Nothing happens until somebody sells something.
—RED MOTLEY
Everyone is in the business of selling. The only question is, how good are you at it? Most people are terrified of selling because of the high potential for rejection and failure involved with trying to get someone to buy something. As a result, the very thought of being “in sales” is traumatic for most people.
As I mentioned in Chapter 3, people fear failure and rejection. Because these fears can sometimes loom so largely in our thoughts and feelings, we actually structure much of our lives to avoid being put in situations where failure or rejection is possible.
People choose relationships where there is a high level of acceptance. People choose jobs where there is a low probability of failure or rejection. People choose their social relationships and associate with people who accept them “Just the way they are.”
Nonetheless, everyone is in sales of some kind. Everyone is concerned with persuading others to his or her point of view. Even if it is just getting your spouse to go out to dinner at a certain restaurant or getting your children to go to bed, everyone is in sales.
Of course, people don’t think of themselves this way. For example, once I was addressing a roomful of senior accountants with a major international firm. The accounting firm had brought me in to speak on the techniques of persuasion. I started by asking, “How many people here are in sales?”
The room went completely silent. One of the reasons why accountants choose the accounting profession is that they will never have to sell anything to anyone, and the potential for rejection is very low. The very idea of selling never occurs to them.
I paused for a second and then said, “Perhaps I didn’t ask the question clearly enough. How many people here are really in sales?”
After a few more seconds of silence, the senior executive of the organization caught on to what I was asking. He slowly raised his hand and then looked around. As the other accountants saw the top man with his hand up, one by one it dawned on them that they were in sales as well.
I then asked, “How many of you are here because you have the ability to bring in new business for the firm? How much of your income and your promotability depends upon your ability to increase the number of clients of the firm and your annual billings?”
Without hesitation, they all raised their hands. “So,” I said, “Everyone here is in sales. The only question is, how good are you at selling? In the next few minutes, I will give you some ideas that will help you to be far more persuasive in working with skeptical corporate clients than you might have been in the past.”
Public speaking is a form of selling, and the principles that apply to making a sales presentation are many of the same principles that apply to speaking in public. After all, the more audience members like you and trust you, the lower their fears are of accepting your message. The more they trust you, the more open they are to your influence. When they trust you completely, they will follow any recommendations that you make. Like selling, the purpose of speaking to any one or any group is to persuade people to think and act differently than they would have in the absence of your influence.
You always have a choice: You can be persuasive and influential, or you can be docile and passive. You can get people to cooperate with you, or you can go along and cooperate with them. The choice is yours.
The good news is that selling is a learnable skill. All top salespeople today were once poor salespeople. Many people in the top 10 percent of sales today started in the bottom 10 percent. With practice and repetition you can learn the skills of selling—persuading, communicating, and influencing effectively. All sales skills are learnable.
I mentioned earlier that everyone fears being manipulated or taken advantage of. No one wants to be sold something that he doesn’t want, need, can’t use, or can’t afford. No one wants to be talked into something that she will regret.
So whenever you approach a new prospect for your product, service, or idea, he or she is conditioned from past experience to be cautious, doubtful, and suspicious. You trigger an automatic fear of making a mistake. Your first job in the sales conversation is to reduce that fear and replace it with confidence.
Sometimes I ask my audience, “What is the most important word in selling and in social life? What is the one word that determines how much you sell, how fast you sell it, how much you earn, your standard of living, your lifestyle, and virtually everything you achieve in your work and in society?”
Almost invariably, there is a long silence. Then I tell them the answer: “Credibility.” The most important word for success in public affairs, speaking, selling, and business is credibility. The more that people believe you, the more open they are to being persuaded by you.
Imagine a teeter-totter. When you meet a customer for the first time, one end of this teeter-totter is very high. This represents the customer’s fears of making a mistake in dealing with you. The other end of the teeter-totter is low. This is your level of credibility at the start.
Everything you do from the first moment of contact, on the phone, by e-mail, or personally affects this balance. It adds to or takes away from your level of credibility. Everything counts!
The way you speak, walk, talk, dress, shake hands, and interact with the prospect raises or lowers your credibility in some way. For a sale to take place, for the prospect to accept your recommendation, her fears must go down and your credibility must go up so high that she can deal with you with complete confidence.
We say that “everyone likes to buy, but no one likes to be sold.” Everyone is skeptical, suspicious, and cautious with offers of any kind and in any attempts to persuade him to do or think something different from what he is already doing. Everyone has been burned in the past and is determined not to be burned again. The way you reduce these fears is by raising your credibility.
