Sales 101 Part 1/2: The Art & Social Psychology behind making the sale.
Selling is an art and a science, you have to be proficient at them both for Massive levels of Success.
This is a 2 part series on the Art, Process, and Social Psychology behind making the sale:
I don’t think many Salespeople get into the industry of Selling and think themselves as much of “scientist” or an “artist” when they first begin! For many of us, we’re told that we have a great personality and it would be a good Career change, for some, we lose our asses in our respective careers due to recession and have to make a shift into something that promises a brighter future, but for many, we come into it young, with the intention of making it our job while we pursue other “passions” like University or use it to supplement our income to another job!
But then we get into it, and we come to understand that the “great personality” we have isn’t closing deals and making us any money. That the prospect of income is a little harder to achieve than we had thought, and that having a dual focus is not always the best idea when we want to make some real money in our field!
Some of quit, some of us become the achievers this industry needs!
So we begin to examine things, look at what we say, how we say it, and discover that there are REAL techniques to getting the deal inked and getting your clients coming back time and time again for even more of your particular style of service and product your represent!
It’s all about process, testing, measuring, and redefining the process:
I was there once, a bright eyed young scholar with dreams of becoming a stock broker in New York and becoming the next Warren Buffet! Reality sunk in with the University Business and I realized it was exactly that, a Business. Something designed to keep me within the walls, paying tuition, and growing the profit lines of the institution! It would be one of my Philosophy Professors that brought that to heed and ultimately have me come to the a quick understanding that it wasn’t going to be the University that led me to success but my own passions and creativity!
Fortunately, like many University students, I was already well adept at staying up late, writing while drinking (a little more wine these days and a little less discount beer), and meeting insane deadlines on disgustingly large projects that most people would just look at and dismiss as another piece of work anyways!
I was perfectly primed for the Marketing and Sales Community!
I left University much wiser and with about 7–8 really SOLID tools that I took with me into life, unfortunately those tools cost me about $6000 a piece and I later learned it would cost me about $35 bucks and 5 hours of reading time out of Barnes and Nobles, but I had them in my midst!
The first of these tools was that “Process was everything.” Everything in life follows a process, a natural order, something that aligns everything perfectly in place for creation! Straight from your gene expression right up to the highest levels of government, we are creatures created, run by, and have found tremendous growth on process!
Selling would come to be no different but I would first have to find the process, the ladder on which sales were built! I looked around for a number of years wondering when the light was going to break through and show me, and just as quickly as I was searching, I was finding nothing. There were bits and pieces here and there, but I had to create something on my own, and that is exactly what I have done for you! I’ve given a process, a science that you can use to grow your income, create lasting change within your customers, and make more money than ever before!
Now, this process, I’ve spent a lot of time testing and measuring, figuring what works, what doesn’t work, developing and re-developing it from various employers and contract perspectives, taking my own flair from a great many mentors over the years and putting in and taking away things, re-adapting them to suite my needs, and eventually knowing it so well, I could work on the fly when a client presented me with something new!
What surprised me when I was younger, was when people started asking me “what it was I was doing” So I began showing them… they adopted some of the process in their own selling systems and it helped them grow their incomes… a couple of co-workers turned in my own team of 5… my own team of 5 turned into a team of 15… the team of 15 turned into a training role working with a team of 130… and then the material was distributed to a team of over 5000 people where I would eventually travel the country developing Managers to better train their teams!
It was working… so I stuck to it! However, the one message that I will always maintain is that you have to make this process your own! You have to test and measure what works for you, you have to find out what makes the difference in your industry, in your selling process, and what you ultimately grow from as a result! You have to become an artist! I’m supplying you the tools, the canvas, the paint, the brush, the easel, you still have to create the picture!
The Sales Process:
Every step outlined — Short and Long Term:
Prospecting:
Prospecting is where you begin for ALL Business! It’s the simple art of finding new Business! Thinking about the prospects of the Klondike gold rush, they would often spend hours digging through the dirt to find the gold.
This is what prospecting in Business is, finding gold! Finding your customers and filing them into your Marketing pipeline so that they might some day become gold as you slowly begin to grow your Marketing channels up!
It’s also the foundation for all Marketing efforts, you have to find channels to advertise in before you can begin advertising. Be it Social Media, Guerilla, Mass Media, Mini Media, or Micro Media Marketing, it all begins with finding the gold within those channels, targeting your specific customers starting broadly and narrowing down slowly, until you find that niche that responds to your brand!
In sales, we spend a tremendous amount of time cold calling, door knocking, email and message blasting in order to find our customers! It’s very raw, very time consuming, but there is no single and more effective technique (when done correctly) than approaching people and Businesses to grow your client base! You have to start somewhere, start by picking up the phone and making 500 phone calls in a week! I guarantee that if you do that much output, you’re going to see a result!
