Use Educational Selling with Every Customer
December 15, 2009
Use Educational Selling with Every Customer
By Brian Tracy
A major reason that prospects do not buy is because they do not fully understand what you are selling and how they can use and benefit from it. Many salespeople assume that after one sales presentation, the prospect is familiar with the details of the product or service as they are. This can be a big mistake. In educational selling, you take a low-pressure/no-pressure approach. You do not try to influence or persuade the customer in any way.
Show the Customer
In the "show" part of the presentation, explain or demonstrate how your product or service works to achieve a particular result or benefit. Get the prospect involved. Ask him or her to do something, try something out personally, or make calculations to prove your points.
Tell the Customer
In the "tell" part of the educational selling process, explain the features and benefits of your product or service, using stories, statistics, research results, and anecdotes from other satisfied customers. Like a lawyer, "build a case" for what you are selling, presenting evidence in the form of visual aids or written materials that "prove" the quality and usefulness of your product.
Ask the Customer
In the "ask questions" phase, pause regularly to ask questions and invite feedback on what you have presented so far. One mark of top salespeople is that they keep their prospects involved in the sales conversation by continually requesting comments and opinions as they go along. When you "show, tell, and ask questions," you position yourself as an educator rather than a salesperson.
Learn your Prospect’s Needs
The more competent you become at learning your prospect’s real needs, and the better you teach your customer how to get the very most out of what you sell, the more the customer will like you, trust you, and want to do business with you, over and over again.
Action Exercise
Take out a sheet of paper and draw three lines down the page, creating three equal columns. At the top of each column, write the words "Product Feature," "Product Benefit," or "Customer Benefit." List each positive sales feature of your product or service in the first column. In the second column, write the product benefit attached to each product feature. In the third column, define the customer benefit, the answer to the question, What’s in it for me? Practice positioning yourself as a "teacher" with your prospects. Focus your presentation on helping your prospects to understand how helpful your product or service can be, trusting fully that if he or she understands completely, the sale will take place automatically.
Five Rules for Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every successful entrepreneur or business person has been able to identify a problem and come up with a solution to it before someone else did. Here are the five rules for success.
1. Find a Need and Fill It
Human needs and wants are unlimited. Therefore, the opportunities for entrepreneurship and financial success are unlimited as well. The only constraint on the business opportunities available to you are the limits you place on your own imagination.
2. Find a Problem and Solve It
Wherever there is a widespread and unsolved customer problem, there is an opportunity for you to start and build a successful business.
Once upon a time, before photocopies, the only way to type multiple copies of a letter was with carbon paper places between sheets of stationary. But a single mistake would require the typist to go through and erase the mistakes on every single copy. This was enormously clumsy and time consuming.
Then a secretary working for small company in Minneapolis began mixing flour with nail varnish in order to white out the mistake she was making in her typing. Soon, people in other offices began asking for it. The demand became so great that she quit her job and began working full-time manufacturing what she called “Liquid Paper.” A few years later, the Gillette Corporation came along and bought her out for $47 million cash.
There are problems everywhere. Your job is to find one of these problems and solve it better than it has been solved in the past. Find a problem that everyone has and see if you can’t come up with a solution for it. Find a way to supply a product or service better, cheaper, faster, or easier. Use your imagination. 4. Focus on the Customer
The key to success in business is to focus on the customer. Become obsessed with your customer. Become fixated on your customer’s wants, needs, and desires. Think of your customer all the time. Think of what your customer is willing to pay for. Think about your customer’s problems. See yourself as if you were working for your customer. 5. Bootstrap Your Way to Success
Once you have come up with a problem or idea, resolve to invest your time, talent, and energy instead of your money to get started. Most great personal fortunes in the United States were started with an idea and with the sale of personal services.
Most great fortunes were started by people with no money, resources, or backing. They were started by individuals who came up with an idea and who then put their whole heart into producing a product or service that someone else would buy.
Action ExerciseLook for business opportunities everywhere, develop, an entrepreneurial mind-set, and continually be open and curious about the needs not satisfied and problems not solved.
One idea is all you need to make your first million. By Brian Tracy
The Law of Reciprocity
People have a deep subconscious need to reciprocate for anything that is done to or for them. The Law of Reciprocity is one of the most powerful of all determinants of human behavior. This is because nobody likes to feel that he or she is obligated to someone else. When someone does something nice for us, we want to repay that person, to reciprocate. We want to be even. Because of this, we seek an opportunity to do something nice in return. This law is the basis of the law of contract, as well as the glue that hold most human relationships together.
Concessions
The first party to make a concession is the party who wants the deal the most. You must therefore avoid being the first one to make a concession, even a small concession. Instead, be friendly and interested, but remain silent. The first person to make a concession will usually be the person who makes additional concessions, even without reciprocal concessions. Most purchasers and sellers are aware of this. They recognize that early concessions are a sign of eagerness and are prepared to take advantage of it. Be careful.
