How do you convince someone to buy your product or service?
Think about how you buy a product or service. Even the richest people in the world with “money to burn” do not buy for the sake of buying. Yes, they can buy whenever or whatever they choose, yet there is a reason that they buy. People love to buy; they just don’t like to be sold.
Have you ever sat in front of a prospect and tried desperately to sell them something? You’ve asked lots of questions and you know that your product or service will solve their problem but for some reason they just haven’t given you the purchase order.
If you’re like most business development people or salespeople, sometimes you just can’t figure out why a prospect doesn’t want to buy. In your eyes they are very much in need of what you have to offer and you know you can help them, if they’d only let you. If you haven’t stepped back from the situation and analyzed why they aren’t ready to buy, then perhaps now would be a good time to do it.
Some people like to help or, the word I like to use, “rescue” people when we see them struggling. Once we get the prospect talking about their issues all too soon we tend to jump in and begin to tell them how we can help them. The discussion tends to be intellectual.
The issue is that people buy emotionally and as salespeople we don’t go deep enough in our questioning to get to the emotional/compelling reasons for the prospect to seriously consider buying our product or service. By cutting the process short the prospect doesn’t feel enough pain so they don’t see the need to spend the money to fix it. Only when a problem has a personal impact on the prospect will they have that compelling reason to buy, not before.
Step back and debrief your past few sales calls and determine if you were trying to rescue or were you helping the prospect discover that compelling reason.
How do we help the prospect discover the compelling reason? The following are a few questions or statements that will help you help the prospect discover their compelling reason:
- Tell me more about that problem.
- Can you be more specific?
- Give me an example?
- How long has that been a problem?
- What have you tried to do about that?
- How much do you think that has cost you?
- How do you feel about that?
- Have you given up trying to deal with the problem?
- The easiest way to put this into perspective is to put you into the situation.
What makes you buy a product or service? Is it the features and benefits the salesperson so convincingly shares with you or do you have a compelling reason to buy? Ask yourself these two questions the next time you’re in front of a prospect to determine if there is a compelling reason for them to buy.