The process of selling to one person or to a group consists of seven steps. When you speak to win in a selling situation, just as when you speak to an audience, you must bear these seven logical steps in mind. If you miss any one of them, your selling or persuasion effort will fail.
The first step in selling is prospecting—finding people who can and will buy your product or service within a reasonable period of time. Prospecting begins with you determining exactly who your ideal customer is. What is his or her age, occupation, education, position, and previous experience with what you are selling?
Companies spend fortunes in market research every year to determine exactly who is most likely to buy their products or services. Before you sell or speak, you must become absolutely clear about the audience you are attempting to persuade.
As with audiences of any kind, there are four requirements a prospect must have before he or she is open to being influenced by you (or to purchasing what you are selling).
First, the prospect must have a pain that has not been alleviated. The prospect must have a “felt dissatisfaction” or have an area of discomfort that is bothering him or making him unhappy. Before you begin selling, you should identify exactly what pain an ideal prospect would have that your product or service can take away.
Second, a good prospect is someone who has a problem that has not been solved. Sometimes, this problem is clear to the prospect. Sometimes it is unclear. And in some cases, it can be nonexistent. But in any case, you must define the problem that your product or service solves in a cost-effective way.
Third, the prospect has a need that has not yet been satisfied. She wants some sort of improvement in her life that your product can deliver. What is the need that your product or service fulfills?
Fourth, a good prospect is someone who has a goal that he has not yet achieved. Your job is to determine what goal or improvement your product or service enables your prospect to achieve in a timely and cost-effective way.
In a sales presentation, the first thing you must do is to separate prospects from suspects. You need to ask questions to determine the prospect’s pain, problem, need, or goal that your product or service can alleviate or take away. The rule is “no need, no sale.”
But even in nonselling presentation situations (i.e., business meetings, company seminars, convention presentations), your opening remarks should address one or more of the “big four” and suggest that your answer or solution is in your coming remarks.
One of the most popular ways to open a talk where your goal is to get them to take action on a product, service, or experience is to say something like:
According to the insurance industry, of 100 people working today, at age 65 one percent will be rich. Four percent will be well off. Fifteen percent will have some money put aside. The other 80 percent will be dead, broke, dependent on pensions, or still working. In the next few minutes, I am going to show you how you can be among that top 5 percent and have enough money so that you never have to worry about money again.
You establish rapport by asking good questions about what the prospect is doing now in his or her personal and business life, and then listening intently to the answers.
You establish trust and gain influence by explaining how your product or service has helped other people in the same situation as the prospect or member of your audience.
Questions are very powerful in establishing rapport. By asking open, honest questions, you demonstrate to the prospect that you are interested in what he is thinking and feeling and that you care about his or her situation.
Listening builds trust. The more intently you listen to another person after asking him a question, the more he will like you, trust you, and be open to being influenced by you.
The National Association of Purchasing Management, which is made up of thousands of executives whose job is to purchase billions of dollars worth of products and services for their companies, does a survey of its members each year. It asks them two questions: What do you like most about the salespeople who call on you? What do you like least about these salespeople?
Year after year, the answers come out the same. The professional purchasers say that they like salespeople who ask good questions, listen carefully to their answers, and try to help the purchasers make good buying decisions. Here’s a typical answer to what purchasers say they like least about salespeople year after year: “The worst salespeople come in here and talk and talk about their products and services, never ask me any questions, and don’t listen to me when I try to tell them what I need.”
Listening melts away distrust and suspicion, lowers the fears of the person or group you are talking to, and raises your credibility. When you become an excellent listener, people like you, trust you, and are open to being persuaded by you to buy your product or service.
Telling is not selling. It is only when you are asking questions that you are selling. It takes no intelligence to blather on about your product or service. But it takes tremendous intelligence to take a feature or benefit and phrase it as a question, causing the prospect to think about your product and what the answer might be.
Instead of saying, “This photocopier produces an astounding 32 copies per minute,” you say, “Do you know how many copies an average photocopier produces? It might surprise you to learn that it is only 18 copies. But this machine, because of the advanced technology we have developed, actually produces 32 copies per minute.” When you present a piece of information after you have asked a question, it is vastly more powerful than if you just made a flat statement.
When I speak to audiences of any size, I continually ask questions and then wait for the answers. In many cases, audiences don’t have the answers, but the dynamic tension of the silence that is created after you ask the question rivets their attention and gets them hanging on every word. It pulls them into your subject. I then tell them the answer as though it is an amazing fact. Audiences love this question-and-answer method of speaking and presenting information.