Because of this cost effective approach, and it’s very direct way to begin pushing your product into the Marketplace, it is the single most important factor for all Sales and Marketing efforts and cannot be ignored! Ever!
If you start ignoring your prospecting efforts, I can guarantee that you’ll slowly start to notice drop off, and slow but surely, the death of your Business!
Rapport Building:
Rapport is the art of small talk, to connection, to friendship! It’s the ability to make your client feel comfortable before getting down to Business! The ability to have a conversation with out clients in a way that matters to them! Finding out about their kids, their days, their lives, how they started their Businesses are all topics to consider!
However, rapport building reaches much deeper than this, it’s the ability to “walk the walk” AND “talk the talk” as a Sales Professional! It’s about body language, it’s about the tone of your voice, the expression on your face, your cadence of speech, and so many other things!
As Sales Professionals we have to be able to blend in to a multitude of customer interactions and the fastest way to do that is to much our clients nuances in their speech and their patterns! This is the beginning, the basics. As time goes on and you become more proficient, you’re able to read them on a physical level and ask questions to better hone in on their needs based on their subconscious reactions.
Ultimately it comes down to being able to work with MANY clients! Being able to adjust, being able to adapt and grow, and eventually being able to predict the direction of the Sale based on all of the reactions!
Fact Finding:
Fact finding is called many things “Probing”, “Leading Questions”, “NEEDS assessment”, at the end of the day you’re finding a way to narrow down your large list of offerings to your client and discover what it is they need most. What is going to best help them.
More importantly it is the ability to ask questions in a logical sequence. A pattern than digs deeper and narrows down to what a client wants specifically.
For example; if you’re in Automotive Sales, you’re not going to ask a customer “What color of car they want?” without first asking something like; “What did you have in mind, a car, a truck, or an SUV?” Asking a question that is out of sequence feels unnatural!
I can think of a time when I was working with a client on their selling process, they had just hired a new Sales Professional to the role when someone had walked in and was perceived to be looking at a pair of shoes on the top shelf! The Sales Professional had begun pitching them the pair that they thought they were looking at, and, before the Sales Professional could speak any further, the man looked at him confused and said; “that he was just in to fix the shelf.”
Think of all the questions you could possible ask in the selling process, pick your favorite 10, memorize them, and begin testing and measuring the results!
Trade-Up (Applicable to trade industries only):
If you’re not in an industry where you can trade something, ignore this step.
If you’re in a Trade in & Trade up style of selling situation this one is placed after fact finding because, for many Sales Professionals, you want to know what you can leverage in order to up-sell your customers, get their payments down (if that’s their goals through “fact finding”), or just work a deal!
The reason this becomes before demonstrating a new product is that you might have to demonstrate why their trade is valued the way it is. Not every customer is going to be happy with the value of what you’re giving them for their item. From Cell phones, to Vehicles, to Jewellery, to Real Estate, or any other product in between, they might be a little upset if their “perceived value” of the item they’re trading is lower than the actual value of the item.
You’re going to have to demonstrate to your client the value of what you’re offering them and potentially enter into the “Negotiation & Objection” handling facet of the Sales Process. A dangerous place to be if you haven’t had the chance to demonstrate another product already that your client has fallen in love with.
There are is a tremendous amount of Social Psychology in handling trade value that surrounds emotional attachment to previous product, I’m going to be writing about this later, if you want to learn about this follow me at the top of this article as I’m bound to publish it soon, or find us over here: https://www.facebook.com/salestraininc and like our page.
Demonstration
Demonstrating comes after you’ve built trust through rapport building and earned the “right” to qualify your customers, helped them feel comfortable enough to have your customer trust that you’re the expert through qualifying, and have successfully handled their trade (assuming you’re in the trade industry).
You’re going to be building emotion into a product designed for everything your customer is looking for, which is why it is so vital that you follow the process beforehand. Clients that ask you to show them product right away and demand to “see something” before they you earn their trust and find out what they need is a fast way to burn and turn a lot of potential leads!
However, demonstrating can be beautiful, and this is where the art can truly come out of the Sales Professional!
This is where you can paint a picture of everything that you help people own by selling to your clients specific needs on an emotional level, or on a specific level! There is a difference; for example:
Emotional Demonstration:
“The incredible thing about this home is that you’re going to have a beautiful back yard to enjoy with your kids, and eventually grand kids for years to come! I know many clients I’ve helped in the past have loved this particular layout! They have a great deal of room to put their swing set over here, and even have enough space for those nights your want to curl up, sit by a fire of your making, and really relax knowing that everything has paid off after years of working to get here! That’s all people really are looking for in a home at the end of the day, would you agree?”
