Selling is not telling - Ask questions
Wayne Berry of Top Gun Business Academy taught me that “selling is not telling.” Over the past 5 years I’ve learnt an enormous amount from Wayne about selling. One of the fundamental keys to professional sales is to be more interested in your customers than yourself. Seems basic right?
It still shocks me how many sales people are unprofessional. You can spot an unprofessional sales person straight away when they:
- Immediately start talking at you
- Launch straight into the great features of the product that they’re flogging
- Start bagging the competition
- Offer you a solution without knowing what you want
- Start demonstrating their product.
If you are a sales person ask yourself, “Whose voice do I hear the most when I meet a prospect for the first time?” If it’s your own, then it’s time to brush up on your skills.
Now it may be that you truly have something exciting to say to them, but the problem is that:
Your prospects don’t care!
That is, they don’t care until they know that you are interested in them and that you understand their specific circumstances.
How can you establish interest in your prospects and develop understanding? That’s the easy part:
- Ask questions to develop rapport, to uncover needs, wants and emotional drivers.
- Have the questions prepared in advance and written down.
- Take notes on your prospect’s answers to your questions, taking particular notice of the things that they really get excited about.
- Only offer a solution based on what you’ve uncovered through asking questions.
Trying to “pitch” to a prospect is hard work. Asking questions on the other hand is easy because you don’t have to feel pressure to perform. You can just sit back and listen while your prospects happily talk about themselves.
The interesting thing that not many people know is that this principle fits perfectly with web marketing. Take a look at your lead generation website. Is it telling or selling?
About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.
Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.
