The key to buying motivation: opening the door to sales success
One of the most important things we teach salespeople is that your job in sales is to understand what people do and then help them do it better. Because you just have to understand what people are doing; How they do it, why they do it that way, when they do it and who they do it with – you can really help them and show them what is important to them. Remember, the focus here is on perspective: what makes sense to YOU. It’s not about what makes sense to you and what you want to sell them. Also remember that this is not about asking prospects about their “needs,” “problems,” or “pains.”
As Steve Schiffman, president and author of DEI Management Group, states in his book “250 Sales Questions to Close the Deal”:
What if I asked this person to describe the pressing business issues he or she will face in the future? What happens if I base my proposal on these business problems? I might have a good picture of what’s going on in this person’s world, but I wouldn’t have a complete picture. Even if you learn everything about a person’s pain, needs, and problems, you will only learn some aspects of their situation that are currently causing pain and problems. You don’t get a complete picture of
. What about the rest of your contact’s situation, things that don’t fall into the categories of pain, needs, or problems? What’s going on here? If I’m just talking about “needs,” I don’t know – and if you’ve only asked the questions listed above, you shouldn’t be asking them either.
Let’s take a closer look. People will only choose something if it makes sense to them. I think we can all agree on that. So how do we know what will be meaningful to someone we’re meeting for the first time or who we don’t know that well yet? We do this by asking questions and showing genuine interest in the people we meet.
Many of us salespeople learn from time to time that we need to listen carefully and show our interest by asking questions. But how many of us are actually good at it? We are passionate about our products and services – we want to take action and show our potential customers that we have a cure for every disease.