Equal or Greater
Every concession you make in a negotiation should be matched by an equal or greater concession from the other party. If the other party asks for a concession, you may give it, but never without asking for something else in return. If you don’t request a reciprocal concession, the concession that you give will be considered to have no value and will not help as the negotiation proceeds. If a person asks for a better price, suggest that it might be possible but you will have to either decrease the quantity or lengthen the delivery dates. Even if the concession is of no cost or value to you, you must make it appear valuable and important to the other party or it will not help you in the negotiation.
Small concessions on small issues enable you to ask for large concessions on large issues. One of the very best negotiating strategies is to be willing to give something in order to get something. When you make every effort to appear reasonable by conceding on issues that are unimportant to you, you put yourself in an excellent position to request an equal or greater concession later. Use Reciprocity to your Advantage
Use the reciprocity principle to your advantage. Before negotiating make a list of the things the other party might want and decide upon what concessions you are willing to give to get what you want. This preparation strengthens your negotiating ability considerably. Action Exercise
Prepare your best price or offer before you begin. Then, think through your first "fallback" position and how far you are willing to go to make a deal. Prepare your final fallback position as well, along with the maximum you are willing to concede. This exercise of thinking through these issues in advance will make you a much better negotiator.
Selling in Tough Times
December 7, 2009
Recession Selling 101
By Brian Tracy
Sales and profits down this year? Frustrated with the current economy?
Are your customers coming up with more and more objections? Are they telling you the price is too high, they’re not ready to buy right now, want to think about it, can’t get the boss to approve it, or worst of all, "aren’t interested," when you know for a fact they need your product or service.
What’s your plan?
So how can you ramp up sales in this tough economy?
Take Action to Find Out What Works
I’m amazed at the number of savvy business owners I talk to who complain about their sales. They have the idea stuck in their heads that this recession is bad and there is nothing they can do about it.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Did you know Bill Gates started Microsoft during a recession?
Just because money was tight, it didn’t keep him from becoming the most dominant software provider in the world. And he didn’t accomplish this feat by blaming the economy.
Recessions only come along once every ten to twenty years and ones like this only happen every 50-70 years. And they create huge opportunities for those quick enough to take action and use them to grow their business. People like you!
Find out how you, too, can profit from this economy.
Shift Your Selling Strategy
When I first started out in business, I didn’t know how to get past the common objections that were killing too many sales. But then, when I went through my first recession, I discovered one simple truth about selling.
I’ll tell you what it is in just a second, but let me ask you two questions first:
- Who are prospects more likely to believe; themselves, or you?
- Who is better at closing the sale; the prospect, or you?
The Truth About Selling In Tough Times
The simple truth about selling—and the secret to selling more—is that your prospects are better at closing the sale than you are, if you lead them to it.
Once you understand this and put this breakthrough technique into practice, you’ll close many more sales. This approach turned my career and my business around in the midst of recession and changed my life. It can do the same for you.
Why is it so easy to increase sales when the prospect does the selling instead of you?
Close More Sales By Pre-Selling Your Prospects
The ideal prospects have already heard about you and your products and services and know that you’re the expert to turn to. They’ve heard from people they trust that your products and services work well, so they understand their value.
Prospects like these arrive ‘pre-sold’ and ready to buy from you. Getting them to close the deal becomes a foregone conclusion when you use this amazing selling technique. The result? You’ll close many more sales with a lot less effort.
Don’t you wish you could ‘pre-sell’ all your prospects? Instead of spending your time countering objections from prospects, you could be talking to people who want to buy. Discover how to structure your sales process, establish your credibility, and clarify the value you provide so your prospects ‘pre-sell’ themselves.
Ready to learn the secret to pre-selling your prospects so you can grow your business?
Eliminate Obstacles to Maximize Sales In This Economy
If you drive to work every morning, I don’t have to remind you that it takes much longer to get to work in rush hour traffic. Even a well-designed and well-built freeway slows down to a mind-numbing crawl when it’s overloaded with cars.
Nothing is more aggravating. You’ve got a well-tuned driving machine that could easily do 60 miles an hour and get you to work in 15 or 30 minutes. Instead, you can spend an hour or more stuck in traffic.
Your prospects’ objections are like the cars in that traffic jam, slowing down the sales process. Eliminate those objections in advance, and you and your prospect get to the sale in half the time.
Move the obstacles off the road and clear the way for your prospects to buy. You’ll melt their resistance and sell more of your products and services—again and again.
Want more sales and higher profits?
To earn more, you must learn more.
To order one of Brian Tracy’s best-selling books or CDs on sales, such as ‘Advanced Selling Strategies’, ‘The Psychology of Selling’, and ‘The Art of Closing the Sale’, call our office now on 1300 795 129.
