They Ask, You Answer, 2nd Edition

31 How to Use Assignment Selling to Determine Compatibility

I want to start this chapter by giving you a simple example that’s close to home. Here at our digital sales and marketing agency, IMPACT, we also utilize an assignment selling process with our prospects. Keep in mind that our clients are other businesses, not consumers.

Because we have a very high number of leads coming into our system, we need to make sure that we’re working with good fits and not with bad fits. We want to make sure we’re dealing with informed and educated clients versus those who really have no clue as to what we are and the services we provide—people who haven’t done any research whatsoever.

In our case at IMPACT, we have a set of content (in video and textual format) that completely explains to a prospect our core philosophies of They Ask, You Answer, as well as what makes us unique as an agency. After a quick call with a member of our sales team immediately after the lead comes in, any prospect or company who is going to move to the next phase of the sales process has to have reviewed this content.

Without their doing this, we know it will present so many issues (of misaligned philosophies) in the sales process that we simply do not continue.

You may be wondering how we introduce this content to the prospect. On the first call with a prospect, it sounds something like this:

Mr. Jones, in order to make this process as productive as possible for your team, and in order to ensure you end up choosing ...