The whole point for a salesperson to have outstanding product knowledge and industry expertise is for the purpose of asking great questions. You cannot possibly know what your prospect knows about their business…unless you ask. Selling is not about persuading people to buy your product or service because of your vast intellectual knowledge. Optimal selling is about discovering your prospect’s pain and then customizing a solution to resolve their pain. Product knowledge and industry expertise are tools you can use to discover your prospect’s pain and these tools always take the form of carefully crafted questions. Enhance your selling skills by building up your product knowledge and industry expertise and then fashioning that knowledge into effective questions. You will increase business as your prospects are skillfully prompted by your questions to reveal their pain that your solutions can resolve.
Archives for December 2013
We all have hidden weaknesses
We all have hidden weaknesses. These are obstacles that we are probably not aware of but that affect us in a big way when we are in front of a prospect. They are not obvious to those around us and they don’t show up on an interview. So what are they? They take many forms but the most common is a belief we may have about the way things are in the world or the way things work in our industry or in sales in general. For example if you believe that you have to call on purchasing agents first before you can contact the end user of your product then that belief will affect your ability to sell and learning sales techniques to help you deal with the end user will be of no help. Maybe you believe that it is ok for the prospect to think about your proposal for a few days even after they committed to making a decision when you delivered it. If that is true, then you will have a low closing rate and closing techniques will be useless until you overcome that self-limiting belief.
Sometimes hidden weaknesses are more psychological. For example if you have a strong need for approval from people then you will shy away from using techniques that you believe might jeopardize your relationship. You will avoid asking any question or making any statement which you perceive to be aggressive because the prospect may not approve and you need the approval.
So how do we know what our weaknesses are if they are “hidden”. Well you can contact me and we can test you for them. But another way is to pay attention to what you do or say and what avoid doing or saying. Ask yourself why you are doing it or saying it. then ask why that is important and then try to compare what you are doing to what the more successful people are doing. Ask yourself what would happen if I tried something different. Listen to your self-talk. What you are saying to yourself will go a long way to identifying your hidden weaknesses. The good news is that if you are able to identify and overcome just one there will be a quantum leap in your sales effectiveness.
Command the Prospect’s Attention
The typical salesperson walks into a prospect’s office with a skillfully prepared PowerPoint presentation used to close the sale and increase business. It is colorful, clever, artistic, and bursting with charts and graphs. The salesperson’s presentation is about the products or services that the salesperson is trying to sell to the prospect. The goal is to get the prospect to listen to the persuasive argument and to slide the sales order form on to their desk to get their signature. The Optimal Salesperson doesn’t bring a presentation to the meeting. Instead, he or she comes prepared to ask good, hard, and tough questions to learn what the prospect needs. The focus of the meeting is on the prospect, allowing the Optimal Salesperson to differentiate themselves from all the other sales people.
The Art and Science of Selling Value
When a company takes on a new product line to sell, one of the first things they typically do is call a meeting of the sales people. At this meeting they have the product manager from the marketing department and the technical person supporting the product do a joint presentation on the value the product brings to the marketplace and to their existing customer base. Sales managers then encourage the salespeople to go out and explain the value proposition to as many prospects as they can to boost sales of the new product line and validate the decision of management to bring the product on. This sledgehammer approach to selling value will boost sales but it will also be grueling for both management and the sales team. Initial excitement of the team about the great new product and its value wanes as they hear a continuing stream of comments like: “I don’t see how it will help me”, or “we’re not really able to do anything right now” or “I like it but can’t see how e can use it right now” or any one of a thousand other polite ways of rejecting the new product.
The problem is not the product it is the approach the sales team is using to sell the value. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It does no good for the salesperson to extol the value of the product (or service for that matter) if the prospect does not see the new product as adding value. So how does the new product add value? It only has value to a prospect if it solves a problem that exits in the world of the prospect. It does me no good to have a machine that is three times faster unless my existing machine is too slow and is causing a problem because of its slowness. The total cost of the solution has to exceed the cost of the problem or it will make no sense to change. In other words it will not add value to me, the prospect.
If you want to sell the value of the product, first find out what the prospect considers valuable. You do this by talking to the prospect and discussing his or her operation and problems that they may be having. Of course if I have a new product that management is encouraging me to sell, I would center my discussion on problems that my new product solves. If they are having a problem, ask the prospect how much the problem is costing them. If the cost of the problem is far greater than the cost of your new product then you have the basis for establishing the value in a way that is meaningful to the prospect. Only after you have established the basis for the value should you explain how your product or service can benefit them. If they don’t have a problem that your new product solves, then talk about something else. It keeps rejection to a minimum.
What makes selling so difficult?
I started my career as an engineer and in those days it seemed to me like the salespeople had the easiest job in the company. They didn’t have to keep up with technology. They didn’t need to pass a test to become licensed. Whenever clients asked really tough questions, they brought the engineers in to answer them. It seemed all they did was talk to people, take them to lunch and occasionally play golf. What could be easier? Then they made me a salesman and it seemed like the toughest job in the world. Talking to people, which seemed easy from afar, was a struggle. No one wanted to talk to me when I got into sales. Solving problems was easy when I was an engineer. I discovered that asking the questions to uncover a significant problem that needed to be solved on a sales call was much more difficult. Prospects were guarded. Telling the sales department or the client how much it was going to cost to solve a problem was easy when I was an engineer. Discussing how much money the prospect had available to solve a problem on a sales call was much more difficult. It took me years to discover that my initial thought was correct – selling is easy. Not only that, it is fun. The elite sales people, the top 6%, do it effortlessly. So why was it so difficult for me in the beginning and for the vast majority of salespeople on an ongoing basis? The answer lies in our belief systems and other hidden weaknesses that we possess.
Your mother told you thousands of times not to talk to strangers, but your sales manager tells you to talk to 20 strangers per week. Is it any wonder that we have call reluctance or that we feel stress when prospecting? You learned at an early age that discussing someone else’s money situation in public was not polite. Is it a surprise that salespeople avoid discussing money with a prospect as long as possible? As humans we all need approval but the inexperienced salesperson feels internal pressure when she seeks it from prospects on sales calls. That pressure causes her to skip over the tougher questions she knows she should ask, so as to have a better chance of being liked by the prospect. What makes selling difficult is the erroneous self-limiting beliefs we have which make asking simple questions seem difficult. Hidden weaknesses cause us to avoid doing what we know we must do. So what is the secret to effortless high performance in sales? It is really no secret at all. You just have to identify the self-limiting beliefs that get in your way and eliminate them or change them. It is not easy but the emotional energy you put into changing the belief systems you have is repaid many times over with stress free effortless high performance in sales.
