People buy for their reasons, not ours, and at times, in spite of ours.
My wife made an SUV purchase recently and following one of the test drives, the salesperson took her through a litany of features and benefits. The most memorable was the on-board air compressor that had three features and functions:
- Raises the vehicle 4 inches for better off-roading capabilities
- Lowers the vehicle 4 inches for easier grocery loading and unloading
- Provides a means to inflate flat tires on the spot
My wife came home saying that she would never go off road, is tall enough to load groceries without the hassle of starting the air compressor, and has never, and would never fix her own flat tire because she has become accustomed to all manner of road-side assistance. Her final statement was that new things break on new cars.
Do not misunderstand me. Having a quality product or service that provides high value to the purchaser is important. The key word in that statement is purchaser. In 2002, the Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to Daniel Kahneman for empirically proving that people buy emotionally and justify decisions intellectually.
Why were you invited to the opportunity?Salespeople know this. Sales practitioners often fall short. Take the following quiz. Think to the last new sale you made to a new prospect(hopefully you don’t have to look too far back), and answer the following questions:
- What were the top 3-5 business issues your prospect was trying to solve through you?
- What were the specifics of those issues?
- What were the real world examples of the existence of those issues?
- How long had your prospect been dealing with those issues?
- What had they done to try to resolve those issues?
- How had those solutions worked?
- What lessons had they learned?
- Had they given up? Why?
- If the issues persisted what would be the cost to their business, family, and division?
- If the issues persisted what would be the cost to them personally?
- How would that cost make them feel?
- How important was it for them to invest time, energy and resources to resolve those issues?
- How committed were they to resolving those issues?
- What were they hoping you could do for them?
If the answers to all of these questions were shared with you by the prospect before they agreed to do business with you, you created an environment where it was easy for them to buy and easy for you to sell. You found out what was personally, compelling, and emotionally important to them.
Had the car salesperson focused on what was important to my wife, and tailored his presentation to those points, she would have brought the car home and we would have gone off-roading to the grocery store, trying to get a flat tire.
Never prescribe a solution for a problem without first diagnosing it properly. Avoid sales malpractice. The sales call is not about you, it is about them.
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