Theodore Leavitt of the Harvard Business School once said, “All selling in the twenty-first century will be relationship selling.” What this means is that the quality of the relationship that you establish with the customer or audience is the most critical factor in determining how influential and persuasive you are.
That’s because emotions distort valuations. The more a person likes you and trusts you, the better he perceives your product or service to be. When he likes you, he feels that what you are selling is of higher quality and worth more money. He is more forgiving of problems or small deficiencies in your product compared with your competitors’. The more he likes you, the more positively he will respond to everything you do and say.
The first two parts of the sales process, determining that this is a genuine prospect and establishing rapport and trust, will get you up to bat in the sales conversation. But it is only when you and the customer agree that the customer has a genuine and immediate need that your product or service can satisfy that the customer becomes interested in your product, service, or idea.
Never assume. Even if many of your customers have the same need, never assume that a particular customer has exactly the same need as other people you have spoken to.
Position yourself as a “Doctor of Selling” in your sales work. If you go to any doctor in any area of specialization, the doctor will go through a three-part process every single time.
First, the doctor will conduct a thorough examination. He or she will take a variety of tests; check your blood pressure, pulse rate, and temperature; and ask you a series of questions about your condition in the present and immediate past.
Only after the doctor has completed this examination will he or she move to stage two, which is to make a tentative diagnosis. A good doctor will discuss the examination results and then ask you if these findings are consistent with your symptoms.
When you agree with the diagnosis, the doctor moves to stage three, which is the prescription or course of treatment. If a doctor were to meet you and immediately recommend a prescription or course of treatment without conducting a thorough examination and diagnosis, it would be considered medical malpractice.
By the same token, when you meet a prospect or speak to an audience and automatically assume that what they want and need is what you are selling before you have done an examination, you are committing sales malpractice.
When the prospect agrees that he has a pain that he wants to go away, a problem that he needs solved, a need that he wants satisfied, or a goal that he desires to achieve, only then can you present your product or service as the ideal choice for this prospect.
If you begin talking about your product or service before then, you will actually kill any interest the prospect might have. The prospect will “turn off” and lose interest in listening to your recommendations.
The fourth stage of selling is for you to present your product or service in a persuasive way as the ideal choice for this customer, all things considered. Your product or service does not have to be perfect. It simply has to be the best choice at this moment to enable the customer to solve his problem or achieve his goal.
A good presentation repeats the information discovered when you were identifying needs and then shows the prospect, step by step, how the problem can be solved or the goal achieved with your product or service. The presentation is not so much an act of trying to persuade the person, but rather an act of showing the customer that your product or service is the ideal choice to solve the problem or take away the pain.
During your presentation, as you present each feature and benefit of your solution, ask the customer if each of these makes sense to him. Good salespeople ask for feedback at every stage of the presentation. Poor salespeople race through the presentation, talking only about their features and benefits, and at the end they say, “Well, what do you think?”
When you don’t give your prospective customer enough time to process the information you are presenting, he will have no choice but to say something like, “Well, it looks pretty good, let me think it over.” He remains unconvinced. The words “I want to think it over” or “Let me think about it,” are customer-speak for “Goodbye, forever.”
People don’t think it over. This is just a polite way of saying, “You went through your presentation far too fast for me, and I do not see why or how I should buy your product or service at this time. But thanks for coming in.”
The fifth stage of professional selling is to answer the prospect’s questions, concerns, or objections. There are no sales without objections. Because of the wide range of experience that a prospect has had in the past, the prospect will almost always ask you a series of questions about price, terms, conditions, quality, competitive offerings, appropriateness, and utility.
The highest-paid salespeople in my experience are those who have thought through every logical objection that a customer might give and have developed a clear and convincing answer to each objection. When the customer brings up the objection, the salesperson acknowledges the objection, compliments the customer for bringing it up, and then explains how that objection is easily dealt with and why it is not a reason not to proceed.
Poor salespeople, on the other hand, wing it. When they hear an objection, they often become upset and angry and are unsure how to respond. As a result, they lose sale after sale.
The sixth part of selling is to close the sale. You close the sale by asking the customer to make a buying decision now.
In golf they say, “You drive for show, but you putt for dough.” In selling, everything you have done up until now is the equivalent of “driving for show.” Your ultimate success will be largely determined by your ability to help the customer overcome any hesitation or doubt and make a firm buying decision.
Perhaps the simplest way to close any sale is to ask, “Do you have any questions or concerns that I haven’t covered?” When the prospect says, “No,” you then use the Invitational Close to elicit a buying decision. You say, “Well then, why don’t you give it a try?” If you are selling services, you would say, “Well then, why don’t you give us a try?” If you are selling a hard product—an automobile, furniture, or even a house—you would first say, “How do you like this, so far?” When the customer says, “It looks pretty good,” you say, “Well then, why don’t you take it?” Or, “Why don’t you buy it?”
