What Are Your Actually Selling?
Can I just tell you that you are not selling what you think you are selling?
I can hear the umbrage you are taking right now!
“OK Teik, I’ve listened to your fancy ideas so far, and some of them have been really useful, others have been interesting, but now you’ve gone too far! What do you mean I’m not selling what I think I’m selling! I know exactly what I’m selling, I’ve been selling ‘X’ for years!”
Let’s take a breath, I’m not trying to insult your intelligence. Rather I’m challenging your perspective!
Let’s try this – quickly write down what you are selling.
Write it down before you read on and watch the video.
I believe that if you are a builder, you will have written “I renovate houses” or “I build houses”.
If you are a lawyer you might have written: “I provide legal services”.
A hardware store? “Garden tools”.
Computer Guy? “Network systems”.
Now, let’s shift perspectives. Look at what you are selling from the shoes of your customer and answer the question “what am I looking for when I buy from this business?”
Believe it or not your customers don’t want to buy a renovation or legal services. They don’t want garden tools or network systems.
Your customers walk into your business seeking solutions to their problems.
Watch this video that explains what they are looking for and how you can make a sale every time by selling them what they need.
The key is to understand what their needs are, even if they ask for the obvious. In many cases, they may not know what their needs are themselves, so you may have to tease it out of them.
They are not looking for a builder who can renovate their house – they may be looking for a builder who can look after all the Council regulations so they don’t have to, they may be looking for a builder who provides quality finishes that they can show off to their friends, or they may be looking for a builder who can assure them that they are financially stable and won’t leave their project half finished. If you know this, you can sell them stress-relief about dealing with the Council; or you can show them your projects in top suburbs and past customers who tell them how their finished house is admired by others or you can sell them peace of mind by providing free insurance.
What you do not sell them is just a renovation project.
Focus on your customers’ needs. Remember that most buying decisions are made with the heart, not the head. What you sell must appeal to something they want to feel.
Get to understand how your product can meet those needs. Stop selling the physical features of your product, start selling them the benefits those features give them and provide for their needs.
Now it’s time to explore this further if you really want to nail every sales opportunity on its head. At teikoh.com you can search for marketing training videos in my blog to learn more about meeting customer needs, and to learn about the difference between features and benefits of your product or service here, and how to use them to meet customer needs here.
While you’re looking through the blog, you can also register to get these business tools delivered directly to your inbox every week.
No comments yet.
Add your comment