The Magnet Method

Selling today requires special skills and strategies, as well as changes in your selling style. Here are 12 techniques that will work in today’s tough market for getting customers to want to do business with you.

1. Create the customer first.
Don’t try making the sale before thoroughly “cultivating” prospects. They must want to do business with you. Objections mean a prospect isn’t a customer as yet. Keep cultivating before you plant any sales seeds.

2. Find the key concept.
No matter what your product or service, always sell ideas. Find what grabs the customer. Look for the customer’s hot buttons. Your customers must perceive what you’re selling as helping them reach their goals rather than your sales quota.

3. Excitement closes sales.
Always use the excitement close. Make buying a “high” moment for the customer – an upbeat event. Customers must come away believing they have made the right decision. Congratulate them on their choice and assure them they have done the right thing.

4. Call on those who call you first.
Don’t waste time trying to find prospects if you already have some coming to you. Remember, if you’re viewed as the expert, prospects will want to do business with you. Develop expertise in your field and then share it liberally.

5. Make the sale before the presentation.
Timing is everything in sales. So, wait to make a presentation until you’re certain that the customer has decided to buy. Presentations are the “frosting on the cake,” the culmination of the selling process.

6. Keep asking more questions.
Take charge by asking thoughtful questions to show that you know your business as well as the customer’s. Lots of good, penetrating questions mean you’ll have to field fewer objections when you close.

7. Create a buying environment.
Focus your attention 100 percent on the customer. Avoid thinking about “making the sale.” Create an atmosphere so prospects see you as the authority. Your goal is to make the customer so comfortable that the sale is inevitable.

8. Customers buy what you know.
Once the prospect believes your message, you’ve made the sale, even though the buying cycle may take make a purchase it will make a difference, something good must happen. To motivate your prospects, make sure they understand how the sale will make a difference to them.

10. Let them in on the secret.
Every buyer has a secret. “You really want your company to be the best, don’t you?” Give your customers feedback about what you sense about their goals.

11. Every prospect is a customer.
Not every prospect will buy when you want to make a sale, but think of every prospect as a customer. Stay close to your prospects – even those who do not buy at the moment are your future customers.

12. Sell your company, not just yourself.
The sales pros know that the company behind them is today’s key to success. Prospects want to know the selling company will be there in the future. You and your company hours, days, weeks or months. It’s the salesperson’s knowledge that seals the deal, sometimes far in advance of getting the actual order.

9. Always appeal to a dream.
We believe that when we are the sales team, so show off what you’ve got.