When you customize your sales presentation to the specific needs and values of your prospect you will differentiate yourself from the pack. It’s in this process of selling, that in itself would create credibility and trust resulting in the buyer seeing you as an expert.
With all the information that we have access to, I’m puzzled as to why many, many salespeople just don’t know how to sell. Yet, many salespeople just give a blanket sales presentation hoping that they will hit a need or a value.
Do they think if they smile and show up and make statements about their product that they will make the sale? And I’m not just talking about the newbies, I’m also including many salespeople that are veterans of the game.
It doesn’t matter how long you are doing something, if you learned wrong in the first place and didn’t change, then you have been doing the same things wrong for years.
Yes, there is so much to learn and you have to transform yourself into a lean mean sales machine, but there are some basics and when learned will help you get over the finish line.
Regardless as to the industry in which you work – sales-is-sales. If you are a financial planner or if you sale software or manufactured goods there is a system that works.
I’m assuming everyone knows the basic steps in a presentation? Introduction/warm up, inquiry as to the needs/values/problems/etc, analyse the needs, provide a solution/present, close or arrange for further action. Very simple.
The Problem
Let me ask you this. Have you ever presented to someone only to realize that they just didn’t care about most of the stuff you talked about?
One of my clients just told me the other day that due to his lack of a specific product and closing ability, he brought his manager along for the appointment.
After his talking for 30 minutes about the benefits, the prospect said to his manager, “so, how do I benefit?”. Amazing isn’t it?
Not only did they not get the deal, they wasted their valuable time as well as that of the buyers.
Did the manager assume that if he just kept telling the prospect about the benefits that maybe he would get lucky and the prospect would say “that’s for me”? Why didn’t the manager aske questions to determine the exact needs of the prospect?
Ask Those Questions (the better way)
How about this: Don’t talk about benefits or solutions. Seriously. All you do is ask questions.
You want to ask questions that will reveal the needs of your client, then ask more questions to find out how they make a buying decision, then ask more questions to dig down and find their pain points or pleasure points if you are selling swimming pools, the more information you get the better the chance of making the sale.
Then when you think you know all their needs you go one step further. Take each need that they told you and ask them, “how come ____________ is important to you?”
After they tell you, ask them “what else?”. You want to find out the core reason for them to buy. It’s the reason behind the reason. And do the same for each need. With this exercise you will be hearing their values, the things that are most important to them?
Example:
Say you are selling life insurance and you are meeting with a couple. You ask them, “how come life insurance is important for you at this time”. Now you may assume that the obvious would be to protect their family for the future, which is the case.
But after asking the question, they say, “that my father died at 46 and never had life insurance and my mother struggled her entire life financially bringing us up and I want to make sure that should something happen to me, my family is protected”.
Knowing what the prospect just told you did a bunch of things:
- They exposed to you their motivation for getting insurance;
- By them telling you out loud reinforced their belief in life insurance;
- They now see you as a person that cares, because you dug down to expose the real reason;
- By telling you a very personal storey about their families hardships, means that they entrusted you with their own deep feelings. Thus, it shows trust and builds rapport and now you kind of have a bond.
If these prospects had spoken to other sales reps, do you think they also dug deep like this? Probably not. So as a result, you just differentiated yourself from the pack.
Also, with knowing their needs and values, determine which ones are the most important. By doing so will give you their highest values, their hot buttons.
Now Present
All you have to do now is connect your buyers most important needs and values to your products specific benefits that fulfill those needs. Very easy.
What you did, was customized your product to the specific needs and values of your buyer. How strong is that???
Now Try To Get Your Buyer To Close Themselves
After doing that, you can ask your buyer about their thoughts. Ask them about how they now see your product working for them. Let them tell you how your product works for them.
Think about this! What does it mean when your buyer can tell you how your product will fulfill their needs? Not you telling them
This is damn magical, isn’t it.
After this, it’s highly possible that your buyer says to you, “what do we do next?”
If you don’t know the answer to the “what do we do next” question, then you are in trouble, maybe try a new career.