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Art of Selling Video Summary:
The Art of Selling Tip 1: Stop trying to sell anything.
The romantic idea that great salespeople can literally sell anything to anyone is ludicrous. If you’re a great salesperson, the first thing you want to do is make sure that what you're selling is in fact both desirable and needed by your ideal clients. You also need to make sure that your ideal clients have money that they can invest in your solution.
Before we go any further, think about that right now. Is what you're selling desirable and necessary to an ideal client who would be willing to invest in it? If not, it's time to switch gears or switch organizations to make sure that what you're selling fits that criteria. For the rest of this process, we're going to assume that that's the case. I'm going to walk you through a framework to ensure that you can sell your offering to that ideal client.
The Art of Selling Tip 2: Focus on challenges.
It's time to focus on the challenges your prospects have. For years and years, we were taught by gurus like Tom Hopkins that our prospects should have interest. This is simply an old-school way of looking at sales.
Focusing on interest is actually focusing on your offering, not on the prospect. Right? What's most critical is to understand the challenges that your prospects are facing within the domain of what your offerings can actually solve. That means starting your interactions by understanding what their most critical challenges are, from their perspective. You can start that conversation by suggesting a couple of common challenges that you're seeing in the marketplace right now. This is going to show that you have some expertise, and it's also going to engage them in a conversation around their challenges.
The Art of Selling Tip 3: Understand the upside.
Just understanding what's holding prospects back is great, but you also need to understand the value of solving their challenges. Because if you don't, you're likely to cause your prospect to not see the value in what you're selling. To avoid this mistake, try asking a question like, "If you were able to solve the challenges that we've discussed, what would that mean in increased revenue or profit to your organization?"
Be sure to have your prospects do the math themselves, not you. I see salespeople all the time who tell the prospect what the increase in revenue will be. You don't want to give them the number. The prospects should be able to do that math themselves. It can be very simple, but it makes this so much more powerful.
The Art of Selling Tip 4: Make it personal.
What's in it for them? One of my mentors used to say that behind every corporate objective is a personal objective. If you don't understand what's in it for the prospects to solve their challenges, then you're missing out on a key piece of information. This is critical. Just because a challenge is costing the organization, you shouldn't then assume that it's personally important to your prospect. You need to be fully certain that these challenges are affecting your prospects in a personal way in order for them to really have the motivation to make an investment in your solution.
The Art of Selling Tip 5: Get a budget.
Get money on the table before showing your solution. Salespeople are always reticent to talk about money with prospects, and most of us have been taught since childhood that it's rude to talk about money. In sales, if we don't talk about money before presenting our solution, we're doing one of two things. We're either ruining the sale by blowing prospects out of the water with a price that they can't afford, or we're leaving significant money on the table by giving a price that's a lot less than what the prospect was actually willing to invest. Be sure to talk about money before you present your solution.
The Art of Selling Tip 6: Determine the prospect’s authority.
Determine who is part of this decision. This last piece of our sales process requires that we understand the decision-making process. We never want to assume that the person that we're talking to is the exclusive decision maker for this opportunity. Even if you're talking to the CEO of an organization, the CEO often still needs to run something by subordinates, or a board, or maybe the chairman. We need to understand what that decision-making process is before we present the solution. A simple question like, "Linda, what's your typical decision-making process for a project like this?" is going to give you tremendous insight into the prospect's actual authority.
