Climate Control

In order to be effective and bring results, your sales presentation must take place within a selling climate. You must establish that climate by interweaving it throughout your presentation.

What is an appropriate selling climate? How do you make it part of your presentation? You must begin with the understanding that a champion only sells the benefits and features that the prospect wants to buy. For years, I’ve analyzed this point, and I’m convinced that it’s critical to success – don’t sell what you want; sell what they want.

It’s astonishing how many salespeople talk about, explain and try to sell only the features that they like, using such language as follows:

“Oh, I just love the fact that it slices grapes.” The prospect doesn’t give a hoot about what you love.

“You know, I’ve got this same policy in my own portfolio.” Prospects don’t see what that has to do with their investment decisions because your circumstances are different from theirs.

“When you pour the OPEC into this beast – look out. It’s gonna ram you back in the seat. It’s gonna peel rubber.” The prospect may be a conservationist who worries about the high cost of fuel and wants an economy car.

The champion doesn’t sell benefits before finding out what benefits the prospect wants. When the average salesperson plunges into selling benefits, the prospect is sitting there thinking, “None of this stuff I’m hearing is important to me.” Keep that up for a little while, and the prospect will leave if he’s on your premises – or you will if you’re on his.

To be sure we’re together in this area, just ask yourself, who pays for your product or service? You or the buyers? Then we should give them what they want. Doesn’t that make sense? We should sell them the features that will do the things they want done.

How does this fit my teaching that you should make decisions for your clients? It fits neatly. People want more than they can get. Money is only one of the great limitations that we all have. Time is another. People want their cars to be larger on the inside and smaller on the outside, their meals to be more delicious and less fattening and their investments to have higher return and lower risk. They want it all, but you know they can’t have it all, so you have to decide – among your many products and services and their many desires – what specific items will fly for them.

In most cases, you can’t afford to show them everything and lead them step by step over every square foot of your knowledge to the one item each of them will buy. That’s not efficient, not professional and not a way to make money.

The purpose of your consultation interview – which might be a few quick questions on the phone to a prospect or a longer face-to-face interview in someone’s office – is to diagnose their problems and determine opportunities. Following such an interview, you decide how to proceed. This process calls for eliminating the discussion of a wide variety of possibilities that you, as the professional with expertise, know they won’t buy anyway. Part of your service is to save their time as well as your own. If you walked into a doctor’s office with a broken arm, you wouldn’t want him or her to x-ray your leg.

Knowing now that the selling climate calls for concentrating on what they want and not what you want, what then is the process for interweaving this fact into your presentation?

Don’t Sell Logic – Arouse Emotions
Many of us try to sell our products through logic and only through logic. People seldom buy logically. Some of us think many things are bought and sold completely without emotion – not so. For example, who gets excited about pork bellies, cocoa beans and baled cotton? Speculators do. They’re betting heavily that they can outguess the future. Producers do; they worry about oversupply and falling prices. Users do; they worry about undersupply and rising costs. Even in the most unglamorous products and services, fortunes and reputations are being made – and lost.

Be genuinely interested in doing your best for the customer, and show this interest by asking questions that will tell you what he or she is seeking to accomplish. Rise above the limitations of your own taste and preferences. Recognize that what’s right for you isn’t right for everyone. Make an intense effort to see that world through your customer’s eyes.

Use your expertise to guide the customers to the best solution that your inventory provides for them. To do this, wait for positive stimulus from the customers. When you get it and if you believe they’ve found something to help them achieve whatever effect they want, reinforce their image about that purchase. Concentrate on your customer. Say sincere and positive things that reflect your customer’s uniqueness, and you’ll not only make the sale, you’ll create a client who’ll send you referrals and buy from you again in the future. The key is to discipline yourself to wait for the customer’s positive input. Unless you do that, you’ll find yourself puffing something he or she doesn’t like, and before you know it, you’re caught in a web of obvious insincerity.

Remember, as I’ve already stated, people do not buy logically. They buy emotionally and then defend the purchase logically. Logic in sales is a gun without a trigger. You can twirl it all you care to, but you can’t fire it. Emotion is another gun in sales and this one has a trigger. You can hit the target with it. Every time you generate another positive emotion, you’re pulling the trigger on another accurate shot at closing the sale.

Let’s list the most widespread, effective and powerful factors that trigger equally powerful buying emotions:
• Color and style
• Pride of ownership
• Vanity
• Security
• Prestige and status
• Ambition
• Employment change
• Keeping up with the Joneses
• Health
• Love of family
• Family getting larger
• Family getting smaller

No skill that you can acquire in sales will enhance your earning power more than learning how to arouse these emotions in your buyers in ways that are positive to the sale you’re seeking. The exact words that you use will depend on your offering, your personality, your buyers and market conditions. Study each of the selling factors above and develop a list of emotion-evoking questions you can ask your buyers. If you’re selling luxury cars, you should be able to come up with several approaches for several of the buying emotions. If you sell plastic pipe to landscape contractors, you’ll have difficulty coming up with useful “emotion-evokers” on anything except security.

Remember, such logical statements as “They can afford it,” “It’s the right size,” “Prices are going up,” and “It meets their needs,” put too much emphasis on fact and too little on emotion. They’ll never think about whether they can afford it or not until you get them emotionally involved in wanting it. What does the size matter if they don’t want it? Yes, prices are going up, and that’s a strong emotional reason for buyers to hang on to their money and not buy anything they don’t want. It may meet what you think they need, but the fact remains that they’re going to buy what they want.

Positive emotions trigger sales; negative emotions destroy sales. As you work at developing the skill to evoke emotions in your customers, always keep the concept in mind. You can destroy sales as rapidly as you can create them through the clumsy use of, or the lack of control over, the emotional setting. Also remember that your actions and manners, your words and how you say them and your grooming and clothes are all things that trigger emotions in your prospects – whether you want them to or not. People will react emotionally to you. Prospects suffer the effects of fear when a salesperson patronizes them; prospects feel disgust when a salesperson is nonprofessional in any way.

When you’re working with strangers, you can’t know where their sensitive spots are, and if you try to guess, you’ll guess wrong more often than you’ll guess right. So play the odds. Greet them with a pleasant but unforced smile and soft attitude. Don’t pay them compliments, don’t ask them personal questions and don’t welcome them with a bootlicking manner. Be sincere, open and interested in their needs, and you’ll create a winning climate to close the sale.