One of my clients, a security integration company that has historically sold large projects and no recurring revenue, engaged with Vector Firm’s Growing RMR program about seven months ago. Although their six sales people understand the industry and perform very well, they never understood how to sell additional maintenance agreements or shift their projects to a managed services offering. Since last fall, that’s all changing…
Although the first four months of the year has been a complete shift in RMR performance, a personal highlight happened this week on a site walk. Training Session #5 of the Growing RMR program focuses on Outcome Questions – the subsequent questions the great ones ask that move the discussion to an emotional level. An Outcome Question asks the customer about the outcome of their scenario if they do nothing.
My client had the following dialogue:
Sales: What happens if those ptz cameras fail?
Customer: We issue an order to you, and you come out and fix it.
Sales: How long does that take?
Customer: Sometimes it takes weeks to push an order through our system.
These questions defined the scenario, but the following questions defined the outcome and made the customer emotionally engaged…
Sales: How do you know the status of your orders?
Customer: I constantly walk up front and ask about it – trying to push it through. I can be a real pain, but they usually respond.
Sales: Who is responsible if your system is down for weeks and something happens?
… after several seconds of silence…
Customer:That would be me.
Sales:You know, if you guys had one of our maintenance agreements you would never have to issue an order – you just log a service ticket with us and we’ll be out here within the day.
Customer: Yeah, you should add the pricing of that to the contract.
I know this because the sales person emailed me the entire conversation as he remembered it. His exact words were:
It worked like a charm, I was impressed at how it made him realize on his own the importance of a contract like this without me having to tell him.
Although we teach Outcome Questions in most of our programs, they’re most relevant in the Growing RMR program because of the change that is being introduced – if you don’t get your customer emotionally engaged they’ll never change… would you?
If you’re interested in learning about how our Growing RMR program can help your group:
