Suppose that you are about to give a sales presentation and you desparately need the sale. You are totally focused on getting this sale closed.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the person hearing your presentation. As you listen to the words and the conversation progresses, you intuitively pick up that he or she desperately wants this sale and is completely focused on getting the sale.
What are you thinking? They really don’t care about me. They just want my money. It’s all about them. Can I really trust what they are saying as they are probably just saying things to get my money? In fact, I can probably get a big discount if I ask for it. But do I really want to deal with someone who doesn’t care about me? How can I escape this conversation – fast?
Now suppose you are about to give a sales presentation, and you would certainly like to get the sale just as you’d like to really help this person if you can. But if this sale doesn’t happen, there are plenty of other prospects to talk to and help.
Now put yourself back in the shoes of the person hearing your presentation. As you listen this time, you feel that they really care about helping you and that is what they are focused on. I feel I can trust them. I should keep listening so I can find out more.
The difference in these two scenarios is what you actually care about. If it is making the sale, you’ll make less sales. If it is about helping the other person, you’ll make more sales. The first repels your prospect; the second attracts your prospect.
So in every sales conversation, try never spending a single moment worrying about whether they will say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. That is up to them. What you must do is give them all the information they need to make the best decision. This is what you must be fully committed to and care about the most. Don’t be concerned about whether they want your help or not. As counter intuitive as it seems, you’ll sell more faster.
How about starting off a prospect conversation with: “I am committed to making sure you have enough information so you can make the best decision for you. During this process, I might even tell you that my offer is not the best fit for you and I’ll recommend something else. If I do feel that I have the best fit for you, I’ll tell you that and I’ll explain why. The final decision on whether you choose to buy from me or not is obviously up to you, and I’ll respect whatever decision you make knowing that I’ve done my best to help you.”
How do you think saying this would make your prospect feel? How would it make you feel as well? With this approach, you forget about ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and you focus on having great conversations to see if you can really help people. This simplifies the whole sales process, as you don’t need a lot of techniques to persuade them to say ‘yes’ as you are not focused on that. A ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision will just come naturally.
So from now, try caring more about helping your prospect and caring less about making a sale, and you’ll make more sales.
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A Caring Resource
In this article I talked about caring about helping your prospects and customers. You want to take your caring one step further and also show you really care about them as a person. Do this and you’ll have loyal customers who will not only buy more from you but they’ll rave about you to others.
There is no better way to show you care about your customers and prospects than to regularly send them real greeting cards in the post. Cards purely to give appreciation with no expectation of anything in return. When you do this, you’ll be amazed at what comes back.
Sending very personalized, high quality, real cards can be easily done from your computer – at a fraction of the cost of what you pay for cards in a store. Plus there is no need to go to the shops or the post office. The system for doing this is SendOutCards.
To test drive the system, and send a card with my compliments, click here.
If you are interested in making a difference by spreading the word about SendOutCards, click here and watch the video. Alternatively if you prefer to read instead of listen, click here.
If you would like to chat further about this, just email me at tessa@salesconversation.com. I’ll personally work with you to help you be as successful as you want to be.
One user of SendOutCards increased his sales by 14% last year and the only thing he did differently was send cards of appreciation to his clients. Sending cards works.