The Invitational Close is the easiest close of all and is extremely effective when the prospect is convinced that he or she will get the benefits that he or she wants from what you are selling.
Another powerful closing technique is the Directive Close. With the directive close, you again ask, “Do you have any questions or concerns that I haven’t covered?”
When the customer says “no,” you assume the customer has said “yes,” and then say, “Well then, the next step is . . .” and you describe the plan of action to purchase and take possession of the product or service you are selling. For instance, you might say, “Well then, the next step is that I will need your signature on these two forms and a check for $2,995. I’ll take this back to the office, complete the order, set up the account, and we’ll deliver it next Wednesday afternoon. How does that sound to you?”
The power of the Directive Close is that you keep the initiative and maintain control of the conversation. You conclude the sale or transaction and wrap it up.
In selling, many people actually get through the first five phases of selling and then when it is time to ask the customer to make a buying decision, they go into a form of semiparalysis, like a deer caught in the headlights. They freeze. Their heart rates increase. They become nervous and shaky. They tremble at the potential for rejection that goes along with asking the customer to buy their product or service.
But this is not for you. Your job is to learn how to close the sale and then to practice over and over, until you can ask for the order smoothly, efficiently, and calmly in every situation.
When I was selling a restaurant discount card from office to office some years ago, I would give an enthusiastic presentation. But when it came time to ask for the sale, I would freeze up completely. Then I would blurt out, “Well, what would you like to do?”
It seems that every customer said the same thing: “Well, it looks pretty good. Let me think about it. Call me back.” After a few weeks, I had people all over the city thinking about my product. But the telephone never rang. Again, I soon learned that the words let me think about it or why don’t you call me back were customer-speak for farewell.
One day, I had a revelation. I realized that the problem was not my product or the customer. It was me. My fear of asking a closing question was holding me back. I resolved that from that day forward, I would not be put off by a good prospect.
The next morning, I walked into a prospect’s office and gave my presentation. He nodded and smiled and said, “Well, it looks pretty good. I’ll take a look at it. Why don’t you call me back?”
I summoned up my courage and said, “I don’t make call backs.” He looked up at me sharply and said, “What did you say?” I repeated, “I don’t make call backs. You know everything you need to know to make a buying decision right now. Why don’t you just take it?”
He then said those magic words that changed my sales career, “Well then, if you don’t make call backs, I’ll just take it right now.” He signed the order form and gave me the money. I walked out of that office on cloud nine.
I immediately walked into the next office, gave my presentation, and when the prospect said, “It looks pretty good, why don’t you call me back?” I said the same thing. “Sorry, I don’t make call backs. You know everything you know to make a buying decision right now. Why don’t you just take it?”
And he did, and so did the next customer and the next customer after that. From that moment on, I sold to almost everybody I spoke to. I sold more in a day than I was selling in a week before I began asking for the buying decision.
In retrospect, I realized that the problem was my fear and my inability to ask a closing question. In many cases with yourself and in your selling activities, your fear of rejection can become so great that it can cause you to fail even with a highly interested prospect.
One of the keys to overcoming rejection is to realize that rejection is not personal. If people are negative toward you or to what you are selling, it has nothing to do with your quality as a person and most likely not with the quality of what you are selling or offering. It has to do more with the prospect and the fact that he has been brought up in a commercial society where he has to reject commercial offers or he would be overwhelmed with purchase decisions. Rejection is not personal.
The seventh step in selling is to get resales and referrals from your satisfied customers. To achieve this goal, you must take good care of your customers after the sale, especially immediately after they have made a buying decision.
It is right after the customer has decided to buy that she is most likely to experience buyer’s remorse and change her mind. You must be prepared for this.
The best salespeople and customers give considerable thought to how they treat the customer after the sale. They are absolutely determined that the customer is so satisfied with not only the product, but the service and the way the product is delivered and installed, that the customer will buy again and recommend his friends.
It is 10 times easier to make a resale to a satisfied customer than to make a brand-new sale to someone who has never bought before. This means that it takes one tenth of the time, money, expense, and effort to make a resale than it does to start from the beginning and find a new customer. This is because you have already established a high level of credibility with the already-satisfied customer.
