The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Majer

If your prospect does not see the value in your product or service, and if the only difference between you and the competitors is in pricing, you didn’t do a good job as a sales person. The main description of your position inside the company is to create the value, not just to show your price list. Teaching and educating customers is no longer enough, giving them information about your products or services is no longer necessary. They can get them by themselves, without ever talking to you or your company, and know more about your product and positioning on the market then you.

If they know so much about you, how can you try to sell them the same product without knowing their business situation or their needs?

Remember that customers are sophisticated; they either have or believe they can get product information more reliably on their own. Information is readily available through many different sources, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Internet is full of different forums, blogs, and review or research websites where they can get information about your product easily.

Customers don’t just want a specific product; most of the times they want to solve their pain point or business issues. A customer in today’s competitive sales environment does not expect to educate the sales professional about their business.  Therefore, you must already possess a solid understanding of the customer’s industry, competitors, and business direction.

Developing such a comprehensive view of the customer is a task that requires extensive researching and education to get an overall picture of the customer’s business industry. The modern sales person needs to focus on understanding the customer’s business initiatives, strategic plans, IT environment, and key customer preferences.

If you are still seeing yourself as someone who is there to educate customers, you are living in the past. The time of product-centric sales is gone. Welcome to customer-centric approach in sales.

You need to move away from the focus on presenting your products. Instead a customer-centric approach shows that you recognize and understand your customers’ needs, which is necessary if you want to survive in a 21st Century sales environment.

Your customers are tired of salespeople who come in and are unable to address real business needs, but talk about their company and the hottest feature, or unique one that nobody else has. There are many dimensions that you are selling, and price is only one of them.

Certain objections exist to every proposition in the world. What would a soccer, football or basketball game be like without the blocking of shots? And what your proposition is determines what the objections are.

Call on a thousand average people to whom your proposition is salable. You’ll find the self-same objections on the lips of the majority of them. And these objections, boiled down and standardized, resolve themselves into a very small number.

For instance, in the paint business the standard objections are:

(a) “Too much money tied up in present stock to consider changing.”
(b) “Nobody is asking for your products.”

And really these two objections represent the big buffing points of the paint salesperson today, found in the mouths of the great majority of their prospective purchasers.

Now considering the fact that the majority of a salesperson’s calls entertain the same objections, it is only reasonable to suppose that the same rebuttals or answers should overcome them. And that is more than just reasonable; it is absolutely so.

When I say objections, I mean what I say - bona fide objections, not merely excuses for not buying. That kind of objections is a reflection on the salesperson by not yet selling the customer. A real objection can be defined as a valid, existing reason for not taking the products or proposition. When it’s overcome the sale is made.

The effective rebuttal or answer to an objection is one that gets past; it settles it forever. Every salesperson should study and classify the objections met throughout his or her career. Then when these objections are fairly well established in mind, the salesperson should start formulating rebuttals.
They can be (the rebuttals) taken from colleagues, common sense, experience, and experiments.

Whenever an answer overcomes one of these standard objections and makes the sale, put that answer down as a standard rebuttal to that particular objection. There’s nothing better than your own success journal. Except for this book (Crucial Points to Succeed in Sales), you can’t buy one that is better.

And the first thing you know, your equipment includes a standard, effective rebuttal that will clear the path of every common objection you meet.

It is positively a shame to see salespeople stumble and stammer and “hem and haw” in answering an objection they have been up against forty times before. It is inexcusable.

Further reading:

• If you live by price - you will die by price
• How to win the deal without discounting
• Three Classes of Price Objections
• Six Common Objections and How to Handle Them

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Consider the following letter by an active head of one of the largest software company in America:

“Results are the only things that count. We are perfectly willing to pay a salesperson $100,000 a year if they deliver the goods; we are willing to pay $750,000 a year if that person delivers, and a person’s earnings from $7500 a month up to almost anything is in their own hands.”

The heads of ninety-nine out of every hundred companies employing salespeople reflects that sentiment. Often the main limit to the salesperson’s earning power is a self-imposed one.

I am sure you know the question in the mind of the person starting out with a cell phone in one hand and an expense check in the other is: “How can I sell?”

The question in the mind of the salesperson producing now is: “How can I increase my sales?”

Understand in advance, please, that we offer no theories. The source of the methods offered herein derives from the operation of thousands of successful salespeople in varied lines the country over.

These people are working more than the average salesperson because they are better than the average. And here is what they have found produce real results.

Are You an Order Taker or an Order Maker?

Let’s take a look at the order-taker, not as a negative example, and not as an object of pity, but only to make a point.
Chris the “order-taker” visits on Smith, Brown, Jones, James, and Robinson. They are not in the market. Then she opens her portfolio in Harrison’s store and Harrison buys.

Mind you, she didn’t sell anything. Harrison was ready; the order taker had the goods, showed them and took the order. Why? Simply because the prospect was in the market, ready to buy.

She encountered a favorable situation; she was standing directly under the apple with a bushel basket when it dropped from the tree. That is what makes it possible for the order-taker to exist. If the order-taker calls on enough people they are bound to find a certain percentage needing what is sold and ready to order.

Let’s leave the subject of order taking. Let’s deal with the problem of the person who really sells.

What is it? What’s the difference?
Simply this - the salesperson must create a specialized situation, and place people in the market who didn’t feel that way when they walked in the store. It has been said that sometimes a good salesperson sells to buyers who don’t think they want what they buy.

The reason why is this: the good salesperson makes the buyers realize they want what is being offered.

Let this sink in deeply. The order-taker canvasses looking for people who want to buy. However, the professional salesperson tries to make every person he or she calls on wants to buy.

The order-taker accepts the advantage of the situation he finds. But the order maker, a professional salesperson creates specialized situations to suit his purpose.

Now, the question you should ask yourself is:

Are You an Order Taker or an Order Maker?

To learn more about the Crucial Points to Succeed in Sales and how to use them to improve your sales results, get my e-book here.

1. Upcoming interview - mark your calendar for June 3rd at 2 PM EST! Join me and Deidre on Deidre’s Author Buzz and learn what are trigger events, where to find them and learn how to use them, and I promise, you’ll never have to make a cold call again!

Call-in Number:  (347) 308-8745

Link: Deidre’s Author Buzz

2. Podcast - last week I gave an interview for a FindNewCustomers.net website about Trigger Events. With buyers in control, sales and marketers need creative ways to get into accounts. This podcast explains how to do it.

Listen to my interview with FindNewCustomers.net :

3. Interview completed - my interview titled “Let’s start working with a smile” was just published in the newspapers in Croatia and it is targeted towards sales people in tourism. If you can read croatian visit the website by clicking here, or translate it with http://translate.google.ca

I am proud to share with you that my article “Differentiate Prospects from Suspects” has been selected as one of the top ten sales articles for June!

Top 10 Sales Articles website spotlight only the ten best sales articles each month, selected from the hundreds that are submitted. These featured articles are filled with:

1. Timely ideas for emerging sales challenges.
2. Fresh perspectives on what it takes to be successful.
3. Valuable strategies that will transform your sales results.

Please visit Top 10 Sales Articles website and vote for my article as the top sales article of the month!