Member Article

How to sell your product successfully.

If you want to be a business owner scaling up in 2023 you need to consider a different way of selling your product or service. Brexit, the Pandemic and the European war has had a sever impact on our economy. It has created the cost of living crisis and inflation is still at its record high. It has therefore changed the sales cycle.

The danger is that sales teams are still using yesterday’s sales methodology and thinking, in a world that is now vastly different. Selling was getting tough prior to covid due to a somewhat unstable economy. Now making sales is even harder. However, any business can turn bad sales around. So what can we do to ensure our customers buy our products?

Look at your sales department. What techniques are they using? Is their communication with buyers triggering resistance and uncertainty. Think about selling as effecting change in your customers life and then work out how to communicate that to them. A buyer must be able to clearly see how your product is going to change their life or business and give them what they want. They need to be able to compute that buying the product or service is much less risky than not buying it.

Consider that although selling is change, people generally are not responsive to change. Humans do not like to feel forced or cornered into a situation. We like to see value and consistency. Make sure you are selling the value of your product to someone. Not the shiny product or service that they have no experience or knowledge of. For example, If you sell insurance you are not selling them a policy, you are selling them the results of what that policy is going to do. If one spouse dies, the other spouse is able to pay off their mortgage and be debt free.

Create trust. Be genuine. Do not start a conversation with “How are you?” unless you are truthfully interested in the answer. Buyers can sense a lack of authenticity and it will create a lack of trust. What builds trust, is you learning the right questions that takes the customer from their current situation or state to where they want to be, their objective state.

Become a problem finder. In this market sales executives should aim to be problem solvers. To solve a problem, you first need to find out what the buyers problem is. Ask the right questions with the right tonality that triggers the potential customer to want to engage and open up to you. Your buyer may not even know they had a problem before they started talking to you. They will often then view you as a trusted authority who can get them where they want to go.

What are problem awareness questions and why are they important in selling. Human beings buy on emotion. We also push back if we do not like something and we stop engaging. Situation questions help you find out what the prospective customer is really dealing with. Ask questions which allow them to subconsciously reveal what is going on below the surface. Help them find out what the root cause of the problem is and how that is affecting them personally. That’s when the emotion comes out and when buying decisions are made.

How can we then use consequence questions to solve the buyer or customers problems. Jeremy Miner says an example of a consequence question is this: What are the possible ramifications if you don’t do anything about solving this problem? Have you thought about what would happen if your company doesn’t do anything about this issue?

Finally sales teams should be using commitment questions. Commitment questions lead to the ultimate commitment of purchasing. You are helping the buyer to persuade themselves to buy. Questions like: “Can this product or service change things for you?” need to be asked.

The author of this article is Peter Boolkah, an award winning business coach and consultant with over 25 years helping businesses to grow and scale up globally.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lucy Hood .