Selling is the heart of every businesses. No matter how good your products or your services are, if you don’t know how to make a sale, your business will surely fail. Do you realize how other entrepreneurs offering mediocre products are able to earn a lot of money? In this post, we will discuss direct and subtle strategies you can use to effectively sell anything to anyone.
Believe it or not, we people are all selling machines. Try to reminisce the past. Do you remember those days that you are convincing your parents to buy toys for you? Those days when you are trying to convince your parents that you are really in your classmate’s house creating projects and you’re not wandering somewhere else?
We’ve been selling ideas all throughout our lives.
From the day we’re born up to this very moment you are reading this post, you’ve been selling ideas to your parents, friends, professors, co-workers, and other people you are interacting and communicating with.
Here’s a list of actionable tips you can apply to your business so you can earn more regardless of what you are selling.
7 Selling strategies you can apply in your business
1. Sell Yourself First
People tend to buy something from whom they know and trust. If people don’t like you, they won’t listen to what you are saying and therefore your selling powers will be very low.
You as a sales person should have this goal being able to sell yourself first before selling anything. Who you are as a person matters. You need to make that connection in order to get to your customer’s “context”. That’s the time you can start selling your stuffs.
2. Know Who To Sell To
A particular medicine solves a particular illness. In your business, you either have a products or services. Just like medicines, you need to study who is your market, your target customers. Your products or services solve people’s needs and problems. You need to find the right people whom your offers perfectly fit.
If you’re selling something that’s worth P20,000, why sell it to somebody whose budget is only P8,000? Do not commit the mistake of selling anything to anyone and everyone. Your goal is to serve and satisfy your particular market. Just a specific set of people and not every people.
3. Value Over Features
When presenting your offers, do not focus on what the product “is”. Instead, focus on what the product “does”. Do not sell the product itself but sell what problem it solves.
You need to position your product where your customers will perceive it as the perfect fit for their wants and needs. Tackle all possible angles where you can present the benefits your products can give: Physiological, Safety, Psychological, Ego, and etc.
4. Ask Questions & Listen
In relation to #3 where you need to present your offer in the most valuable position, you cannot effectively do it without asking questions and listening to your prospect’s answers.
The key here is, again, context. You need to ask the right set of questions to be able to know the “context” where your customers are coming from and what they really want. You need to understand what motivates your customers to buy.
Once you have the overall picture, you now have the information you need in order to tailor your words so you can position your products as the most valuable offer.
5. Alternative Choice Question
If you know how to ask questions properly, you’ll be able to drive the customers into a position where there’s no way out. There are questioning techniques that can put your prospect into an instant buying decision.
You need to carefully craft your questions in a manner that there’s no room for your customers to say no. One technique you can use is the alternative choice questions.
Instead of asking something like “Are you going to buy ice cream today?”, better ask this instead “What ice cream flavor are you going to buy today?”. Did you see the big impact?
By simply tweaking our words, we can eliminate the room for the customer to not buy anything. With the first question, there’s a room for the customer to say “no”. With the second question, the answer can never be “no” as it needs to be the flavor of the ice cream.
If you learn the art of asking questions, you will have an edge in selling.
6. Do Not Sell
One of the things people hate is they hate to be sold. I even hate it myself. LOL. It irritates me when people are trying to sell something to me.
When people know that you’re a salesman and they feel that you are getting pushy with your offers, they will step back. Guess what? No sales for you my friend. You need to be pretty careful about this.
Instead of being a sales person, you need to change your perspective and the way you approach things. Just like what we have talked about in the previous entries, you need to sell yourself but without being sale-sy and pushy.
Here’s the perspective. Instead of pushing your customers to buy, attract them to buy. Again, you need to carefully craft your words that you will not sound like a pushy salesman.
7. Change Your Language
One of the things you can do to not sound like you are selling is to change your language. You can do this by tweaking the words you use when you communicate with your customers.
Here’s a list of words you can alter.
- Instead of saying price or cost, say investment or amount.
- Instead of saying contract, say document or form or paper.
- Instead of saying down payment, say initial investment or initial amount.
- Instead of saying buy this, say own this or acquire this.
- Instead of saying deal, say transaction or opportunity.
8. Trigger emotion
Emotion is the greatest factor in the decision making process when buying. Although one may argue that the information about a certain product or service are the ones that triggers the buying decision, but it is only a part that helps the emotional state of a buyer. Emotion is more important than information.
You need to put your offer in a position where it will feed your customers ego if they will buy it. Make it painful for them if they decide not to buy. You can also present your offer as something scarce to push them to decide immediately.
So that’s it for now for this post.
I’ll try to add more tips in this post in the future so better check this blog regularly. If you’ve learned somethings from this, please share it with your friends and co-entrepreneurs who are just starting out. This will benefit them a lot. Thanks!
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