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Maximise your sales results with minimum effort
Getting your customers to commit, buy now and buy again isn't a gift or talent. It's understanding the reasons why your customers buy in the first place. Before your customer will be interested in your sales presentation three things must occur:
- They must recognise that they have a need. Many customers are so used to the problems they face that they may no longer see them as problems needing solving and instead see them as normal.
- They must decide that the urgency to have the problem fixed is high enough that they are motivated to take action. Nothing motivates a client more or creates more dissatisfaction with the status quo than being able to see where they want to go.
- They must decide that the problem is so acute that it must be solved now.
Unless these three conditions are first met you are wasting your time with a sales presentation because the customer will have no desire or need to listen to you.
So how do you get your customer to recognise their need and want to take action?
This can only be accomplished through the building of trust between you and the customer. A customer will not want to openly talk about their problems with a sales person because they fear being locked into a sales presentation then having to say no. You overcome this opposition by taking a consultative approach.
The more questions you ask the less likely the customer will see you as a salesperson and more likely they will see you as a consultant. Attention spans are short and easily wander yet asking questions keeps the customer engaged as they must think about your question and then their answer. Asking questions also keeps you in control of the conversation. They are reacting to your cues and you'll decide what the next question will be.
It's important that you carefully prepare your answers in advance because they are your greatest tool as a salesperson. Telling is not selling it's allowing your customers mind to wander and think about other things. Having carefully prepared probing questions that allows the customer to express their dissatisfaction with a particular problem and then become interested in resolving it is essential to opening the door to a sale.
Open ended questions are great for this purpose.
The more your customer talks about a problem the more intensely they will want to solve it. Early discussion of your product before a customer says they both want and need it will ruin all possibility of a sale.
You have to turn the customer's general need into a real and specific one
Whatever industry you are involved in there will be a given set of general needs experienced by that industry. Most people within that industry will share these common needs at one time or another. Every business within that industry will have its own specific needs that may or may not fall under the general ones. Your task as a salesperson is to begin talking about the general needs experienced in the industry and use that to lead into the specific needs of your customers. You must move from the general to the specific. This is what creates the desire to take action.
Then and only then can you begin to prescribe individual solutions for your customer from what your company offers. Once the desire to take action is there you can take on a consultative role and begin talking about the specific solutions that will take your customer from where they are now to where they want to be.
Closing the deal
When you've gotten this far the important point to remember is not to try and close the deal before the customers says that they both want and need your solution.
To find out more about our training programs and services, please contact us (02) 9411 1345 or email us at info@qec.net.au
