It’s time for another rant of mine.
This time it’s about how we can screw up a sales call by talking about too many things at one time.
Not only do we wind up confusing the customer, but many times we also wind up confusing ourselves.
Salespeople are quick to blame the customer as being the reason they’re not able to sell more, but I say, “Go look in a mirror!”
Keep It Simple Stupid — or KISS — is an expression that has been around for years, and it fits very well for how we should approach sales.
Don’t overcomplicate things for your customer.
I was recently on a sales call with a salesperson who had so many different subjects on the table at one time, there was no way the customer was going to ever be able to figure out anything.
When I asked the salesperson after the call if he felt he had too many topics going on at once, his response was, “No.” He felt he needs to confuse the customer. He sees it as his way of making the customer realize how much they need him.
I asked him how successful he has been in sales and he said he hadn’t been very successful — but he blamed it on the customers he was trying to sell to. He felt Marketing was giving him bad leads, because the customers (in his opinion) were all stupid.
Honestly, I don’t think “stupidity” described the customer as much as it described the salesperson. Not too bright to think you can create sales by using a strategy of confusing the customer.
Our objective in sales is to keep things simple.
Make it be a no-brainer for the customer to want to do business with you. Focus on one topic and/or need they have, and use that as your platform for gaining the initial sale.
You’ll never be able to prove how much you can help them until you can show them how much you help them with one item.
Keep it simple. Make the initial sale and build out from there.
Copyright 2014, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.
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One Response
When I used to offer two options for doing local listings feedback from fairly intelligent clients was that was too many. I realized it was better to sell them a basic listing, deliver on that, and then ask if they wanted to optimize the most important listings.
If two options is too many, that proves we need to SIMPLIFY as much as possible. Even though we feel they need to know more – they really don’t in most cases.
Mark is correct: keep it VERY simple.