I once met a counsellor and told her that a counsellor will
outsell a sales person with the right training...
It wasn’t that I just blurted this out at this networking
event I went to...
It was just that she was trying to sell me Freedom if I was
interested, I just had to go to this entrepreneurs’ event that she was selling
for other people.
Telling is not selling
The funny thing is, the people she was lead generating on
behalf of for this entrepreneur event had trained her to feature dump me with
lots of information.
When I first started in sales I was a blurter, and
thankfully I’ve now change. But to help you think of this: Does Oprah Winfrey
just speak at people none stop when she is counselling people?
(Picture taken from http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/)
As you know, say too much of the wrong thing and you can
lose a sale; and this makes sales scary for many people new to sales as it
creates a fear of rejection. It hurts like hell to be made to feel like a snake
oil sales person, but being taught bad technique will focus prospective
customers attention on your sales skills rather than the value of your offer to
benefit their lives.
When selling keep this in mind:
‘Does what you say or
do move you closer or away from a deal?’
This is really important
in every deal you are involved in. If the prospect has no interest in this,
stop trying to feature dump them what you think is right in your mind.
Socratic selling
Then she even employed these shocking Socratic selling
tactics on me. Here is an example of Socratic selling, and why some sales
people think they have someone right at the end of the sales funnel but are
kidding themselves most of the time.
You: “So you know that looking at the sun can ruin your
eyes?”
Prospect: “Yes”
You: “You also agree that sun glasses protect your eyes from
the harmful sun rays?”
Prospect: “I suppose yes again”
You: “To spend £10 on protecting your eyes must be worth
it?”
Prospect:”You’re right it’s not much to spend.”
You:”So it’s sunny today and my £9 glasses will be what you
want?” (This is where you think you have an order.)
Prospect: “Let me have a look and think about it.”
What, the prospect said yes to everything. What happened
there? Maybe you did not get enough yes’s out of the prospect?
Or maybe the truth is that your glasses are really tacky and
cheap looking and a pair of £9 sunglasses do not fit the needs of this
prospect? Or it could be that it was impossible for the prospect to not say yes
to your questions? And so you fooled yourself because your questions took her
down a certain line of answering, and now you believe the prospect is difficult
because they said yes all the time but did not buy. How wrong you are in this
instance.
Be the prospect now and re-read the dialogue. Is it really
possibly not to say yes straight away? Once you said yes, did you feel like you
want to buy sun glasses – really?
Now at the same time think of other criteria that you would
need to make you buy sun glasses, such as a certain brand or to look good for a
first date. If you look back at the questions above, it doesn’t seem possible
that getting people to yes works all the time in getting people to tell you
what they want to buy.
Done that. So you see, it shocked me when this lady used
this method to try to get me to go to this conference. I told her I had done
lots of business development already for businesses and her methods were
obviously taught by some amateur snake oil sales person.
Now I am going to tell you what shocked me the most. Then I
will explain why it shocked me so much: she is a therapeutic aroma therapist.
Why is this shocking? These people know how to do a proper consultation.
Medical people need to know the problem before the prescribe a remedy.
She kicked all her knowledge and skills out of the window to
hard sell and feature dump me, with some Socratic selling added in.
I gave her a few tips to use her counselling skills to find
out if what she had on offer met the needs of what her prospects were looking
for - which she liked. No one likes obvious trickery used by sales people, and
she certainly had a bad introduction to sales.
So why are medical people so able to sell?
Admit a problem
When you are with a doctor, they are trained to ask you a
series of questions to found out where you have a problem, while figuring out
the best solution for you. At no point do they start off with giving you the
answer before you even speak. Even if you have a heart attack and someone was
there. The doctor will ask the witness questions while doing their own
diagnosis.
The amazing thing about a doctor is that they are taught to
have counselling skills too. They have to learn how to and put in practice
skills in keeping patients calm and help them to be able to work through their
problems.
I once had a friend who liked a drink, we all do. This one
was drinking a bit more than most and after some persuasion went to the AA and
admitted he needed some help. Now the counsellors there don’t force you to
admit anything. People at the AA just keep turning up and are counselled by
people they meet, and one day the person just admits they are an alcoholic. Now
it has been known that getting an addict to admit they need to change and take
action is one of the hardest things to do in the world. I reckon not many great
sales people can get an addict of any problem to admit they have a problem and
take steps to change. Yet a counsellor can. I’m sure you are getting my line of
thought here. That’s why I believe a counsellor has the potential to outsell a
sales person.
Black box
All living beings have what marketing people call a black
box. It’s the thought centre where all sorts of reasons, stimulus, responses,
belief, values et cetera are processed. The job of a counsellor is to get into
the black box (inception) or draw information out (extraction) just like the
agents in the film Inception.
Now even more impressive is that a counsellor can affect the
way a person thinks without the patient feeling any pressure too. How many
times has a sales person put pressure on you, or you felt they over stepped the
mark trying to “close” a deal, or you’ve heard a colleague saying things like:
“this offer ends today. Are you buying or not?” kind of pressure?
Consumer decision making theory
If you have a rush of customers constantly waving money at
you, then just ignore everything on this page. However, if you have to compete
against other products or services for the same customer then you will need to take
on board the information on this page.
If you want a better sales performance, you will need to use
a bit more counselling skills to understand your customer. You will have to
draw out their objections, beliefs, values, reasons to move closer to a sale or
away from a sale.
Open questions
By learning more open questions rather than closed
questions, you will help you use your new counselling techniques. As clients
feel less threatened and trust you, when their guard drops you will start to
know the truth about their thoughts, and where you both go from here.
Facilitation
Facilitation and change management experts also use
counselling skills to help management and directors in big companies sit around
a board table. I’ve done this often. I might have an end bit of information I
want to come away with. But I like to get each person to admit what they want,
or what they worry about in working with my company too.
Trust
If the decision maker/s don’t trust you then you won’t get
the sale. If they don’t trust you then they won’t trust your product, service,
company, or what others in their own company think of them for choosing you.
Post purchase dissonance
In marketing, this is the feeling of regret once a product
is bought and consumed. The main regret is that the consumption does not equal
the expectation at the front pre-sale end. Your job is to ensure that if it is
between you and a competitor tendering to a prospect, yours is the one that
provides the least regret or downside, as well as most satisfaction.
However, once you ask more open questions and less of a
pushy Socratic hard-selling sales junkie, you will get more trust, get more
prospects telling you what they want to buy, all their worries, hopes and
dreams, and more orders. Think of Oprah Winfrey, trusted by millions and bought
by millions.
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