Imagine that it’s the end of the month and you’re still significantly away from your sales target, you have one opportunity, a light by the end of the tunnel, you do your homework and you realize that if you make this right you’ll be smooth sailing over your sales target and not only that you’ll get the best client in the whole of the continent on board.
Soon enough you dig deep and you find out that you’ll be pitching to the big daddy of the industry who typically sits through 7-8 pitches a day! Needless to say, only a minor percent of them end up getting selected.
This is a man who knows it all in and out, there are no ways you can fast/smart talk this guy into making a deal. Finally, the day arrives and you are pitching to the big daddy, at first he listens through your presentation with an expressionless face and then abruptly stops you and says “Skip the generic make me feel good slides and tell me how much do you want”. You’re startled your flow has been disrupted and you realize the deal is slipping away from you.
An average salesperson would quickly skip the slides fast/smart talk discuss the price and would hope that the deal falls into their lap. In 90% of the cases that does not happen, in the remaining 10%, the deal happens because the client has too little time in juggling between pitches and impulsively decides on you.
So what do you do? Are you one of the salespeople who come back to the office without the deal and cover it up by saying that the client was not in sync with the services we were offering? At the end of the day, all the pitches and all the presentations have almost the same material with the same level of creativity and sophistication, the difference is how you control the party you’re pitching to, how you establish that you’re in charge and how the meeting steers and concludes according to your terms.
Now coming back to the scenario, only this time the person pitching to the big daddy is you, with an in-depth knowledge of neuro finance, the moment you’re put on the back seat by the daddy, you bounce back with something finance neurologists call frame control. You control the frame, through an intriguing story and in the blink of an eye the client has surrendered his full attention.
The presentation concludes and the big daddy comes to you and says “Keeping aside the deal what the hell was that pitch? Only I pitch like that”.
Rather than getting into the theory of frame control, let me explain it to you with the help of an example. You’re pitching to a client who lost interest and started to scribble in his notebook, applying the frame control technique a smart salesperson halts the meeting and tells the client “Okay let’s keep aside the pitch I think Mr. Client has drawn something I’d like to buy, so what is the cost of this masterpiece.” Everyone is startled the attention shifts back to you and establishes you as the energy that is driving the meeting.
There are set categories of frame controls that you can use to always drive the meeting in your direction establish the authority and drive the meeting like you want to. You can dig deeper into frame controls and neuro finance in our forthcoming articles.