How to Understand the Sales Essentials

The key to sales success is to ‘sell’ which means clarifying for your potential customer, as well as yourself, that your service will meet their needs or, to put it another way, solve their problems.

But most of us are guilty of ‘anti selling’ or putting people off. This is because we ‘sell’ far too early. If we ‘come on too strong’, we turn them off!

So here are the two key principles that will lead to a significant increase in your sales:

1. Ask more questions! All the research shows that the more questions you ask about the buyer’s needs, the more sales you will make.
2. Don’t move onto telling about your service too soon even if they ask! You must establish the client’s need or problem for you and for them first. This gives you the opportunity to prove to them that your service will cure this need/problem.

Consider these examples:

Scenario 1, Architect:

Customer: I am looking for someone to design a house.
Sales person: We can do that. We offer a complete service from survey to finished building.
Customer: Thank you. I may come back to you.
Result: Probable lost sale

Contrast with:

Customer: I am looking for someone to design a house.
Sales person: Interesting; what sort of house are you planning to build...

This illustrates the seller holding back from ‘selling’ too early and as a consequence, the exchange starts to have a bigger impact on the customer.

Scenario 2, garden maintenance service:

Customer: My garden always looks a mess.
Sales person: I could fix it for you, for only £10 per week.
Customer: I haven’t got that kind of money thank you.
Result: Probable lost sale.

Contrast with:

Customer: My garden always looks a mess.
Sales person: What’s making the mess?
Customer: Oh it’s the damned weeds and leaves collecting in all the corners which means so much bending and scraping
Sales person: How do you feel having to do this all the time?
Customer: Oh really bad; my back is playing up and so I avoid it.
Sales person: So you are looking for a garden that gives you pleasure rather than pain?
Customer: Exactly
Sales person: We can do that for you.

Again the seller has impacted on the customer far more when s/he asks questions that lead to understanding the customer’s need or problem. In this example, the cost becomes almost immaterial. Remember, what interests all of us, including your customers, is to talk about our problems! It gives us a good feeling and we start to relax and want to do business with this understanding person.

This can be a subtle skill! If you would like to practise go to my website – www.pod.eu.com, and click sales. You will find more examples and also take the Farrer skills training challenge.

By John Farrer