Sales Techniques Of Selling Ice To An Eskimo
Posted by Goody on 05/11/08 in Business
Everyone has a way of doing the things they do. From the way you choose where to go to dinner, to the way you decide what to wear to work. The actions you take and the decisions you make follow a certain pattern. You have your own individual way of coming to a decision, and of getting yourself to take action. When buying a product/service you might not even realize that there are specific steps you take each time you make a purchase decision. It would be pretty inefficient to use arbitrarily chosen steps to make a decision every time you had to make a purchase. We have consciously or unconsciously developed a specific combination of feelings/thoughts within ourselves that will cause us to “make sense” of the purchase decision, and buy. If we know the exact steps a person takes when making a confident purchase decision than we can provide our product/service in the manner necessary to create the sale. It is much easier and wiser to use a pre-existing system - in this case a comfortable buying strategy, than to try to create a whole new buying pattern.
There are three main forms of representing things to ourselves. We use the visual, auditory, and feeling senses to interpret information we receive. With the information we receive via these channels we create our representations of things, or basically the meanings we give to things. Everyone uses a combination of these three modalities in specific ways to create a certainty within themselves to buy. In eliciting your clients preferred strategy you simply need to ask the right questions. These powerful questions will give you the basic key to unlock the buying response.
Chances are that your client has made many buying decisions in his/her life. These buying experiences have provided a habitual way of making purchase decisions. By asking the right questions you allow your client to access these memories and the process used to buy. Remember that this will require asking specific questions, and also its important to know that everyone does it differently….there maybe 3 steps or 10 steps in the decision making strategy of your client…it can vary…some will first “Hear” from a friend about x, then they will “imagine” how they would “feel” having it, and next they want to “feel” themselves using the pr/s…then they’re certain about buying.
The following is a list of questions that should be used with a client to access the buying strategy:
How do you know when you should buy something?
How did you begin the process of buying your last (X)?…Then what?…etc.
How do you feel certain that you’ve made a wise buying decision?
What makes you certain about choosing a (X)?
How would you know when its time to buy a (X)?
How do you go about deciding if the pr/s is right for you?
Once you get specific feedback from your client as to their strategy, you can then present the benefits of your pr/s in the same manner. An important point to make here regards process words. A process word is a word that is used as a thing (noun) and is actually a series of steps or process (linguists call this nominalization). For example if I tell you that the key to business development is “client acquisition.” That makes sense to us. However I’m not really telling you anything. In this case “client acquisition” is being used as a noun, a thing, when it actually is a “process.” I think you would agree that client acquisition is a process. What we need to know is the process. Getting the process (series of steps) is real information we can use. Otherwise I will be communicating ambiguously with my audience using “client acquisition,” which means something different for each person. The process of “client acquisition” would be surfaced by asking questions such as “How do you get a client?”(what actions produce ‘client acquisition’?” When a process word is given by the client, your intent should be to ask questions that will give you the process (steps, actions) that create that process. So when retrieving a clients buying strategy beware of process words. If they give you a process word in a response such as “I need to feel good about it.” - this doesn’t give you any information. You would need to follow up w/ a question such as “What specifically about a pr/s makes you feel good?” This is what we call Eliciting the Buyer’s Strategy.
Angel Armendariz is the President of Green Castle Group LLC, Creating Excellence Through Insight.
Consultant, Trainer, Author. http://greencastlegroup.com/
Tags: combination, consciously, eskimo, exact steps, existing system, experiences, feelings, memories, modalities, preferred strategy, product service, purchase decision, purchase decisions, realize that there, representations, sales techniques, senses, what to wear to work
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