Do You Own the Single Most Important Skill in Sales?

Jan 13 2010

Do You Own the Single Most Important Skill in Sales?

Posted by: Cheryl Clausen in sales coaching, tags: increasing sales, sales coaching, sales skills

Before you can answer that question you would have to know what that skill is. I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I want to talk about a common deadly mistake made by people trying to sell their products and services every day. Especially people who previously sold a low cost product.

I Already Know How to Sell

Unfortunately, many people who start a business who have experience selling low ticket products believe they have an unfair advantage because they already know how to sell. Yes, you know how to sell that product yet if you are now selling a service or a high ticket product the knowledge that led to your success will lead to your failure now.

There’s a big difference between selling a service and selling any type of product. Plus there’s a big difference between selling a low cost product and an expensive product. Product sales are transactional and experiential whereas high ticket product and service sales are relational and emotional.

Features Do Not Create Value

Product knowledge can play a significant role in product sales because the customer has a mental checklist of features they want, and features they don’t want. The product with the most relevant checks on the customers mental checklist is likely to gain the sale. The only thing standing in the way is cost comparison.

Compared Cost is NOT the Same Thing as Perceived Value

When you are selling a product and you can rattle off features like a machine gun it can work for you because you are rapidly hitting and missing the prospects buying buttons. When you try the same approach selling a service or higher value product you make a deadly mistake that works to your disadvantage and costs you the sale. The more feature bullets you fire the less interested the buyer gets, and the more likely you are to lose the sale.

Prospects are very familiar with what a product is supposed to do before they ever decide to buy one. They know that some versions of a particular product do more things they want while others do less. Typically the prospect has experienced the product either through a previous purchase or through someone they know having one.

High ticket products and services have far more “features” than a prospect ever wants to know about. Most of the possible features don’t add value they only add confusion, and confusion leads to “no sale”. The potential buyer cares far less about how they get what they want than about simply getting what they want.

The single most important skill in sales is the ability to help a prospect uncover and imagine the perceived value of ownership.

As the cost of ownership rises so does the prospect’s uncertainty. Uncertainty is reduced and perceived value is increased when you help the potential buyer discover:

How your offer produces or eliminates exactly what they are looking for
How much faster, easier, etc. this will make things
How the value of getting what they want is far less than the required investment

These discoveries must be made by the potential buyer with your help. They must say these things in their words not hear them in yours. You must help them feel their current frustration along with the feelings of removing it.

I’ve always said you would do far better knowing next to nothing about the product or service you are selling if you’d just meet with people and get to the heart of what they really want. Once you know that, then and only then, can you develop a plan to help them get that and have them eager to hear it.

Sometimes, like in this case, the damage is in the details and the gold is in the heart.

Coach Cheryl

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under sales coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.