How often are you ghosted after a positive, warm sales call? You were on fire; the client was positive and responding and it was clear that your offer was right on point. And then, nothing. You can’t get hold of the client. You’ve tried email, phone, social media even and nothing.
Getting this sales challenge sorted needs you to get a couple of things right. Listen to Pavlo Phitidis discuss this on The Money Show:
- Why does your business exist?
Whilst your purpose might be to make money, create wealth, support the economy, generate employment, or make a difference to the world, your businesses doesn’t care. Its only purpose is to solve defined problems through a great experience for its customers.
- Become expert at serving customer segments.
You hope that it is enough to have an excellent product or great service offering, with all the right features to solve defined problems. The problem is that your competitors have equally good offerings. Let me be clear, without a good product or service offering you wont even exist. But on its own, it’s not enough.
- Develop a sales engagement system.
Whilst your product or service offering can fix a customer’s problem, how you engage with the customer creates the experience. This includes how you market to them, engage them in the fist meeting and should they select you, how you deliver on your service thereafter. All these activities stack up to create the overall experience. Your sales engagement process is an essential element of the experience.
- Master your sales discovery meeting.
Often when selling, you spend most of your time talking to your product or service offering. This product-centric selling was valuable in the 1700’s to early 1900’s. It simply is not good enough today. A smiling, nodding customer (seemingly hanging on to your every word) does not mean that they are engaged at all. Polite yes, but not engaged.
- Understand the “why” behind the problem at an emotional level.
Problem-solving selling has 3 layers of sophistication behind it. The first is to engage with the customer in such a way that they tell you the problem that they have. This is where many sales techniques go wrong. Mostly, you jump in with how your product or service offering can solve it and…. deal done! A fatal mistake.
Once the problem is stated, you should transition your line of questioning to understanding how and why and when the problem comes about. Spend time on this conversation. Get into the detail. Let your customer really drill down into the detail. At this point, your customers would almost be living the cause of the problem, and then you transition into a line of questions to understand how it makes them feel. That is the gold in selling. The emotional outcome of not having the problem solved, creates the opportunity for you to solve it and remove that personal, emotional pain.
- Solve the problem and resolve the “why”!
Now talk to how your product or offering can resolve the problem. Be sure also to ask how, with that problem resolved, the customer would feel. Be sure that in your engagement, that feeling, attributed to you and your product, confirms the emotional outcome of relief and certainty.
We all buy emotionally and justify logically. Fitting your product or service features to a stated problem is a lost opportunity and matches you to any other competitor in the market. Turning the stated problem into an emotive need matched to a personal problem is what sets you apart and ensures that “yes” is very highly likely a real yes.
