Whether you’re pitching a product, service, or idea, mastering the art of engagement can significantly impact your sales outcomes. Just ask Craig Kohler, a sales consultant at TKK Electronics in Wisconsin. Kohler, who happens to also be a teacher in his free time, has been in sales for over 40 years. And naturally, he’s seen all the ways a sale can go right and all the ways a sale can go awry. Our marketing consultant Lara recently sat down with the sales consultant-extraordinaire to find out what it takes to have such an illustrious career in sales and how the sales industry has changed since his beginnings in it. And what he had to offer was more than we could have asked for. Let’s start with his top 3 keys to keeping a captivated client.
3 Keys to Keeping a Captivated Client
1. Build a Strong Rapport Quickly
As Kohler notes, in sales, time is of the essence, so, as he suggests, you’ll first need to find something that you and your client(s) can quickly connect through.
Often, this requires a close attention to how your audience is initially responding to you. Other times, it might require a bit of homework before you meet. This might look like doing some digging to find common connections or interests, or even just striking up a conversation about something you observe about them. It might be something as simple as noticing the dog sitting at their door in the background of their screen over Zoom. (Kohler himself often fosters dogs, so this was a quick point of connection between him and Lara.)
Building these points of connection is, after all, the first step in earning a client’s trust. And if done well, you might just have a recurrent client, or even a client who doesn’t buy from you now, but remembers you later-on down the road when the time is right for them.
2. Use Approachable Language in Your Sales Pitches
Perhaps indicative of his experience as a teacher—mostly, that is, teaching younger students in mathematics, social studies, and language arts—Kohler is a no-nonsense kind of person. Specifically, he refuses to use jargon that isolates or neglects his audiences. And this, we feel, is one of the ways he demonstrates his extraordinary skills of keeping a captivated client.
After all, teaching, as Kohler notes, is very similar to working in sales in that your success revolves around keeping the attention of your audiences. And it’s one thing to showcase your knowledge about your field of work, but it’s a whole other thing to be able to accurately communicate about it without being demeaning or patronizing. This kind of approach can, in fact, limit your sales, Kohler says.
So, instead of using specific jargon that a client will certainly not be familiar with but will make you seem more knowledgable, break the information down into memorable and accessible language the client can understand. Make sure they’re with you every step of the way so that they trust they can ask you questions and feel fully-informed about your product/service.
Certainly, Kohler says, you can introduce acronyms or other devices to help your client remember or better understand the information you offer. But crucially, he suggests, cut out any pretension or unnecessary language that might put up a barrier between you and your audience.
3. Read Your Audience and Know Their Needs
Of course, it’s not enough to merely temporarily connect with and captivate your audience. You’ll need to be able to maintain their attention, and again, like students in a classroom, this can be a challenging task if you’re not equipped with the right skills.
One of these skills, Kohler notes, is being able to read the room. How is your audience responding to your presentation or discussion. Are they engaged as meaningfully after 15 to 20 minutes into your pitch as they were at the beginning of it? Are you losing their attention?
And certainly, with the rise of short-form content in the past few years, audience attention spans have indeed become shorter than what they used to be. But this doesn’t mean you can’t meaningfully engage with your clients as you might’ve been able to 30 years ago. It just means having to adapt your sales pitches to meet the needs of your audiences.
Of course, some signs you might need to switch gears might be more clear than others, Kohler says. You might see a yawn or someone pull out their phone if they’re so bold to do so. But other tells might be something more subtle like less head nodding or less verbal responses back and forth. If this happens, Kohler suggests considering taking a brief bathroom break and returning to the matter with fresh minds and eyes. Otherwise, try switching gears and making the matter more engaging through dialogues or activities.
Qualities to Have to Keep Your Audience Captivated
While all of the above sound very logical to Lara, she admits to Kohler that she can’t help but feel that she nevertheless could not achieve such success in sales as he has had. When he asks her why she thinks so, she suggests that, as many psychometric assessments suggest, some people are just better suited for working in sales than others. She, for one, feels very uncomfortable with sales, as she suggests she would never want to pressure someone into a sale.
But Kohler is quick to rebut. He suggests instead that certainly, there are qualities a good salesperson should have, but that he mostly prioritizes the following qualities.
1. Honesty
Kohler says that from his experience, one of the most important qualities he has demonstrated in sales is his unrelenting honesty. “If I don’t have what you need,” he says, “it is on me to be honest enough to say, ‘you know what? I don’t think this is going to be the best use of our time right now.'” This is so that the audience knows that you’re not pushing a sale that won’t actually benefit them. And at the same time, it allows you to keep a foot in the door to say that you’re always available for them if and when the time does come.
2. Passion
“Everyone can sell something,” Kohler suggests, “because everyone has passion about something.” That is, you have two or three things in your life that you care a lot about. It might be fashion, it might be food, it might be cars, he suggests, but whatever it is, it won’t sound like sales, it’ll sound like explaining why that thing is really important
3. Persistence
Lastly, of course, working in sales requires a lot of persistence. That is, it’s not enough to just put in hard work once to either find or connect with a client. In order to maintain that client and make meaningful connections that might lead to future sales and other opportunities, you need to put in consistent work regularly. Ever the teacher and mentor, Kohler calls this doing your homework.
Before heading into your next sales meeting, brush up on how that account is going and some of the notes that might help you continue to feel connected to your client in meaningful ways that show you’re engaged and care.
Special thanks to Craig Kohler for the expert advice featured in this blog post!
If you have expert advice you’d like to offer us and be featured in a blog post like this one, let us know! Leave a comment on our latest LinkedIn post letting us know what expert advice you have to share.
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