Sales Cooke has often heard catchy phrases to describe effective sales people. You know, the guy who can convince anyone to buy anything–even if they don’t need it. Well, I am not buying it. If you have to ‘convince’ someone to buy from you, you are not really selling–you are advocating or pushing. Worse, you are engaging in the type of sales process everyone despises.
Here is an important selling tip–Sales is less about convincing and more about solving. Convincing involves advocating. Advocating focuses only the features, benefits, and the many advantages of your product and not really on the needs of the prospect. Convincing and advocating is egocentric. It is focused on you, what you want to accomplish, and on what you think you know they need. Usually a sales person who spends a lot of time advocating has spent very little time really listening and learning.
Effective sales behavior is built on solving. People buy a product or service for one of four reasons–makes them money, saves them money, fulfills a need, or solves a problem. It is pretty simple. Once you understand what they are looking for, why they are looking for it, and how your offering helps them with it, there is no advocating necessary. When engaged with a sales professional who invests the time to listen and learn and understand, most buyers will trust the solution presented them. In the presentation process, the true sales professional links only the needs of the client to the benefits of the product. And, because there is a direct linkage of need to solution, there is no advocating necessary–the solution practically sells itself.
When developing or hiring a sales professional in your organization, please do not hire the individual who has met their quota ‘selling ice in Alaska’. Sales Cooke’s sales management philosophy is to teach, develop and recruit sales people to build relationships and solve problems. Those types of deals result in long term relationships and a stronger, more effective customer base.
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