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I Hope My Wife Doesn’t Read This… Why Salespeople Should Romance Prospects

Amar Sheth
Amar Sheth

Prospects. We all have them.

Romance. We all want it.

One of the most frequent complaints and pet peeves prospects have about sales professionals is that we are too unprepared, pushy and unaware of the basics of the business.

Even the most seasoned professionals sometimes miss a beat and forget to go through their process. Check out what I’m talking with this screenshot from someone I’m connected to on LinkedIn.

Promance Social Selling

So why is that salespeople just aren’t willing to invest the time necessary to show prospects some romance?

Time Is The Single Biggest Factor to Success

Call me an optimist but I believe that most sales professionals have good intentions of wanting to help prospects with genuine business challenges. However, we’re hard pressed for time.

There’s a stat from one of the big research houses that should give you concern if you haven’t already seen it. Sales professionals, on average, spend only 21% of their day selling. That’s less than 100 minutes!

This limitation of time is our biggest issue. I get it. But shouldn’t you want to romance your prospects in sales?

That’s right, I’ve coined (an excessively cheesy) term: Promance.

PROMANCE: The Art of Romancing Prospects

I’ve been blessed to have been surrounded by many great sales professionals. One of the most powerful and recurring themes that surfaces time and again is their ability to probe, ask questions, and challenge prospects with grace.

They elevate the prospect’s thinking and help them realize how their projects can contribute to massive organizational goals. This is powerful.

This is Promance. It is not the art of the schmooze or anything excessively stereotypical that has come to define us in sales.

Quite simply, it’s the ability to:

1. Help prospects elevate dialog to big picture thinking.

2. Express (through tangible means) your commitment to their big picture.

3. Move past the solution.

It sounds so easy to do but this is a learned art. I am fortunate enough to see this daily by working with some of the best and brightest minds worldwide.

Use Social To Express Promance

As you consider tangible ways to demonstrate a clear understanding of the prospect’s challenges, consider how you’ll discover this and how you’ll deliver it as well. Use publically available information to conduct research, find correlations and examples to help hammer home your expertise.

It’s not an overnight task – it’s a multi-touch, multi-person journey that you’ll need to deploy. But if you’re willing to put in the time, you will see that using socially driven information can help skyrocket success.

How? Because, quite frankly, very few people (your competitors and peers) are doing this.

The Bottom Line

Time is the most valuable resource you have. By investing it into prospects, you can successfully demonstrate your desire to help them succeed – the by-product of that will be revenue.

So, when is the last time you truly practiced Promance? Tweet me @AmarSheth or connect with me on LinkedIn to share your story.

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