closing them? Well, if so, this is for you.
I want to talk about why the prospect won’t open up to you right off the bat. You ever played that game Hedbanz?
There’s a game out there called Headbands and what it is is you take a card that has a picture of a person or a place or thing on it, and you put this little band around your head, and the card fits in the top, and the picture faces out to everyone. Everyone that’s in your group can see it except for you. So what you have to do is you have to ask the group questions to try and figure out what is the picture on the card.
And that goes along with a major issue that’s happening today when appointment coordinators are trying to book appointments. It’s the lack of proper questions. I read a very, very interesting statistic the other day. And it said that four-year-olds on average ask 400 questions a day. As adults, how many questions do we ask in a day? Not that many.
So the quality of the appointment that you’re trying to book and the quality of the prospect is going to be based largely on the questions that you ask them.
You see, the prospect won’t tell you much unless you ask the right questions. One of the industries that I see asking the wrong types of questions constantly is in the retail automotive business. It’s not that they don’t ask questions. They ask plenty of questions. They just don’t ask the right questions. Typical questions that I hear asked at car dealerships tend to be things like, “Can you come in today or tomorrow? Are you going to lease or finance? Do you have a trade-in?” These are great questions to ask down the road, but not right off the bat because all it’s going to do is put the prospect in a position that they feel like they’re not cared for.
All they feel like is a number. “Okay, this person’s going to come in tomorrow, hopefully. They’re going to lease, and they have a trade-in.” That’s all that’s cared about. What if your team took a step back and asked them questions to be able to better understand what it was that they were looking for and what types of issues and challenges they’re trying to solve with the purchase of a vehicle?
It’s time the appointment coordinators took a more proactive role in nurturing the relationship before the prospect books an appointment. There is an easy way to do this. You can find out how here