out of order- how not to kill the sale or delay a friendship

Every once in a while, we all do something that runs counter to our normal mod us operand i. Something that afterward, we end up feeling really embarrassed about. Thursday at Downward Dog was one such night for me.

A group of us decided to get together for happy hour, and 8 or 10 showed up. Good times. I met a few new people, and had a great time hanging with friends, mostly talking business.

One of the newcomers was a new business owner in town. I'd heard about him through some other contacts and had wanted to get in touch with him to find out what he was doing for his business insurance, a specialty of mine.

We got a chance to meet and chat for a minute or two and I popped the question, " by the way, who do you have taking care of your insurance for the office?" I hoped he would say that he'd not taken care of it- a chance for me to help. Unfortunately, he had already set it up as a requirement of the bank he got his loan through.

Normally, this is the point at which I would gracefully offer myself as a resource if he ever had questions, tell him it's great to meet him, and then transition to talking about some community groups he might be interested in getting involved with, talk with him about his family, and maybe introduce him to others at the event. I'd then make a note in my blackberry later, to follow up on the insurance thing a few months from now- hopefully after I've hung out with him at other events between now and then.

Unfortunately, I was stirred by my sales training of old, and went into a little bit of objection-handling, part of sales 101. I explained to him that even though he already has obtained coverage through someone else, that he still has the freedom to look at other quotes. If our coverage makes more sense, we can easily satisfy the banks requirement- we help people with that all the time. I then went in for an easy close and asked if I could follow up with him to take a look at his current coverage. He declined nicely, but the body language was clear- I'd been one of those annoying sales guys. Yikes.

I'm not sure what got into me. I am often guilty about being passionate about what I do. Rarely though do I regress back to my early days of sales 101. I prefer relationship, and then business. Sometimes it can be easy to cross that line from an elevator intro into a sales conversation when you know there is a need.

This whole interaction reminded me of a business trueism- people rarely can be persuaded to your point of view, until they feel like they know you. It would have been impossible for me to handle the guy's objections, because he didn't know yet if he could trust my answers. We still didn't really know eachother.

In retrospect, nothing wrong with getting into business conversations with new people you meet, but it's important to not progress farther than the relationship will allow.