Personal Finance

Be practical about a prospect’s problem to accelerate the sale

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A salesman talks to a potential buyer. FILE PHOTO | NMG

To accelerate the sale, be practical about how your product solves the buyer’s problem.

Regular readers of this column know that I don’t think much of most internal trainings. And that’s because they look inward instead of outward. They tell what we can do instead of how it helps you.

They talk of ‘waiving registration fees on credit cards’, but buyers understand ‘giving away cards for free’. And if you are critiquing this last sentence, insisting that they mean different things then listen up.

To close the sale faster make the buyer see your product’s usefulness from his personal perspective. Here are a few examples:

The tag line for the outsourcing company says, ‘Do what you like, and let us handle the rest’.

As catchy as that sounds, repeating it to the buyer forces him to think how it applies to him and lengthens the sale that much more.

If the buyer is, say, a one man band trainer, or, marketing audit firm that needs telesales services on a project basis, try instead, “Do your training (or auditing), and let us create more training business for you (or, handle your telesales for you).”

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It’s a seemingly dwarf of a difference, but with an unbelievable giant of an impact. It is more likely to see him sit upright with rapt attention faster than regurgitating the tag line, ‘Do what you like and let us handle the rest’ ever would.

“Our revolutionary elevator is a through way- it opens from opposite sides.” Again, when selling to the airport manager try telling him instead that “it fits well into an airport’s needs, activities and plans because it eases traffic flow, and therefore queues, by allowing passengers to alight from either side of it.”

Same product, in a hospital, “the two-door lift saves lives because it cuts down by half the time it takes in an emergency to wheel a patent from casualty to theatre; this is because entry and exit is possible without having to turn the stretcher.”; same product, to a warehouse manager, “the two door elevator saves time and heightens safety; this is because the forklift’s driver need to turn this way and that across the factory floor is eliminated, plus there’s no need for him to climb a ramp to go to the upper floor.”

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Looking at these three scenarios, one begins to see why a plain, “our revolutionary two-door lift opens from both sides” lacks descriptive usefulness.

Converting the facts about the product into its practical use for the buyer is what will get you the sale. We buy the flash disk because it can fit 1,000 songs not because it’s 4GB.

“With our Internet speeds you can download a movie in less than five minutes,” speaks to the movie loving buyer in a way that, even an animated, “our Internet speeds are 5mbps”, never will. Being practical and personal about how your product solves the buyer’s problem makes it easier for him to ‘get it’. Get it?

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