Partner Article

How to sell your product successfully.

This article was written by Peter Boolkah, a global award-winning business coach with over 20 years of experience helping businesses to scale up and grow.

If you want to be a business owner scaling up in 2024 you need to consider a different way of selling your product or service. The downturn in the global economy and the cost of living crisis have changed the sales cycle. There is a danger that people are still using yesterday's sales methodology and thinking in a world that is now vastly different. Selling was getting tough before COVID due to a somewhat unstable economy. Now making sales is even harder. However, any business can turn bad sales around. Buyers only stall when they are uncertain that what you are selling is going to get them the results they want. 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 customer's 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 can pay off their mortgage and be debt-free.

Sales is all about trust. Be genuine. Don’t start a conversation with “How are you?” because often you are not interested in the answer and the buyer knows that. What builds trust, is you learning the right questions that will take 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 buyer's 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 don’t 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 customer's problems? 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 didn'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?”.

Good selling technique is an art that must be studied and learnt. As an exercise, it is always worth looking at your sales technique and taking a deep dive into what is working and what is not. Once you have ascertained that you can move forward and make the changes.

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