Advance Selling Technique:
Learn to Help the Customer
© 2007 David Peterson
I write a lot about trust in my
articles. It is obvious to me that you need to establish trust
before you can move a person from the “suspect” stage to
the “prospect” stage of the selling cycle.
Trust is something you earn.
There are several tips you can use to assist you in earning a
prospects trust. One of the tips I want to focus on is helping
the customer.
We are not talking about a
perceived trust here. A perceived trust is the reason the
prospect trusts you because they trust your company’s name.
You haven’t earned that trust your company has earned that
trust.
What is the difference between
a perceived trust and an earned trust? It boils down to the
prospect may want your product but this prospect may not buy
from you. Even though you made the initial pitch they still
may not buy from you.
The prospect will call back
into the queue and buy from the next available representative
if you haven’t earned your own trust worthiness. They trust
your company and your product but they bypassed you in the
transaction.
This happens every day of every
year. The prospect becomes a customer after you pitch them.
Yet you don’t get the sale. Whose fault is that?
Typically sales representatives
get really upset at this fact. The customer buys the exact
product from someone else. You can hear them complain, get
upset, but they never look inward to determine why the
prospect didn’t buy during their phone conversation.
As a sales representative if
you have had this happen to you then typically it boils down
to the prospect didn’t believe in you! It has nothing, in
fact absolutely nothing to do with your product or your
company – IT’S YOU!
Get over it, and learn from
your mistakes. Here is an easy way to build trust quickly.
Learn to help the customer.
They are calling you or they are filling out a network
marketing lead because they have a need.
Your job is to first, find out
what they need. After you find out what they need try to help
them solve for that need.
Start by cleaning up their
account or the information that they provided in the lead.
1. Is their company name
correct?
2. Is their name spelled
correctly?
3. Are you pronouncing the
name and business name correctly?
4. Do you have the correct
address and phone number?
5. Besides the product you
are pitching what other products do they own?
6. Who else has the authority
to call in on behalf of this account?
7. Are they having other
problems with your company?
8. Do they need your company’s
help to solve a technical, a billing, or a financial
problem?
All of these types of questions
are asked before you go into the probing questions. Although
these appear to be probing questions, they are not used to get
to the reasons why a person needs your additional products.
They are used to help you establish your credibility.
You have to understand that the
typical prospect that you are in contact with NEEDS your
product. This includes the $0.05 Network Marketing lead and
the inbound phone call into the sales department of a large
call center. There is no difference; people need what you
sell.
Yet to get them to buy is a
different matter. You have got to get them to WANT your
product and to WANT to buy from you.
The only way to do this is to
build trust. Help solve a customer’s problem first before
you even attempt to sell your product and you will be way
ahead in the sales cycle.
Let’s look at a couple of
real examples.
The first one is a person
signing up for a network marketing lead. This particular
person has indicated that they are looking for additional
income when they retire in 2 years.
To build trust, after your
opening statement you may want to proceed like this…
“I get this call a lot from
people getting ready to retire, what type of retirement do
you currently have setup? Also when do you anticipate that
you will be receiving social security...?”
The point of the statement
above is that you care. You really want to understand the
situation the customer is in BEFORE you make you own pitch.
Here is a second one. To build
trust with someone needing a service that you provide after
your opening statement try to do this…
“I understand that you are
experiencing problems. Of the three problems that you have
listed which one is critical? It turns out that I can fix
one of the problems that you have listed but the critical
one needs additional technical support help. Let’s get the
minor one fixed now and then I will sell you a support plan
to get you to our technical department to fix the major
issues…”
The point of the second
statement is that you really did solve one or more of the
customer’s issues. Always allow the support department to
solve the major issues. You could actually create more
problems buy getting involved into what you don’t fully
understand.
The two examples above really
are advance selling techniques. Most salespeople would just
start some minor probing questions to determine if there are
issues that their product or service can solve. The
professional salesperson will try to actually help the
customer.
To build this trust you have to
provide real help not perceived help. Successful professional
sales representatives will engage the prospect, build trust by
finding out the problems, immediately solve the problems they
can, and then allow their product or service they sell to
solve the additional issues.
I.E.: Allowing their product or
service to solve the additional issues is called – A
SALE!
Sincerely,
David
Peterson
Author
of:
Been There - Done That
David
Peterson's Search Engine Optimization Guide
Please
send all correspondence to: questions@usreference.com
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