OK, here’s yet another list we want you to make. The reason for this list is prod you into paying attention to the pains that your customers have.
The shift here is that you should be constantly focused on their issues – not yours. And you can’t do that if you don’t know what to listen for. So make the list, then take the top 3-5 most common issues and insert that into your story.
PROSPECT PAINS.
What kinds of pains/problems do you help people solve? Do you have a list of those? No? Shame on you.
How can you be a problem solver if you don’t even have a menu of the kind of problems you fix? Start that list today.
Brandon Gerard, one of our members of the Advanced Selling Podcast Linkedin group, asked a great question today and thought it was worth sharing:
“Is your smart phone hurting your customer relationships? I came across this great article, How Your Cell Phone Hurts Your Relationships by Scientific American, discussing how the presence of a smart phone causes people to trust you less if they see it sitting out next to you.”
PROSPECT POSSIBILITIES.
Selling is emotional. What’s more emotional than dreams? How can you help–through your service/product–create future possibilities for your prospect? Don’t laugh so quickly. If you sell a solution, then you solve problems. And if you solve problems, you advance your client to a new future. Shouldn’t you know what that might be?
It seems that the very thing we are looking for – the motive – is something we should study extensively, but we don’t. Buyer motives are tricky. Motives are usually in some form of “pain” or “problem” with the prospect’s current reality, or “unexploited opportunity” (a brighter future that they can realize with your solution).
Most salespeople think motives have to do with their products. But that is a myth. Your value is tied to problems you solve or opportunities you help people create by being in their lives. Your clients buy from you because you solve a problem better or differently from anyone else.
This means to be slightly less positive than your prospect. This might go against everything you’ve heard about professional sales….”be enthusiastic…it’s contagious.” I don’t find that to be the case.
If you’re going to be Selling From Strength, you have to create space for the prospect to convince you that they have a problem worth solving…and you can’t do that when you’re more positive than they are.
“Wow, that sounds kind of quick…I’m still not sure I fully understand what you’re trying to fix. And if I don’t understand it yet, how am I going to be able to recommend the best solution? Can we take a step back for a moment?”
Not sure where I heard that first, but it makes sense in sales.
Rather than playing the game of ‘impressing’ the prospect (which we all do, albeit unintentionally), why don’t you be insignificant. Let their pains and dreams take center stage, instead of yours.
It just might be that they develop so much rapport with you from being heard, they actually buy something.
This is reflective of a case in New York where a bank robber went in as ‘himself’ to rob a bank. When the police asked him why he didn’t wear any disguise he said that he put lemon juice on his face, took a Polaroid picture of himself and he was nowhere in the picture, thus he concluded that lemon juice made his face disappear. Click here to read the article The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is by Errol Morris.
A couple of psychologists got a hold of that interesting fact/story and decided to look at it from a “competency” standpoint. They have concluded that our incompetence precludes us from seeing our incompetence.
The reverse of that is why the highest achievers among us rate themselves the poorest when it comes to self-assessing a skill. The reason is that they see where they could be and where they are and detect a major gap.
A less competent person rates themselves higher because they don’t see much of a gap between where they are and where they could be. They don’t think they can be any better than where they are.
So the next time someone asks you about a skill that’s a core skill for your success, make sure that you think about your answer and be cautious about self-0assessing too high. If you do, that may be an indication that there’s a lot of room to grow.
What kinds of pains/problems do you help people solve? Do you have a list of those? No? Shame on you.
How can you be a problem solver if you don’t even have a menu of the kind of problems you fix?
Start that list today.