The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [110]
Exercise
Do a workshop on building value. Ask your team what builds great value around your product or ser vice. How and where and what will you say to introduce your market education? To be the Ultimate Sales Machine you need to define and perfect every single step of the sales process. In this exercise you are perfecting a precise way in which you will introduce market education to your prospects.
Sales Step 4: Create Desire
Now it is time to make your client want your product or ser vice and want it right now. There are a lot of things you can do to increase this desire. As I’ve mentioned, two powerful techniques are:
Lead them through a series of questions in which you intensify their need from their perspective.
Present killer data that truly motivates your buyer to take action now.
Be clear on this important point: Your buyers will be a lot more motivated if their current situation becomes unacceptable. To create desire, you must motivate your buyers using a combination of problems and solutions, even if you are the one pointing out the problems that they haven’t really considered. Market data and your core story can do this well.
Market data can show your prospects that their market is fierce with competition and can spotlight the high failure rate of businesses. Do the research to find out this information.
If your prospects are comfortable with the current situation, they are not motivated to change. So make them feel uncomfortable. People will act faster to solve a problem than they will to gain an unrealized benefit. People naturally move away from problems and discomfort to solutions. Once you have shown them the problems, paint the picture of their wonderful future with your products or ser vice and you will create desire. Just be sure you are painting a picture of their future and not just your products. Remember that features tell, benefits sell. Don’t tell them what it is, but rather why they need it.
Exercise
Do a workshop asking all of your salespeople, “What are some pain points that would motivate your prospects to buy?” Write down four of them. Then write down the four benefits of your product or ser vice that directly address those pain points. Check yourself: have you just written down features or benefits? Your prospect doesn’t care that your product is faster or more energy efficient. Tell them why that matters to them. How will it make their lives or jobs better?
Sales Step 5: Overcome Objections
What are the most common reasons that you lose a sale? And how many different ways have you developed to eliminate barriers to buying? The toughest objections are the ones you don’t know. A talented salesperson establishes need and finds out the objections early in the sales process. But often, when you go into the close, the hidden objections arise. Certainly, you can ask your client outright, “What’s stopping you from making this decision?” Using a standard set of questions, top salespeople will qualify buyers’ buying criteria right down to their toes, before they even begin to sell. The better you qualify them, the fewer obstacles you’ll have as you come into the close. Do another workshop with the broad question, “How do we create desire in our clients to have our product or service?”
As I already mentioned, the best close of all is when the buyers make their own decision to buy because it’s the most logical conclusion they can draw from the information you’ve given them. Again, the core story should work really well to reset the buying criteria and bring the sale to a logical close as explained in Chapter Four. You can also ask questions that show them the cost or downfall of not moving forward with your product or ser vice. My salespeople ask questions such as:
What is your biggest marketing challenge?
What would it be worth