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Practically every sale made to a new buyer may be properly classified as easy, difficult, or impossible. You’ll readily agree to that. But will you agree to this? Sales are not easy, difficult, or impossible according to the character or mood of the person you’re talking to.
What you say or do during the first few minutes of your conversation is the one thing which largely controls the later course of the sale. It doesn’t take brains to make a sale difficult or impossible. Your task is to pave the path and make it easy. And it’s just as easy to make a sale easy, as it is to spoil it altogether.
The whole object of your approach is to arouse fully your prospect’s interest, and bring them to the point where they want to see your product and hear your proposition.
That is the first specialized situation - to make the person you’re talking to really want particulars - arouse their interest and put them in a buying frame of mind.
How are you going to go about creating this situation?
In the first place, there is a factor in selling which few men seem to have recognized; yet it is a block over which we stumble time and time again, when by knowing that it was there we could just as easily walk around it.
This stumbling block is this:
The average person’s instinctive antagonism to being sold.
It exists and is a force with which we have to contend just as surely as the wind blows, the rain falls, and the sun shines. The minute a person realizes that you have something to sell, they instinctively - without realizing it - throw up the mental barrier.
Though they will hardly put it in words or even admit it. More likely they will respond this way in their mind:
“This person has something to sell. He thinks he is going to make me take it. I’ll show him he is wrong. I will not buy.”
You see the idea? The mere fact that you are a salesperson influences your prospect partly to make up their mind that they are not going to buy. This feeling is based on the fact that every person instinctively hates to admit that another person can make or control him or her to do anything. And remember, all this happens before either of you say one word. So your first task is to get past this barrier of instinctive antagonism to being sold.
How are you going to do it?
Here’s the way to overcome that instinctive antagonism to being sold - the quick way - the sure way.
Forget forever that there is such a thing as forcing your business on the other: put yourself in their place and start right - working with the potential buyer to find out how their business will be benefited by your proposition.
In this way you can overcome this instinctive antagonism to being sold in much less time than it takes to tell about it. The earliest you manage this antagonism the better.
There is a right and a wrong way of meeting the objection of antagonism. Here is an example.
The salesperson says to the prospect:
“Your vacuum cleaner is a loser; mine has twice the power and suction. I can’t even give you a trade in on that piece of junk.”
The right way:
“I know you are interested in a clean environment and my company is too. This is the reason they designed this vacuum cleaner; it does not recycle the dust - it picks it up and securely holds it. It’s the best help you can get toward maintaining a clean home environment. Here, let’s compare in a operation test your old one with this new model.”
The question has been turned from salesperson’s proposition to discussing customer’s problem. The instinctive antagonism to being sold has been passed. And if he’s the right salesperson, the eventual solution of your problem will be his proposition.
Overcoming instinctive antagonism to being sold is a good deal like starting your plane by doing a pre-flight walk around first; it has nothing to do with your initial purpose but it is a necessary preliminary.
The real purpose of your approach is to arouse the interest of your prospective purchaser - to put him in the mental attitude of:
“If this is what he says it is - I’ll buy.”
Get the idea?
And once you have created the specialized situation, all you have to do is to prove that your statements are true; then the order is yours.
What you say or do during the first few minutes of your conversation is the one thing which largely controls the later course of the sale. It doesn’t take brains to make a sale difficult or impossible. Your task is to pave the path and make it easy. And it’s just as easy to make a sale easy, as it is to spoil it altogether.
The whole object of your approach is to arouse fully your prospect’s interest, and bring them to the point where they want to see your product and hear your proposition.
That is the first specialized situation - to make the person you’re talking to really want particulars - arouse their interest and put them in a buying frame of mind.
How are you going to go about creating this situation?
In the first place, there is a factor in selling which few men seem to have recognized; yet it is a block over which we stumble time and time again, when by knowing that it was there we could just as easily walk around it.
This stumbling block is this:
The average person’s instinctive antagonism to being sold.
It exists and is a force with which we have to contend just as surely as the wind blows, the rain falls, and the sun shines. The minute a person realizes that you have something to sell, they instinctively - without realizing it - throw up the mental barrier.
Though they will hardly put it in words or even admit it. More likely they will respond this way in their mind:
“This person has something to sell. He thinks he is going to make me take it. I’ll show him he is wrong. I will not buy.”
You see the idea? The mere fact that you are a salesperson influences your prospect partly to make up their mind that they are not going to buy. This feeling is based on the fact that every person instinctively hates to admit that another person can make or control him or her to do anything. And remember, all this happens before either of you say one word. So your first task is to get past this barrier of instinctive antagonism to being sold.
How are you going to do it?
Here’s the way to overcome that instinctive antagonism to being sold - the quick way - the sure way.
Forget forever that there is such a thing as forcing your business on the other: put yourself in their place and start right - working with the potential buyer to find out how their business will be benefited by your proposition.
In this way you can overcome this instinctive antagonism to being sold in much less time than it takes to tell about it. The earliest you manage this antagonism the better.
There is a right and a wrong way of meeting the objection of antagonism. Here is an example.
The salesperson says to the prospect:
“Your vacuum cleaner is a loser; mine has twice the power and suction. I can’t even give you a trade in on that piece of junk.”
The right way:
“I know you are interested in a clean environment and my company is too. This is the reason they designed this vacuum cleaner; it does not recycle the dust - it picks it up and securely holds it. It’s the best help you can get toward maintaining a clean home environment. Here, let’s compare in a operation test your old one with this new model.”
The question has been turned from salesperson’s proposition to discussing customer’s problem. The instinctive antagonism to being sold has been passed. And if he’s the right salesperson, the eventual solution of your problem will be his proposition.
Overcoming instinctive antagonism to being sold is a good deal like starting your plane by doing a pre-flight walk around first; it has nothing to do with your initial purpose but it is a necessary preliminary.
The real purpose of your approach is to arouse the interest of your prospective purchaser - to put him in the mental attitude of:
“If this is what he says it is - I’ll buy.”
Get the idea?
And once you have created the specialized situation, all you have to do is to prove that your statements are true; then the order is yours.