Technical Demonstration:
“One of the things you’re really going to love about the home is that there is all brand new wiring throughout! What that means is that, even though it’s a dated home with a lot of modern upgrades, you’ll be going from 60 amps to 200 amps so you can run all of your electronics that your grandparents would have never thought of without worrying about damaging them, having power outages, and have the peace of mind knowing you’re never going to have a fire; and peace of mind is everything you’re looking for in your new home!”
The difference is staggering but the objective is the same. Catering to what it is they’re looking for and establishing yourself as the expert in your field. When it comes time for a decision, especially if you’re in a “2 person situation” (Husband/ Wife, Couples, Decision Maker/ Friend who’s an “expert”) you want both of them asking you “What do you think about our decision?”
A statement like that doesn’t happen often, but it’s music to your ears because not only do you have the sale in the bag, but they’ve become an opportunity for you to build a lifetime buying relationship! They trust you, they know you as the authority, and you’re definitely pinning their needs down to an art form at this point with your demonstration ability!
Trial Closing and Negotiation
Trial closing is the art form of getting a pulse on your clients. Maybe you’re just not feeling like they’re ready to buy at this point and they haven’t given you a buying signal that has you asking for the order just yet! That’s where a trial close comes into play!
It’s not quite asking for the sale but still figuring out whether or not they are warm or hot enough to buy your product. If you’ve done an excellent job of building trust, fact finding their needs, demonstrating to those needs and they’re still not saying “Yes, I’ll take it!”; a trial close works GREAT!
Some examples of trial Closes are…
“Can you see yourself driving something like this?”
“How do you feel about the monthly payments?”
“We have an amazing financing contest going on, all you to do is a quick credit authorization, do you have a couple pieces of ID?”
There are literally THOUSAND of ways to “Pulse check” your customers and see where they are, but it is non-threatening way to start to lead down the path to a sale!
Affirmation of the Sale (After the Buyer Says Yes)
The sweetest sound to any Sales Professionals ear is “We will take it!” before thee Sales Professional even gets the chance to ask “Did you want to buy this?”
Unfortunately that doesn’t happen everyday… or even every week… hell, so many of us get used to asking for the Sale after a number of years in the Business that we haven’t heard it in months because we know better than to not ask for the Sale when we’ve been given a buying signal!
The second sweetest sound is when a client says “Yes!” after we ask a closing question of our customers!
But there is one key ingredient to all of this that so many Sales Professionals miss out on and that is the “Affirmation of the Sale”.
The affirmation is simply re-assuring your customers that “they made an excellent buying decision, giving them a Business card, letting them know that you’re going to follow up with them (based on your follow-up system), and that you’re always here to make sure that they are taken care of!”
It offers them tremendous peace of mind and helps reduce buyers remorse, on a Social Psychology level we want to make sure and be reassured that they have made a great decision!
Everyone goes through buyers remorse, especially after large purchases and the reality of the payments sink in! We start to think “what have I done… oh my god… but I do absolutely love it…” and you hum and haw over it for the coming weeks until you settle into the idea that you own it or don’t, and want to return it as a result!
Now imagine, if the person that you bought this from, after building all of that trust, you had a great time, laughed, enjoyed your experience, and had you saying yes the entire way through finished off the Sales Process by saying “Thanks guys…” and walked away.
You would probably be standing there with your new product or service wondering… “what the hell just happened?” And a foreboding sense that you just made a terrible mistake!
As Sales Professionals, we have to sit on the other side of the Sales floor from time to time and wonder what it is our clients are thinking. What we can do to better improve their experience! The secret is doing one of three things:
- Re-assure your customers they made a great buying decision, that whoever owns the product is going to be tremendously happy with it for years to come!
- Let them know you’re going to follow up to make sure that they are happy with it no matter what! And then execute on that promise! Telling your customer that you’re going to follow-up offers nothing but lip service and is FAR WORSE than not offering to follow up at all!
- Re-assure them that you’re always going to take care of them. Don’t be afraid to give them a Business card with their personal phone number on it! Years ago, I sold phones, to this day, I still get calls about people who want to upgrade, who want a change, who are wondering how to fix something on their phone! (Legitimately helped someone one day before writing this article). It offers me a chance to either help them, point them in the right direction to someone I trust who can help them, and it’s another opportunity for me to market my new services to them if I’m no longer within the same industry!
Take your time with people, especially at the end of the Selling Process, it’s going to make your Marketing efforts later on that much easier, it’s going to help you earn repeat Business, and ultimately, it’s going to help you create a feeling in your customer reminding them that they did in fact do a great job, and they’re going to be thrilled for a number of years!
Objection handling:
So, the question remains… what happens if your client says no? What do you do then? I have the answers for you and more in my next segment!
Matthew Gourley is the CEO and Founder of Salestraininc.com — A company that specialise in making you money, growing your Business, and helping you achieve the freedom you deserve!
