How to sell anything to anyone in just six easy steps.

Selling has become a common profession for anyone from a CEO to a janitor, from a doctor to a professor in a university, from a jury to a tinker. What do they sell? A doctor sells his prescription. A jury sells the verdict. The only difference between their nature in selling is whether they sell it "directly" or "indirectly". Unlike the people in sales, who sale goods and services to customers or business directly, the professions like doctors, pilots or professors, sell things indirectly but for a common purpose. The majority of us sell things for earning money. But selling and earning doesn’t favor all squarely. Some are excellent at it than other. They occupy the big share of an economy. So how do they do it. Do they do different things or do things differently? Who are they actually and can we be something like them? The years of research and practice has the answer. And for the good news to all, it is” Yes”. In this article we will discuss about how to develop our ability to sell things to anyone. It depends upon your discipline and adherence to what we are going to discuss here. It is a habit, a script and a well-planned manner rather than anything else. Before the selling becomes a lost art, we will jump into what makes you a good salesperson and how you can make a lot out of this skill.

The selling begins when you have identified a prospect. Or you can up-sell (sell something additional or of a high price or cross sell (sell different product) to your existing customers. Whatever is your selling goal, a well-verged, well-choreographed sales pitch determines your ability to close the sale. Remember that there are no bad prospects, only bad sales people. What distinguish between a bad salesperson and a good salesperson is their structured and rehearsed sales pitch. The ability to change and challenge the state of the mind of the prospect is the basic underlying factor. Let’s start by looking at six steps where you can develop sales pitch to sell anything to anyone.

1.      The Warmer/attunement

 Just like a sport, the first step after you meet your prospect is doing a warm up. Many people rush into briefing the benefits of their product/ service or touting the loyalty or price factor of it. They are doing a mistake. No matter, how good your product is or what price benefit it has got, or how nicely you have presented them, you are putting your prospect into the confusion from the beginning. Rather than focusing on your pitch, he will be thinking, "if your service is so good then why didn’t I know it before or why do you have to worry telling about this to me". Remember if the price factor alone was convincing for the purchase, the prospect would have visited the nearest store and would have bought the product already. Because that is his money and he know how to spend it wisely. You wouldn’t have to worry.

 Again, when you explain the greatest innovation and achievement that your company has made in years, the prospect remains indifference. In his question of “why should I buy from your company?” you end up telling that we have best quality, we have great brands, we have innovative products etc. But what you don’t understand is, it is a common answer that any sales person gives to the prospect. Who tells that the product they are selling is from a less-reputed or less-innovative company who doesn’t value the quality and is less customer focused. This leaves prospect in confused state of mind. When they are confused, they either postpone the buying decision or decline your sale.

 To overcome this situation, you need to first discover the best way to start the conversation. Instead of asking what keeps you up at night? Start explaining the reasons (3/4) what you are seeing and hearing as key challenges at similar condition. If you have it, this is a great place to provide benchmarking data. Try to capture that could be the highest concern of your prospect. And ask for their concern towards those challenges they are facing. Or if they want to add something to that list.

 The purpose of this conversation is to build the credibility. Essentially, what you’re saying to your customer is, “I understand your world,” and “I’m not here to waste your time asking you to teach me about your business.”

 It honors the customer’s time and shows that you’ve done your homework. In other words, you’ve just established yourself as someone worth talking to. Or, at the very least, for the especially resistant customers out there, you’ve just bought yourself another five minutes. Think about it. You just got your customer to warm up to you by talking about their business

 2.      The Reframe:

When you have established a credibility and the prospect has taken participation in your conversation, the second step is to connect those challenges to either a bigger problem or a bigger opportunity that they ever realized they had. At this point your goal isn’t to explain about the implications of the insight you have built in step 1. Rather Reframe is simply about the insight itself. It’s just the headline. And like any good headline, your goal is to catch your customer off guard with an unexpected viewpoint—to surprise them, make them curious, and get them wanting to hear more. You need to seek the reaction like” I never thought of it that way before” But if you get a response like “ I agree or totally agree” then you haven’t actually taught them anything. And that’s is a dangerous place to be. If the prospect has already thought about the problem the way you have explained then, they have probably thought about a solution their way too. Here, you have failed to provide unique insight and you have failed to provide unique value. This is not the place to be timid, as the entire approach rests on your ability to surprise your customer and make them curious for more information. You’ve just bought yourself another five minutes.

 3.      Rational Drowning

it’s time for the data, graphs, tables, and charts you need to quantify for the customer the true, often hidden, cost of the problem or size of the opportunity they’d completely overlooked. Marketers often refer to this as the “FUD factor”—fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If your presentation is done well, the customer reaction in step 3 should be something like, “Wow, I had no idea we were wasting that kind of money!” or “I’d never thought of this as an opportunity before. We’ve got to get after this or we’re going to really miss out!”

 4.      Story telling/Emotional Impact

Now that you have set up a stage, you need to appoint the prospect himself as the main role of your story. This is where you build the personal message for them. You need to be able to hear something like this, “ I see what you are saying and it makes a lot of sense for my family or customers”. But if you get a response like “I am struggling to see how it applies to me. Because we are different” then you need to understand that the prospect has zero interest in your product. If you get a response like that then, immediately jump into second story. But don’t try to repeat the business case in grater detail. This will never get you past the “we’re different” response. That’s because you’re solving for the wrong problem. So how do you do that? Now you’ve got to make it personal. And this is where a Challenger rep’s storytelling ability really comes into play. As the name implies, Emotional Impact isn’t about the numbers; it’s about the narrative. You’ve got to paint a picture of how other companies just like the customer’s went down a similarly painful path by engaging in behavior that the customer will immediately recognize as typical of their own company. Now they see the challenge or opportunity as their own, and now they’re looking for a solution. 

5.      Convince them of a solution

In step 4, you have convinced your prospect of a problem. Now you need to convince them of a solution. This is a point-by-point review of the specific capabilities they would need to have in order to make good on whatever opportunity to make money, save money, or mitigate risk that you’ve just convinced them they’re facing. Remember before the prospect buy “your” solution, they have to buy “the” solution. Step 5 is about showing customers how much better their life would be if they just acted differently. It’s about behaving differently, not buying differently.

 6.      Your Solution

If step 5 is about getting customers bought in to acting differently, the goal of step 6 is to demonstrate how your solution is better able than anyone else’s to equip them to act differently. Now it’s time for you to sell your solution. You need to be able to explain all the insight and USPs of your product and service. Show them the benefit.

By placing your unique strengths in context at the end of a highly credible teaching pitch you completely change the customer’s disposition toward your offering.

 Remember, the real value of the interaction isn’t what you sell; it’s the insight you provide as part of the sales interaction itself.

(Ref: The Challenger Sale

Book by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon)