The Art of Persuasive Selling

As a marketer, I have been in the world of selling the products and services of brands for over a decade, but the truth is that everybody is selling something on a daily basis. Sales has become a dirty word over the years, mostly because we would rather ignore the fact that almost the entirety of our day is full of people attempting to sell us something. The reality is that learning to sell is the most fundamental and important ability that we should be constantly working on crafting and honing.

When thinking of sales, the image that pops into your mind may be the used car salesman but the connotation here is not as negative as you have been led to believe. Rather think of these skills as the building blocks to how you can persuade people into giving you what you want in exchange for the value that you can offer.

Persuasive selling is a key trait that successful people must possess and it exists everywhere. A research scientist coming up with the cure for cancer has to be a persuasive seller. They have to first be able to persuade a University to give them the opportunity to conduct their research there, then they persuade people to give them money to fund that research. This means going in front of boards for private dollars or in front of government agencies for grants. Once they come up with something, the scientist then has to sell a Big Pharma company to actually produce their drug.

Practical applications for persuasive selling skills can be found in job interviews, negotiating for a promotion, or just trying to lower your cell phone bill.

The key to closing a sale is to map the value offered from your product or service to at least one of these three fundamental challenges that your prospect faces:

• How can you save your prospect time?
• How can you reduce your prospect’s costs?
• How can you increase your prospect’s revenue?

So how do you manage to do this? First, understand the prospect’s motivations and pain points. Sales isn’t about you, it’s what you can do to ease the struggles of the person you’re selling to. Listening and asking questions should be 80–90% of your job. Then you must propose your solution in a way that can solve one of their key fundamental issues (time, cost, and income). By successfully doing this you convey that you understood their challenge and in return offered them a solution that your product or service can accomplish.

Going back to the job interview setting, this can be appliedby understanding what the hiring manager is looking for (i.e. what traits in a candidate are they looking for or how do they define success for the position?). Then map your own experiences and skills to that to show how you can bridge the gap between what they are looking for and what you offer as a potential employee.

Having a solution for any of the three underlying challenges (time, cost, and income) is the key to how any deal in life can get closed. Working on creating a pitch that can leverage your product’s value against one or even all of those factors will always put you ahead of your competition.

Adi Raval is a digital marketing consultant, entrepreneur, and tech enthusiast in Baltimore, MD