People buy from people whom they like, respect, and trust, so selling is really about building and managing relationships. The first step is to find out what your customers expect and demand, and what you need to do to respond accordingly.
A thick skin: knowing how to deal with failure and understand and understanding that even the best lose more often than they would like to.
Tenacity: knowing that daunting problems cannot be tackled without effort and determination.
Selling isn’t a moment of inspiration; it is not about force of argument or the strength of your personality. It is a process. The process is fairly easy to understand, but hard to do.
You can’t just walk into a customer’s office and kick off a sales meeting — it needs careful staging, and both you and your customer need to be prepared.
Next, you start the most important part of the sales process — determining the customer’s needs. During this phase, you ask the key questions, listen to what the customer has to say, identify both the obvious and the less obvious needs, enter into a meaningful dialogue, and review what you have learned.
People buy from people who know their stuff. If the salesperson can’t consistently demonstrate that he or she knows what they are talking about, it becomes almost impossible to buy from them.
Empathy is the ability to connect with someone — to see things from their perspective. For many buyers, a salesperson’s ability to understand their situation is the single most compelling reason why they make the decision to buy.
Without understanding the customer and showing real interest in what he or she has to say, a key ingredient in the relationship will be missing and the salesperson will remain an order taker… at best.
Trust take a long time to build, but only a second to lose. To demonstrate that you can be trusted, you need to be responsive, direct, clear, reliable, and straightforward. Customers don’t like to be manipulated and don’t appreciate evasiveness. If you get caught being dishonest in any way, you’ll not only lose that customer, but the ripple effect of your actions will also spread far beyond the borders of that relationship.
Always assume that your customer is smart and give them due respect: don’t play games, make sure to deliver on your promises, and avoid nasty surprises.
The goal is to move up the value chain to become a strategic adviser to your customer — someone the customer calls for guidance, ideas, perspective, insights, and quite simply, help. Once you rise to that level with a customer, your position is rock solid.
Why is it that so many salespeople respond in a way that their clients don’t want? The answer is — in part — that they are too eager. Early in a sales meeting, they hear a need from a customer and, with the best of intentions, start to address it, start to provide a solution. Any premature recommendation is likely to miss the mark, resulting in a disappointed customer.
It takes a lot of self-confidence to step back and admit to yourself and your client that you’re not yet prepared to make a recommendations. You need to acknowledge that you don’t understand your customer as well as you thought and you need to ask more questions. This level of humility doesn’t come naturally to most salespeople.
“Nobody needs a drill, they need a hole.” In other words, people’s real needs are sometimes hidden behind apparent solutions.
Business needs:
- Reduce cost.
- Increase efficiency.
- Shorten production time.
- Become more effective.
- Increase profitability.
- Improve turnaround time.
Personal needs:
- Look good in front of peers.
- Gain recognition.
- Get that promotion.
- Minimize the risk.
- Boost personal status.
- Decease stress.
As soon as you start talking about how to help them before identifying and confirming their needs, it becomes more about you than about them. If your customer says to you: “Tell me about your company,” it can sometimes work to respond with: “I’ll be delighted to explain who we are and how we may be of assistance, but I can do that much more effectively if I learn a bit about you first.” If the customer agrees, you can start the needs-determination process; if not, you will have to make a credentials presentation.
Surprisingly, two-thirds of all sales calls are made to people who do not make or implement decisions. Salespeople are often reluctant to ask a prospect whether they are speaking to the person who is responsible for calling the shots, for fear of sounding disrespectful. The following preamble can help you check if you’re talking to the right person: “I visit many organizations like yours and everyone has their own way of making decisions. To ensure that I don’t waste anyone’s time or leave someone out of the loop, would your please share with me how the process works here?”
4 out of 5 clients think that when you don’t make notes, you aren’t fully engaged.
Please bring 2 pads and 2 pens for our guests since I would like to have the impression that they are at least somewhat interested in what I have to say.
Brainstorming taps people’s capacity for lateral thinking and free association and boosts creative output.
