Second stage of professional selling skills (sales cycle) is the call where the sales person (medical rep) will be face to face with his customer. We remember you that call stages are four: approach, presentation, handling customer response and close.
Approach means meet the customer and greet him then start the relationship with him. This simply means opening the call. Medical rep appearance and his way of opening has a great impact on starting and building the relationship with customer in this early step of sales call. Medical rep must get the customer attention. Not only that but also stimulate customer awareness and provide a smart transition into the presentation.
This step takes few minutes or seconds so you must make a good favorable impression to your customer. Sales person can use intelligent ice break with his customer in the first visit where there is a tension between the two persons in the start. This tension decreases by time so sales person can start with some things not related to business like; location, weather …Etc.
Now how can sales person or medical rep use different techniques of approach? If we look at the call: Who will attend it? The sales person, the customer and a participating thing between the two which is the product. The customer has his own needs, the sales person has his objective and the product has its own benefits.
So medical rep can approach his customer in three ways: In a form of his objectives, in a form of customer’s needs (known or unknown) and in a form of product benefits. Under these three objectives we can classify approach into different types:
- Introductory approach.
- Product approach.
- Shock approach.
- Patient’s benefit approach.
- Survey approach.
- Question approach.
- Referral approach.
- Flattering approach.
Each type of these approaches is suitable for one customer and not suitable for the other. So remember them we will come back to them when we discuss customer’s styles. Finally keep in your mind that: First impression is the last impression; the way you look, You act , You speak!
