People buy things for one simple reason…
TO SOLVE A PROBLEM.
However, nobody buys something just so the salesperson or company can make money.
Customers are only concerned with themselves and their own issue (that’s just human nature), and they are conditioned to not let go of resources…money in this case… unless they felt they would benefit from it.
So if I wanted to make my commission on a deal, I had to make the deal feel beneficial to the customer.
How did I do that?
I’m glad you asked…
Seek to Understand
Yeah I know, this little saying is totally played out, and honestly I hate it.
However, it’s 100% accurate in that people need to feel like the salesperson – YOU – actually give a damn about helping them get what they want.
That starts with how well you try to understand their situation, their problems and challenges, and what type of outcome they ultimately want.
The biggest mistake I see salespeople make is trying to sell their product to anybody with a pulse, which immediately makes the deal all about the salesperson.
Well guess what? People can feel that instantly, and it kills deals.
Once I learned how to get my head wrapped around understanding people and their pains and desires, selling became waaaaay easier.
After all, without really trying to understand the customer’s situation, all I could do was try to push product features.
I had no actual personalized benefit to sell them on as their reason for buying my product now.
But that was only Step 1, and I was missing another piece…
Helping Customers Make Decisions
Step 2 in my mental transformation was learning that people don’t make decisions easily, and sometimes they need help making sense of the decision to spend their money.
Why is that, you ask? I asked the same question, and here’s what I found…
It’s because people are comparing the decision to do business with you to all of their past bad decisions, not their good decisions.
Basically they are fearful of making a another bad decision and wasting money and time.
This is where the closer’s job really begins, because now the closer needs to help the customer see the positive reasons for paying the money to solve their problem.
After all, the customer still does have a problem that they are thinking about paying somebody to solve for them, and the alternative is that they just keep dealing with that problem.
And if you’ve done Step 1 the right way (seek to understand) and asked a bunch of questions around what they want to accomplish, then Step 2 is just about helping them see the reasons why paying you money to help them makes sense.
For me, Step 2 is really about knowing that I never actually provide any value until the deal gets closed, and the customer can start using my product and their problems get solved.
And THAT was the whole idea here.
To Summarize…
Salespeople provide no value until the customer says Yes and their problems get solved.
People need help making decisions because they are afraid of making a mistake and wasting money and/or time
It’s the job of the closer to provide positive reasons for the customer to buy their product
These ideas have worked out extremely well for me, and if you choose to try them out, you might see that they work for you too.
Close strong,
-Jake Martincic
P.S. If you like this topic and got some value from this article, send me a message on my home page and let me know what sales topic you want me to cover next. 🙂
JakeMartincic.com 