A referral from a satisfied customer is 15 times easier to sell to than a cold call where you start from scratch. This means that it takes only one-fifteenth the amount of time, money, and effort to sell to a referral. The reason is that when you call on someone to whom you have been referred, you piggyback on the credibility of the person who sent you. The customer already trusts you and believes in the quality of what you are selling. All you have to do is be crystal clear about the specific need or problem that the customer has, show him that your product or service will satisfy that need or solve that problem, and ask for the order.
Many products and services today are complicated. Rather than a simple sale, where you call on a single decision maker and the single decision maker makes the decision to buy your product or service, you often have to present to several people at once.
When you have to make a team presentation, whether it is you alone or you and other people in your company presenting to several others, there are some steps that you need to go through.
First, identify the political structure within the prospect company or organization. How are these decisions made? How have they been made in the past? What are the primary considerations in making a purchase decision in your business or industry, for your product or service?
Just as each person has a buying strategy, each company has a buying strategy. Sometimes they like to speak to a variety of different vendors. Some companies like to develop a high level of trust and rapport with a single seller and then deal with that seller. Often the political structure is such that several people want to meet with the seller and feel comfortable that he or she is the right person to satisfy their needs. Whatever the case, your job is to ask your initial contact how this sort of decision is made in his or her organization.
Prior to making a team presentation to another group, find out who the other people in the meeting will be. Get their names, titles, and areas of concern. Even better, phone each of those people and ask them what they are most concerned about and what they would like to accomplish in the meeting.
Remember, preparation is the mark of the professional. And the most important preparation you do is to find out the need structures of the people you will be talking to. What do they consider most important in making or supporting a buying decision of this type?
In every team buying decision, there is one person who can say yes. All of the others can only say no. Your job is to identify the final decision maker—the one who can make or break the buying decision. Sometimes this person will be out in front and asking a lot of questions. Sometimes this person will sit quietly and allow other people to ask questions. But you must know who the final decision maker is and address your remarks to him or her throughout your presentation.
In every buying decision, there is a key benefit or “hot button” that the customer must be convinced he will receive in order to buy.
You should ask someone in the company—before you meet with a team of people—“What is the one thing that the people in your company must be convinced of before they buy my product or service?”
Discover the hurdle—the primary obstacle to making the sale. What is it that would hold the client back or cause the client not to buy from you at all?
The answer to this question will be based on the client’s current needs and past experiences. If you have a friend in the company, you can ask “What is the major obstacle that would cause this sort of buying decision to be postponed or delayed?”
You must get the answers if you are going to make the sale. You must know exactly what the customer most wants and needs, and simultaneously, the one objection that would cause him or her to hesitate or to delay a buying decision. Then, you must emphasize the key benefit, over and over, while showing how the key obstacle or fear is removed in doing business with you.
When you present to an audience, especially if you are trying to get people to buy in to your recommendations, think about how you can use these seven parts of the professional selling process. They will help you develop greater clarity and effectiveness in your presentations.
Determine the pain the audience has that your recommendations can take away. Determine the problem the audience has that your recommendations can solve. Identify a need the audience has that your recommendations can satisfy or the goal that your recommendations can help achieve.
Take some time at the beginning of your talk to establish rapport and trust. Ask the audience members questions and wait for them to answer, either aloud or to themselves. Be warm, friendly, genial, and obviously happy to be with the audience. This builds rapport and credibility and opens people up to the message that follows.
Help the audience members become clear about the needs they have. Remember, many prospects do not know at first that they have a need that your product or service can fulfill. It is only as you ask questions and make points that it dawns on them that they want and need what you are offering.
Present your product or service as the ideal choice for the audience. You can suggest that there are two or three ways to satisfy the need or solve the problem, and then show how your recommendation is the very best for this group, at this time, all things considered.
Bring up objections and concerns yourself by saying, “At this point, people often ask . . .” and bring up a primary objection or reason for not going ahead. Then say, “This question is very easily answered. What we do to satisfy this concern is . . .”
At the end of your talk, ask the audience to do something. It is not enough to end your speech and just let it peter out. You must make a strong statement and ask people to do something that they might not have done in the absence of your recommendations. The action you want people to take right now must be clear to the members of the audience, just as it must be clear to customers. Talk to them about how much better off they will be after they have accepted your recommendations. This is the equivalent of focusing on resales and referrals.
In the final analysis, people change only because they feel they will be better off after than before. So your closing remarks should emphasize how much better things will be for the members of your audience after they accept your advice.
Every conversation is in some way a sales presentation, and like public speaking opportunities, each sales presentation is an attempt to persuade people to act differently than they would in the absence of your remarks. When you master the skills of sales presentation, you will be well on your way to becoming one of the top 10 percent of salespeople in your field.