Sales Tips

Why many salesmen fail?

Many of you no doubt have been brought up on the old rule of:

“Treat people how you would like to be treated.”

In fact I can still hear my old grandmother saying this to me “Bill! Stop pulling that poor dogs tail, would you like it if I did that to you?”

Now as a way to run your life and deal with people this is not a bad strategy as after all you are hardly likely to go round beating yourself up or stealing your own apple pie from under your own nose!

Understandably, many of us take this idea through in our adult lives to our sales presentations and we put them together and deliver them in the exact same way that we ourselves would like to be sold to. We pick out the things we like and the things that are important to us and we make an effort to emphasise them. This, however, is not a good idea! Why do I say that? Well I am pretty certain that not everyone you deal with will actually want to be sold to the same way as you. In fact if you are really lucky as many as 50% of your prospects want to be sold to in that way although in reality it is probably only 20% to 25% The other 80% or so will want to be sold to in a totally different way, they will have very different ideas as to what is important to them in your product or service. What you think is great might be the absolute pits to them, what you identify as the killer benefits might be of absolutely no interest to them!

Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking:

“Well that it is all very well Bill, but how do we find out how our prospects want to be sold to?”

The answer to this question is simpler than you think; the answer is to ask them! And yet many salespeople forget this simple task. I myself witnessed an example of this fairly recently when travelling back from delivering a training with a colleague of mine. We were passing through Heathrow, had some time to kill and my colleague desperately needed a new mobile phone as her current one had stopped working that day, so she was already in quite a needy state. We went into one of the stores selling mobile phones where a she started to look at the phones and deals on offer, almost immediately a salesman appeared and started talking to her.

“Oh I see you are looking at the Motorola XYZ, you are really going to love this phone, it's got this and that and this and that...”

He then proceeded to spend the next two minutes downloading everything that he thought was great about this phone. Not once did he ever think to ask what it was that my colleague was looking for. At the end of his pitch my colleague politely put the phone back and rushed out of the store -- Boy did he talk himself out of a sale!

So here are the two most important questions that you will ever use in selling. Here are the two most important questions that will ensure you start to sell to people how they want to be sold to, here are the two most important questions to ensure that you avoid falling into the "downloading" trap.

1. "What is it that you want?"

2. "How will you know when you have got it?"

The first question ensures that you find out what is important to them and the second question tells you the evidence criteria for them to achieve that. Quite simply it tells you the specific benefits that they are looking for.

So, if we were to replay the above example of my colleague in the mobile phone shop the salesman could have said:

“Oh I see you are looking at the Motorola XYZ, do you mind me asking what it is that you want in a mobile phone?"

My colleague might then have replied:

“Well I need a phone that is really reliable."

On hearing this the salesman could then have replied:

"Ok, how will you know when you have got a phone that is really reliable?"

To which my colleague might have replied:

“To be really reliable it needs to have a battery life of at least three days and a really quick charge time."

Now the salesman knows what is important to her, he knows what it is that she needs, so he can now guide her towards the right phone for her and not for him!

Bill Robinson

Your clients don't care about you!

It's shocking, I know, but your clients don't care about you, or your company, or your products. They are not interested in when your company was founded, the number of employees you have, the production techniques you use or the fact that you have just moved to a new site. All they really care about is themselves, all they want to know is what you or your products are going to do for THEM. So why do so many of the sales letters, presentations and pitches that I see on a daily basis fail to grasp this simple fact?

While I sit here writing this article I am looking at "The Grocer" which is the trade magazine for the food industry. Now I know that this is a business to business communication and so probably not the most exciting magazine in the world and yet companies are spending good money to sell their products through this publication. Time and time again all they talk about is themselves, and to prove it here are some examples of the headlines of the adverts contained within it:

"We're proud of our roots..."

"We've bitten into the nibbles sector..."

"Brand new from the brand leader"

and I could go on and on!

All the people reading these adverts want to know is what are these products going to do for them? What will they do for their business? How much more money will they make for them? In fact every customer you talk to is tuned into one radio station:

WIIFM

What
Is
In
It
For
Me

Every time your client reads an advert, or sales letter, sees a presentation or a sales pitch, all they want to know is what is in it for them! In fact there is a saying:

“Clients don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care"

So the question here is how can we show we care about our clients? Well not by talking about ourselves and telling them how fantastic we are! If we are going to show how much we care, we must first understand them, their business and the challenges that they face. In the words of the great Stephen Covey we must:

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

Now as salespeople we can do this by asking questions, lots of questions to find out what exactly it is that they want, and having asked these questions really listen to what they are saying and then incorporate this information into our approach.

Bill Robinson