BTM Event Video: Handshake CRO Kiva Kolstein – How do you orchestrate the perfect sale? What is sales coreography?

Building the Sales Machine (BTM) Event Series: we post clips of the best questions that where answered during our live events, so you can take the best ideas back to your teams and companies for further discussion.

Eric from Sales Machine: 

We’ve talked about this before, the sales choreography, how do you set up that choreography and maestro that sale?

Kiva Kolstein:

So I believe to my core that a successful seller should choreograph the entire experience.

Counter-intuitively people think that when you memorize, you end up becoming less creative.  Actually, the opposite is true, if you’ve memorized your pitch or demo, you go in knowing what you want to say about the company you work for.  You are freed up to be in the moment, to have a real conversation with the person you are meeting. Instead of thinking about what you have to say next.

Choreographing the entire experience is doing that on steroids.  What I mean is that every time you touch a potential prospect or customer, you have an impact on the outcome of that deal.  Positively or negatively, sometimes in a big way, sometimes in a small way.

Why not choreograph the entire experience and think in advance of the things that you’ll do “if”.

Let me give you some examples:

It’s the morning of your big meeting, what are you doing with your colleague to prepare for that meeting?

• What are you doing in the lobby of the hotel with the person with whom you’re traveling?
• How are you assigning parts?
• Are you running through the deck and demo?
• Have you determined who’s going to ask which question when the question gets asked?

Then, you are in the lobby of the company you are meeting with. What are you doing?

• There’s the companies annual report on the coffee table in the lobby, do you read it?
•  Which part do you read?
• Do you read the CEO letter to the shareholders or the 10k?
• If you’re reading the 10k, what specific parts of it do you pull out that will be useful to your meeting?

• Then, you see the receptionist there that will call your prospect, what questions can you ask them? What can that person deliver to you?
• Then, your prospects assistant comes down to meet you, what questions do you ask them in the elevator?
• Or let’s say that your prospect comes down to meet you, but you know there are 5 other people, that you’ve never met, in the conference room waiting for you. Do you start talking about your company, or do you hold off so the 5 other people upstairs can hear the same thing?
• They ask you if you want coffee, do take a walk to the coffee maker with them and chit chat or do you just say yes and wait for them to give it you?
• You get in the meeting and the technology feels, what do you do when that happens? What kinds of questions might you ask…

The point is, you can keep going forever, you should keep going through the entire sales cycle.  Through the first-call, the second call, every single touch you have the opportunity to impact the outcome of a deal.  So pay attention, and choreograph the experience for yourself.