Paul Bishop

“It may seem like a preposterous assertion to say this, but you’d better be prepared because you are going to sell more.”

We are a contract manufacturer. Before Sales Concepts, we were quoting a lot of work but our success ratio was very low. Their training put us in a much better position. Today we quote fewer jobs and qualify prospects better. We’re using our resources more effectively and increasing our win rate. Sales Concepts helped us change the way we qualify people. We started asking the right questions. We started listening more than we talk. And we learned how to find the emotional drivers that might lead a prospect to give us their business. Once you understand the emotional drivers of the purchasing transaction, you can also weed out the pricing exercises from the real opportunities much more effectively. Some of the things we learned are counterintuitive. For example, we stopped bringing printed collateral to meetings. Everybody comes around and says, “Here’s a brochure, here’s what we do,” but all that stuff gets thrown out. Customers don’t want a menu, they want you to fix a problem. So today we go in with a blank notepad and ask questions to uncover the difficult problems that we can help them fix. If you can do that, you can immediately gain their confidence, and that leads to even bigger things. It may seem like a preposterous assertion to say you’d better be prepared because you are going to sell more. But today it almost feels like we’re short on capacity. We’re successfully selling at much higher levels, we’re operating multiple shifts, and the business is growing as a result.