Learning sales is not only a way to increase your income by harnessing the power of a money-making skill, it makes you a better and clearer communicator overall. Traditional salespeople have a bad wrap in society and for good reason. They are pushy, sleezy, egotistical, and at times unbearable to have a conversation with. No one wants to be caught with a salesperson looking to push their product’s “revolutionary features and benefits” on you. What really separates the professionals from the amateurs in the world of sales is pain. Pain is the trigger for emotion and emotion is the trigger for a purchase. When salespeople can probe and ask questions that allow the prospect to sell themselves on the product as a solution to their pain, prospects leave the experience feeling like they were in control from start to finish and were never pushed into making a hasty decision.
No one wants to feel “Not Ok”
In the book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar by David H. Sandler, he goes over the idea of people feeling “Not Ok” and how that contributes to how they interact with the world around them. In the world today, many people feel unsatisfied with an aspect of their lives leaving them feeling Not Ok, and the only way to cure this is by making people feel less ok than they feel. The last thing someone wants to deal with is a traditional salesperson who harasses them with their product’s features and benefits. This makes people feel not ok, and by rule, they need to make the salesperson feel less ok than they do. They do this by shutting the salesperson down immediately, overshadowing what was once enthusiasm into what is now despair and dejection.
Probing for pain and letting the prospect find the solution
People hate salespeople because they make them feel less ok. They never get to the root of what actually drives all sales. Pain. Instead of giving a features and benefits presentation, probe the prospect with questions and listen closely to their answers. If you do a good enough job and get the prospect really talking, one of two things will happen.
- You’ll find some pain points and begin to press deeper into them with more probing questions.
- The prospect will have no pain and therefore is not someone you should spend time on trying to close. They will lead you on like a date who really isn’t interested in you, but will make you feel as though you’re getting somewhere when you really aren’t. All the prospect wants from you is to be their unpaid consultant. If there is no pain, abort.
Once you find the pain of the prospect, probe with more questions about how that pain makes them feel. Let them draw correlations between your product and the solution to their pain, and eventually, they’ll close themselves.
Let the prospect feel like they’re in control
In most situations, especially a sales encounter, a prospect will want to take control over the conversation and turn the pressure and focus onto you, the salesperson. Politely don’t let this happen. Use gentle and subtle reverses to keep the prospect talking. This makes them feel in control of the conversation when in reality you’re guiding it in the direction you want it to go. Here’s an example of a gentle reverse you could use to keep the focus of the conversation on the prospect without making them feel not ok.
Prospect: “Well, I told you I’m having an issue dealing with x. Will your product be able to fix that problem for me?
Salesperson: “Well, it depends. How do you see yourself using the product?”
The goal here is simple. Get the prospect to envision how they would use the product to fix their problem in their specific scenario. You don’t want to tell the prospect how it will fix their problem because they may not share that same vision as you. Getting in your own way is a good way to kill a sale on the spot and guiding the prospect to a desired outcome in this way is a recipe for disaster. The far superior approach is to let the prospect guide themselves across the finish line without you clouding their vision.
An object in motion stays in motion
Recently, I had a prospect that I felt based on their response that they were ready to move forward with selling their property to me on a creative finance transaction. I matched their enthusiasm and it ultimately backfired on me with the loss of the acquisition. This was a huge lesson for me. I walked him through everything I possibly could, handling objections before they even came up. But after the enthusiasm faded on both sides, I didn’t do a good enough job probing for pain and asking questions. In spite of our seemingly great rapport, the seller ended up ghosting me out of what felt like nowhere at the time. What I realized just a few days later has shaped the way I think about everything in my profession. Because the seller was as high on selling as he could be without actually signing the contract, whatever goes up must come down and I wasn’t there to catch him and send him back up to where I would finally close the deal. If I had pulled back when he was at his most enthusiastic and made him question if this was really the right fit for him, I likely would have been able to pad his blow on the way down and ultimately allow him to guide himself up to a close. Anything more than this has the potential to make a prospect feel like you’re selling them and they are not in control, and that is sure to make your prospect feel not ok. You don’t close prospects, truly motivated prospects with pain close themselves. You are simply there as a vehicle to get them to realize that on their own by using probing questions that your product is the solution to their pain.
Reference
Many of the main ideas of this blog post come from the book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar by David H. Sandler. If you’ve found these concepts interesting or helpful in any way. I strongly suggest checking out the book yourself. It will change your life not only as a salesperson, but as an effective communicator.