Passing through security at Heathrow airport this morning I was faced with an opportunity to give the security team some feedback. Instead of the usual sheet of paper, I approached a machine which had four large push buttons. The first one coloured red had a big smile on it, the next a medium smile, the next one a frown and followed by a miserable looking face.
Very clever, because you just hit the button to indicate how you felt about the process.
How about using something like that in sales, perhaps to test or trial close. Or when coaching to test the positivity of your coachee? I’m not suggesting you create the same machine that I used in security today, although that might work.
For the coachee, you could quickly draw three faces – one smiling, one dead pan and one frowning. Next ask them to tick where they are.
With a customer you could use the scale of 1 to 10 to indicate how positive they are feeling about doing business with you and how well you’ve explained something quite complex.
I’m sure you’ve come up with some better ideas to test the water. And yes, of course good coaches and good salespeople just instinctively know how their proposition is impacting, but it doesn’t harm to check once in a while.
And yes, I cleared through security in under 5 minutes, how good was that. Maybe it was their efficient processes or probably that it was 7 in the morning. I hit the red smiling button as I headed to breakfast before my flight.
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