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Have you ever had that thought, when you know you should have made the sale – but somehow they decided not to go ahead with you?
It’s frustrating, but the bigger factor is that failure to make these sales has a direct impact on your bottom line. How much would your profit and cash flow have improved if they only knew what you could really do?
Somehow, you failed to communicate the full value of your product or service to your customer. They won’t get the incredible benefits they would have received. They haven’t understood how special it is, being your customer. And consequently, everyone loses.
Four things have typically gone wrong in these situations.
1 You fail to establish trust. Sometimes we are so concerned with making a sale that we stop listening. We push too hard or too early, instead of understanding our customers’ needs first. We work to our agenda instead of the customer’s. When this happens, we fail to establish trust with our customer.
2 You fail to create an emotional desire for change. In any sales negotiation, the customer’s desire for change must reach a level where they are compelled to take action. This is a very emotional element of the sales and marketing process that can often be neglected by overly focusing on the logical elements of the decision process.
3) You fail to communicate your unique value. We often fail to communicate how much more value we offer, compared with our competitors. We don’t explain sufficiently why the customer can only get these benefits from us. Consequently, the customer resorts to making a decision based on price.
4) You fail to instil urgency. There is nothing worse, in the sales process, than to hear “I need to think about it”. You have to overcome the inertia caused by fear of making the wrong decision and other factors that cause people to put off making a commitment.
Selling is an interpersonal process
To achieve a high level of conversion in our sales interactions, we need to develop a process that overcomes all four of these issues.
Selling is not a one-step event. You need to court your customers first, by making your business attractive and your products or service desirable. Then you need to develop trust elements in your marketing to build credibility and enable your customers to grow into knowing, liking and trusting you. You also need to communicate your unique value while you communicate the benefits of taking action, so that your solution to their problem can be experienced and enjoyed.
If you can do all this in your marketing processes, you will find the sales process is a breeze. When your customers come to you pre-sold, you don’t have to do much selling to get them to buy.
How is it for you?
If you find yourself frequently worried about how much your competitors charge, you need to work more on your marketing process to let your customers know what you can do. If you find it difficult to get people to make a decision to buy, you need to do more work up front.
It’s not a matter of getting better at closing the sale. Those techniques don’t work very well any more. Now you have to be better at opening opportunities and building the sale, so customers close themselves. That means working more on marketing than selling. It’s about warming customers up to the point where they are compelled to buy your solution, instead of being pushed by a hard sell.
If they only knew what you could really do, your selling and your life would be a whole lot easier and more profitable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Roworth
Greg Roworth is a business growth specialist and author of Run Your Business on Autopilot – How to Leverage Your Business for Maximum Profit in Minimum Time. He specialises in assisting smart but frustrated business owners to discover their unique market positioning and to quickly leverage their business by attracting more ideal clients and building the systems to run their businesses on autopilot. He currently leads a team of business growth specialists as chief executive of Business Success Systems. To contact Greg please visit www.BusinessSuccessSystems.com.au or email him at
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