Understanding your clients’ motivation is the best way to get them buying … from you.
The minute I get a thought, I capture it. For the past year or so, I’ve been texting myself through voice dictation. It works. It’s the same way I am writing this column – voice to text, it works.
Below are some of those random thoughts, in no particular order.
Questions
When someone asks you a question, ask yourself ‘why are they asking this, and what does this mean in terms of this person moving toward a purchase?’
There’s a motive behind every question a prospect asks, and that motive is the sales driver. In return, ask questions of your own to uncover the real buying motive. In sales this is known as the hot button.
What are you thinking?
• In sales, the largest chasm is the difference between knowing and doing. You already know everything; the problem is you’re not doing it.
• How many of you cannot afford to buy what it is you are selling? And how does that affect your belief system? And how does that affect your passion to close the sale?
• In a game of ‘sales chess’ you have to be thinking at least two moves ahead or you’ll likely lose your queen.
What do they really want?
Your customer doesn’t want to buy a ball bearing, they want to keep their plant producing. Customers want outcome, not product. Your customer does not want a can of paint, brushes, and rollers. Your customer wants a beautiful room or an updated look to the exterior of their home. Sell outcome, not product.
Be specific
Is your presentation full of generalisations or customisation? If you only generalise for the enterprise and generalise about the business, you will lose. But if you customise for your customer, or their customer, they can visualise what’s in it for them, and they will buy.
What’s the real challenge with CRM?
Customer relationship management is the most purchased, least-used, and least-adopted software in the history of computers. Why? The salesperson looks at it as management’s tool for accountability. CRM adoption rates would triple if salespeople viewed it as something that could help them make a sale.
If you have CRM software for your sales and service people, and you have a 72 per cent adoption rate, that means 28 per cent of your sales team, and/or your service team, did not adopt it, and most likely hate it. I feel reasonably certain that of the 72 per cent that did adopt it, a high percentage of them look at it as something they had to do rather than something that would help them.
Imagination
Salespeople are missing huge opportunities for engagement and opportunities to gain response from customers by not being imaginative or creative in their communications.
• Show me a sales script, and I'll show you a boring message.
• Show me a slide deck prepared by marketing, and I'll show you a boring message.
• Show me an email prepared by a salesperson, and I'll show you a boring message.
Where’s the value? Show me the value. Where’s the ‘wow’? If you show me ‘wow’ and value, I will respond, I will engage, I will connect, and I will buy.
Those are my thoughts and ideas of the moment. All captured the second they occurred to me. Hope they get you thinking, taking action, and capturing yours.
