The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [109]
REP: So if our program worked for you, it could be worth $100 million?
THEM: Well, if it worked, yes.
REP: Would you be willing to spend $199 to find out if it would work, especially if you only paid after you saw it and only if you thought it would work? Does that sound fair?
THEM: I’m not sure.
Of course you need to have a “close,” but to speed this up a bit, here are a series of questions all designed so that the callers close themselves.
What’s it costing if you’re not getting those dream clients? Are you the type of person who likes to learn new things if they’re going to give you a breakthrough? Let me explain a breakthrough. It’s when you find a method of doing something that dramatically accelerates your ability to accomplish your goals. So let me ask again, are you the type of person who likes to learn breakthroughs?
What if you could learn the breakthrough and then decide if it was worth the money? Would that seem fair to you?
(Here’s the close.) Let’s take a look at some dates for you to attend one of our Web seminars. Do you have your calendar handy?
Exercise
First, is there a way to guide your prospect through a series of questions in which your product or ser vice becomes more and more valuable to her, from her perspective? What would those questions be and what could you do with that information to target that prospect better?
Next, have a workshop to establish the 6 to 10 questions your salespeople will ask all your prospects to qualify them and find out their buying criteria. Drill your salespeople with role-play exercises and pop quizzes to make sure these are so engrained in them that they never forget to ask them.
Sales Step 3: Build Value
After you have assessed your customers’ buying criteria, you must begin to build value around your product or ser vice. You’ve already built rapport. You’ve asked a lot of questions. Now you ask them, “How much do you know about us, by the way?” This is the time that you’ve got your little one-to two-minute pitch that builds value and lets them know your reputation in the marketplace.
An even more powerful way to do this, as you have learned, is to present your core story/executive briefing. This orientation should be targeted to the buyer, not to your product or ser vice.
As mentioned, I worked with a prominent Canadian retail chain called The Shoe Company. The CEO, Alan Simpson, is one of the better CEOs I’ve worked with. They also own Town Shoes, a more upscale line of shoes. They have the best education you will ever see in a shoe store. I’ve described the data they had on feet, fashion, and footwear, but did you know there’s a thing called “the threshold effect”? This study shows that when you walk into a room, people make 11 different assumptions about you (such as your level of education and economic bracket), strictly based on your appearance. Your clothes and, yes, your shoes add to or detract from the impression you make. If a shoe store salesperson can show you all this information, do you think it builds value in that store and that salesperson?
How you introduce the education to your clients is as important as the education itself. You need to presell every thing you are about to tell them. For a clothing store you might say:
Our company has commissioned research on dressing for success. Surveys show that 90 percent of people who wear suits don’t know the perfect combinations of styles and the impressions your clothes make on others. Let me take you through some of this data.
Shoe store salespeople could say:
Most people think the way in which shoes are made is unimportant. But did you know that there are 23 different decisions a shoemaker makes when creating a cheap shoe or a good shoe? Here. Let me show you this. [The salesperson pulls out the binder and flips through some of the data.]
In business-to-business situations, often your core story is the reason you are in front of them in the first place, as you saw in the examples of the newspaper company and the company that sold art