The Ultimate Selling Secret

by Bob Serling

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Nearly every client I talk to is scared to death of making an in-person sales call. Even most of the seasoned sales professionals I know have a gnawing feeling that somehow they'll "lose the touch" and not be able to sell again.

That's because most people view sales as a set of techniques you use to sell your product or service to someone — often against their will. But the fact is, very few sales are ever made against someone's will. And those that are nearly always result in returns, bad will, and bad word of mouth for your company.

Also, using a bag full of sales techniques usually defeats the purpose. Nobody likes to be "sold". Nobody likes to be conned or to feel taken advantage of.

The good news is — this doesn't have to happen. You don't need any slick sales techniques, you don't need to con anyone, you don't need killer closing techniques (which are insulting and usually don't work), you don't need to do anything phony. Whether you sell in person, over the phone, in print, by mail, by email, by the Internet, or any other way, all you really need to understand is...

What Customers Really Buy

Customers buy two things only:

1. Something that makes their life better
2. Something that solves a serious problem for them

Here are a couple examples of what I mean. Of the items that my product development company currently has in development, a number of them are toys. Toys make peoples' lives better. They make the time people spend with family and friends more enjoyable, sometimes even memorable, such as, "Remember that time we were all playing Twister and your foot got stuck on Sarah's?"

Other products and services we have in development, primarily business products, solve serious problems. For example, one of the business methods we're developing is a new approach to getting and retaining subscriptions for magazines that have a subscriber base of 1 million subscribers or more.

Magazines make their money by selling advertising, and the more subscribers they have, the more they can charge for advertising. The two most difficult problems any magazine has are getting new subscribers and retaining existing subscribers. Solving these problems is the key to selling our services to magazines with large subscriber bases.

So in order to sell anything, you don't need to twist anyone's arm and you don't need to use a slick set of the latest selling tricks. All you need to do is either make your customer's life better or solve a serious problem they already have.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it's really a bit more complicated than it sounds...

Why You're Having a Difficult Time Making Sales

Most clients I talk with think their product or service already makes their customer's life better or solves a serious problem their customer has. Maybe it does to some extent, but the real problem is, the benefit you're focusing on is...

Far too general

I've seen this time and time again with my clients. And I've made the same mistake many times myself. Here's a real-life example that will show you what I mean.

When I owned a software company that sold advanced testing and assessment software, we thought that our main benefits were:

1. Training people far more quickly and effectively, saving them a lot of time and money (this would make their life better).
2. Eliminating the serious mistakes that go undetected with conventional testing and assessment techniques (solving the critical problem of well-trained employees who still make serious, costly mistakes).

But guess what? As wonderful as this all sounds, our sales presentation wasn't making the impact we thought it should. We simply weren't closing the number of sales we knew we should be making.

Why? Because our benefits were far too general.

You Must Dig Deeper

If you really want to command more market share and leave your competitors in the dust, the solution is simple — you must dig deeper. Instead of selling the customer the benefits you think they should have, you must find out from the customer himself (or herself), precisely what benefit matters most to them.

The way you do this is what I call, "The Ultimate Selling Secret". So what is this simple, high-return secret?

Committing to doing in-depth research for each segment of your market.

Here's how you do this. When we were selling our testing and assessment software, one of the key markets we targeted was the banking industry. Because of the constantly changing state and federal regulations, the banking industry is in a continual training and testing mode. That made it an ideal candidate for our software.

But when we presented our software, the results of our presentation fell far short of what we had expected. Our prospects were duly impressed with the software's power and capabilities and they seemed to understand our benefits. Even so, sales were lukewarm.

The problem was solved one day when I was talking to a business development specialist from IBM who was interested in presenting our software to a major bank that was a client of theirs. Since we wanted to create a branded presentation for this bank, I went to their web site to get some details to weave into our presentation.

While reading the bank's annual report, I discovered a very important fact that turned things around for us dramatically. The annual report stated that while earnings were up, they still weren't reaching expected levels due to continuing problems with tellers giving out inaccurate information on the bank's check-hold policies.

Check-hold policies — how long funds are held before being released to you when you deposit a check — are very complicated and confusing due to a tangle of state and federal regulations. But when a teller says the funds will be available tomorrow and a customer writes half a dozen checks that bounce because the actual hold period turns out to be three days, it causes serious problems for the customer and the bank.

Because the teller "is the bank" to most customers, many customers often conclude that the bank doesn't know what it's doing, close their accounts, and bad mouth the bank to anyone and everyone who will listen.

Once I discovered this check-hold problem, I made a few calls to my contacts at other banks to see if the problem was as widespread as I suspected it to be. Sure enough, every one of my contacts told me this was a nightmare situation.

So we refocused our presentation to banks to solve the check-hold problem first and then followed with the other benefits we had to offer. The results were an immediate, substantial increase in sales.

Conclusion - Sell the Benefit Your Customer Wants
Not the Benefit You Think they Want

Digging deeper and doing the necessary research to uncover the true benefit your customer really wants takes some time and effort. And most often, you'll need to do this for each customer segment you sell your product or service to.

But as you've just seen, it's well worth the effort. Whether you sell in person, on the phone, in print, by mail, by email, over the Internet, or by any other means, there's no substitute for focusing on the benefit your customer wants most.

Now that you know "The Ultimate Selling Secret", make a commitment today to dig deeper and use what you find to start enjoying greater sales.