If you review the needs well, you’ll demonstrate credibility, empathy, sensitivity, and trustworthiness — and many buyers will make their decision to buy at this point, even before you have presented your goods and services.
The greatest compliment one human being can pay another is to demonstrate that he was listening.
Looking good. Bringing a team — especially if it includes senior members of your organization — may impress the customer, and make them feel that they are important to you.
People make the decision to buy things because of their benefits rather than their features. However, most salespeople are more comfortable talking about features than benefits. It’s not hard to see why. Features are facts and hard to debate. You will rarely be challenged when you explain the features of a product or service — they are tangible and objectively notable.
Benefits, on the other hand, are educated guesses. They are subjective — what might be a benefit for one person may not be a benefit for another. Talking benefits makes some people uncomfortable because it feels like a “hard sell.”
Features and benefits are the trusted selling tools that address the client’s questions “What?” and “So what?” But if you can answer one further question — “What’s in it for me?” — you’ll set yourself apart from the competition. This question addresses the specific benefit — the particular needs of an individual customer.
High-level listening efficiency lasts a frighteningly short time — up to 90 seconds — before dipping precipitously. Specifics are what close deals, so be sure to get them in early, before your client’s attention wanders.
Be humble when you offer the idea and give credit to others whenever you can; there’s nothing to be gained by trying to make the customer think that you’re smarter than they are.
A lot of time went into getting to this point and the fear of rejection can be paralyzing. No matter how many times you tell yourself that it’s not you that’s being rejected but your product or idea, it’s hard not to take it personally.
3 common responses to resistance:
- Becoming aggressive: This suggests that you must convince the customer you’re right — and by that implication that they are wrong.
- Getting defensive: This sends out the message that the process is more about you than the client.
- Becoming passive: Giving up is worst of all. For all you know there may be considerable interest.
Many, if not most, objections are unfulfilled needs. Needs are motivational in nature and when you don’t meet them to the customer’s satisfaction, they usually appear later as objections. Put another way, if you don’t discover all the needs, you risk being blindsided later by an objection.
Most objections indicate interest at some level. Indifference and apathy are the reactions you want to see least in response to your recommendations. When the client complains about something, at least they care about the outcome. Taking the customer’s objection as a good sign will encourage you to work to resolve it. It’s a healthy way to approach conflict.
A person is more likely to read an ad for a major purpose — such as an automobile - after they have bought the product than before the purchase. Reading the ad reinforces the correctness of the decision made in the buyer’s mind.
To begin this process, you should acknowledge their concerns: this doesn’t mean agreeing with their objections (which would suggest a lack of conviction on your part) or implying that you disagree (which would set the scene for confrontation). Instead, simply recognize their right to object, demonstrate empathy, and show that you are amenable to discussing the situation. They will see that you are willing, and hopefully able, to solve the problem.
Keep these questions crisp, open-ended, and void of content, so that you don’t “lead the witness.” For example, if a client voices a general objection, don’t ask, “Is it the price?” This will succeed only in making them suspicious of price — you will have given them another reason not to buy. Instead, try something like “Could you be more specific?”
Most objections that you will hear from clients are really disguised, unfulfilled needs. So the next step of the selling process is reframing the objections as needs.
You can reframe almost any objection into an invitational question that asks how something can be done as opposed to why it can’t. An objection like “My manager will never go for this” becomes “It appears to me that there’s a need to establish a rock-solid business case for this purchase.”
The last thing you should do is lower your price without taking something off the table. If you provide a quote and a customer objects, and you then subsequently drop your price, the message is clear — you were charging too much originally. This sentiment can have serious negative impact on further business and your customer’s perception of you.
Why do so many sales professionals find this step so difficult? The answer is simple — it is that fear of rejection rearing tis ugly head once again.
When a customer is a prospect, they hold all the cards, but once they commit to the deal, they lose some of that power because they are dependent upon you to deliver. It’s uncomfortable for them, and it is a good reason for you to show humility after closing the deal — it’s not the time to whoop and punch the air.