The Purpose Statement

Wednesday, February 7 2024
your purpose statement

When you are meeting a prospective client, what is the purpose statement and how do you use it? Make sure you establish mutually beneficial reasons for both of you to be at this meeting.

Match Need to Value

If we are truly interested in meeting the needs of our prospects, then we must have a strategy to understand what ‘keeps them up at night’. Take time to understand if they have a problem or opportunity that we can help solve, because we need to establish trust and demonstrate a sincere desire to learn about them. Once we understand their needs, we can consider whether what we do will benefit them.

Too often, we are unintentionally focused on sharing what we know about our offerings first, and the client’s needs second. We provide a long list of features that we offer, but we don’t really know if these features line up with the client’s needs. Simply because we don’t spend enough time getting to know them!

The Purpose Statement

Be upfront and honest, so we aren’t giving salespeople a bad name. Do what we say we were going to do. One way to do that is to state our purpose clearly when we first meet. It might go something like this:

(Name), I appreciate you taking the time to see me. I know you’re busy so just to make sure we’re on the same page, my purpose in seeing you today is to do three things:

  • First, I’d like to learn more about you and your business.
  • Second, I’d like to briefly introduce myself, and my company, to give you a flavour of who we are.
  • Finally, if what we do could be of benefit to you, then we can explore how we might support your business. Does that sound fair?

Now, the prospect understands that:

  • We’re a professional who is not about to waste their time.
  • We have an agenda prepared.
  • We are trustworthy.

They can then relax and be curious about what we might do for them. We’ve achieved our goal for this stage of the sales process and laid the groundwork for a successful sales relationship.

Want to make more meaningful sales calls? Start by having a call with TAC.