Sales conversation analysis

As you all know, for our final project in class we had to perform a mock sales conversation with one of the TAs or professor Sweet. I was one of the first ones to go in my class so I was nervous because I was not going to see many other people go so I can learn from them and maybe form some strategies to make my conversation go better. I had written some questions beforehand that I was going to ask to start the conversation and try to base my other questions off of answers from the client. My situation was that I am the CEO of marathon landscaping and I was selling to a lady that was the head of an HOA board for a retirement community.

I started off by asking the client  (Katie Rose) where she was from and she said Pittsburgh so I took off from there and said that I had just moved my company to Pittsburgh and was looking for new clients to attend to. I felt this was a good place to start off and from there I had confidence in myself as a salesman. I had given Katie Rose the background that she was not satisfied with her last customer and that she was looking for something else.

Instead of getting to know her better, I decided to jump into the dissatisfaction with her previous client. I felt that I was diving for the real pain and that is where I could offer her my landscaping services or set up an appointment. I asked on a scale from 1-10 how the other client did and she said 6.5 because they did the job but did not exceed expectations. I jumped at this immediately instead of diving into the pain more and tried to explain that we our determined on filling the needs of the customer and will get back to them on time and came off too desperate by offering a 5% discount if we do not get back in 24 hours. I ended up getting an appointment but I felt like I rushed the conversation and did not invest in the client as much as I should have.