From his article collection, Howard Olsen says that the only reason a professional makes a sales call or presentation is to be of genuine service to a customer. The key thing you need to remember is that the customer buys for his own reasons, not the sales person’s.
This is something I firmly agree with and use in the majority of my marketing and client sales meetings. You need to discover what the want and need (i.e. the pain) is of your customer and how you can best give them what they want so it’s a better choice for them to give you their money than to hold onto it.
But what if you don’t know their need or fully understand it?
Howard also writes that “Professionals take the time in the early stages of a customer meeting to ask good questions and find out what the customer’s real need it. Quite often the customer doesn’t even fully understand their own need until a professional shows up and gets them thinking through a few though provoking questions.”
Find out more about Howard and his Three Truths of Selling course and details at https://high-output.com/store/products/The-Three-Truths-of-Selling-Vancouver-%252d-Jan-30.html
Basically you need to ask Powerful Questions, shut up, and listen. Powerful Questions (as I learned at the Coaches Training Institute) are designed to make the customer stop and reflect on their situation to DRAW OUT what you need to know to be of service to them (yes, another way to say, to sell them).
This is the way almost all selling is done by professionals. Contrast that to amateurs who will spew out all the details and characteristics about their product before finding out the customers needs and wants. They try to sell through pressure tactics, through competitive (discounted) pricing, through plain blind luck that something they say might actually be relevant and resonate with the customer.
But in the end, the professional sells more because he cares enough about the customer to solve his problems, while the amateur finds that people start to avoid him because he is too self centered.
Read what Howard says about this at http://www.high-output.com/uncategorized/the-only-reason/
Want more? Here are Conversational One Liners That Build Trust at http://www.high-output.com/uncategorized/conversational-one-liners-that-build-trust/
