It's usually pretty easy to think of a time when you've spilled candy the wrong way. Maybe you made a presentation long before the prospect was ready to decide; maybe you spent a lot of time and energy sending promotional material to a prospect who wasn't a good fit in the first place.
Spilling candy is easy to do. It's easy to do too much and do it at the wrong time. It takes practice and skill to know what to share when.
One of my clients, who works at an insurance company, shared a great example with me of one way he makes sure he spills candy at the right time, to the right people.
This client routinely speaks with prospects who swear up and down that they don't want to change their auto insurance; they just want to look at their home insurance and improve it or add a policy. Many of these clients are new homeowners who need to obtain homeowner's insurance, but have an ongoing relationship with the agent they use for auto insurance. Understandably, they're reluctant to move away from that relationship.
However, my client knows that looking at home insurance and auto insurance together greatly increases the amount of options he's able to provide for these prospects. So when he talks with prospects who are particularly stubborn about the auto insurance issue, here's what he says:
"You know, I'm happy to look up home insurance options for you. If it so happens that we find a co-op that requires an auto policy, will you at least look at it?"
A lot of people are willing to look at it, and if they're not, my client doesn't have to waste time researching a lot of policies for them. There are just a few places that offer home insurance without an auto insurance bundle, so he's able to give them those choices easily.
But for the prospects who are willing to look at the pricing for both policies, they see the price of the auto policy and decide that they definitely want to look into changing that too.
Obviously, my client isn't spilling a lot of candy here, but it's a way for his prospects to realize that he does know what he's talking about, and he's not just trying to drum up extra business from suckers. People do business with people they know, like, and trust, and the way this client chooses to share his candy with the right people at the right time helps those prospects trust him.
Think about when you've spilled candy properly. What stage in the sales process was it? Who was the prospect in this situation? Think about it as specifically as you can, and then pull what you can from those situations that you can apply more generally.
