Danger ahead…
If you do without the 5 selling fundamentals, you enter the danger zone of selling. It’s the intersection of extreme negotiation, heavy discounting, lost sales, and bad prospects.
The 5 selling fundamentals are what you need do in every interaction regardless of whether it’s email, on the phone, face-to-face, text message or voicemail.
When we get these fundamentals correct, it is amazing what can and will happen.
Something crucial about these five is that you can’t do one without the other; each one builds on the other. Leave any one of them out and you’ll risk being right back in the danger zone.
The five fundamentals are: Continuity, Competence, Confidence, Opportunity, and Profit. I like to put them into a math formula:
C+C=C=O=P
Let’s dive in.
Continuity:
This is about repetition. Just a couple calls to a prospect is not enough. “If after a couple of calls the prospect is not engaging with you, then they must not be interested.” That is a big lie! There’s a reason why the biggest brand names spend billions on advertising; they know they need to keep their name out there. If big brands know they need to do that, you better not think a couple of calls is all it takes.
Continuity is about your prospect seeing you enough to know you’re real and you can help them.
Read these 15 Dos and Don’ts of a Profitable Sales Process
Competence:
Separate yourself from everyone else. This is about you demonstrating your intelligence to your prospect and customer However, it’s not about you doing all the talking. It’s about engaging the prospect in a conversation that has them thinking. Don’t waste time telling them how great you and your company are. That’s old school. Instead, focus on the questions you ask.
Your goal is to take the customer to a new level of thinking and insight. That’s how you stand apart from your competitor.
Confidence:
When you do the first two “C’s” well, you’ll be astounded by the level of the confidence the prospect will have in you, and you in them.
Confidence cuts both ways.
When there is a high degree of confidence, there’s a high degree of trust–and it’s there that real value is created. We create real value when we’re trusted, because that is when the other person feels enough at ease to reveal everything and get to the core of their issues.
Read more about What Prospects Want to Hear.
Opportunity:
You now know the customer’s critical needs, the customer has an astounding level of confidence in you, and so it becomes the perfect time to present the opportunity.
Too many salespeople try to rush into putting a proposal in front of the customer and rush so fast that there is zero opportunity to create confidence. There is little confidence because the prospect hasn’t been exposed to your competence. If you fail to do the steps before opportunity, you’ll find yourself in the danger zone intersection. I guarantee it!
Never, and no matter how tempting it might be, put a proposal in front of a customer before you have built confidence.
Profit:
You might ask how profit could be a fundamental? It’s simple: without profit, you fail to exist. Profit is to sales what air is to all of us. We need it, and we cannot live without it. Don’t think I’m being one-sided and not considering the customer, because I am!
Have you ever done business with a business that doesn’t make money? It doesn’t work for very long. Profit is the oil in the business engine and yes, the customer also makes a profit from the sale you make. Remember that customers don’t buy anything – they invest. And they invest for one reason: they expect something in return. They’re looking for some sort of gain, or a relief to a pain. Either way, they expect a positive return on their investment.
Don’t run from profit! Your job is to create profit for both you and your customer.
Find more about the 5 Fundamentals of Selling in two of my books, High-Profit Prospecting and my new book A Mind for Sales. I strongly recommend you read both to help you master these practices.
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Copyright 2020, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Result
2 Responses
Very helpful!
Very insightful