Why Customers Buy - A Sales Story

The Research Topic📘

Book: The Psychology of Selling - Brian Tracy

How can we increase our selling ability through understanding the psychology of selling?

Additional Resources for more research below……..

Understanding the Fundamentals:

The 80/20 rule in selling. The top 20% of salespeople make 80% of the money. The bottom 80% only make 20% of the money.

In sales, you only have to be just a bit better and different in each of the key result areas of selling for it to accumulate into an extraordinary difference in income.

Making a sale happen is challenging, especially as the majority of people in sales work off of a commission-based pay.

This is the story we unravel as we look into the minds of salespeople and what we can learn from them.

Foundation Rule #1:

Sales Self Concept - the perspective you create on your potential earnings/performance

If you think you can only make $100,000, you will only ever make $100,000.

If you think you can make $300,000 for the year, you now have a chance to make that much.

Foundation Rule # 2:

Goal Setting in Sales is Life or Death - your visions only become true when you put them on a piece of paper

Exercise: Set 100 Goals

Take out a piece of paper and write down 100 goals that you would like to accomplish in the years ahead.

This psycho-analysis of your visions helps you define your priorities, and put in place the words to your success.

With this foundation in place, let’s learn the psychology behind our customers and how we get them to buy.

A Deeper Dive:

Setting out to reach our sales goals starts with developing systems we must follow.

Let’s say for example your goal is to sell twice as much this year than last year, we should develop a framework like this.

The Sales Guideline:

Plan Your Sales Calls/Pitch in Advance

Write down a script/interactions you might encounter in your sales efforts.

Manage a system that you run during every sales call/pitch.

Questions to revolve your sales presentation around:

How much do I pay?

How much do I get back?

How soon do I get these results?

How sure can I be that I will get the results you promise?

Why Customers Buy:

Every customer when they go to buy is looking for an improvement.

Your job is to make sure the customer is substantially better off with your product than anyone else’s or nothing at all.

People value freedom above all other benefits, and it’s important to recognize your customers give this up when they buy from you.

Identify the biggest gains or losses your prospects could experience from using or not using your product/service.

A customer has had an experience where they gave up their freedom for a product that ended up being horrible, which is why every customer has a certain standard of buying resistance.

Identify your customer’s pain points:

• A need or unmet frustration for your customer

Your job in sales is to identify the most important pain points for your customers and sell from that perspective.

For Example:

A prospect walks into a car dealership looking for a vehicle.

You start talking to him and learn that he has 4 kids.

The pain point is his need for a larger vehicle to fit his kids and make sure they are safe.

Your option to sell is now biased towards larger vehicles, and safety features.

Now when you sell the prospect his vehicle, you can make clear these two features as it is of utmost importance to the prospect as he has kids.

Identify pain points, and strike from the solution angle.

Four keys to strategic selling:

Specialize: 

Determine exactly what your product is designed to do for your customer. This can be specializing in a particular benefit, result, customer, or market, but make sure you specifically show what makes your product special.

Differentiate: 

Determine what makes your product superior to your competitors. What special benefits does your product offer to your customers that are not available anywhere else? In what area are your products better than 90 percent of similar goods or services in the market? If the product you sell is available elsewhere like life insurance or real estate, the differentiator is you and your personality, show why they should buy from only you.

Segmentation:

Which customers can most benefit from what you do better than anyone else? Sort out the market, who they are, and where can you find more of this ideal type of person or organization for your product. Think of running an ad for perfect customers.

Concentrate:

Your ability to set clear priorities and then concentrate single-mindedly on only those prospects who represent the very best potential as customers. In some cases, one prospect may be worth 100x more than another customer.

Testimonial Letters/Feedback:

Customers are more likely to buy from you if you can get your previous customers to write reviews.

The more rapport you have for your business, the more likely new or unwilling customers are to buy from you.

Post on your website your best reviews, and show your best feedback from customers to brand new ones.

Now how exactly do we put these ideas into practice?

Let’s find out:

Actionable Steps to Success:

Your Sales Pitch Needs Work: Lets Reword It

Here is an example of how we might take a person selling sales training and improvise their technique.

This salesperson is selling this training to other businesses over the phone.

We break down the process of reworking their cold call dialogue and closing more sales.

The first try on a cold call…..

“ I would like to talk to you about training your salespeople”

Returned answers like “We can’t afford it” “Our people dont need training” and “We have our own sales training program”.

First Step: Innovate

Innovate by first determining you are speaking to the right person. This is different in every situation but for this example:

You can ask yourself: Who is the prospect for sales training in a business organization?

This might be the owner or the sales manager.

Then ask:

What is the basic need or concern of my ideal prospect?

My ideal customer was not interested in sales training, he was interested in higher sales volume, and increasing sales results.

Using this understanding we change the first line of the cold call to:

“Who is the person in your organization responsible for sales and sales training?

Second Step: Establish

When you get through introduce who you are and who you work for and say:

“ I was wondering if you would be interested in a proven method that could increase your sales by 20 to 30 percent over the next 12 months?”

The answers will change to: of course, what is it?

Third Step: The Hot Button

Now we will repeat the “hot button” or key benefit.

“ We have developed a method to increase your sales by 20-30 percent and even 50 percent over the next few months”

Their response “Really how do you do that?”

“ That is exactly why I’m calling you, I just need 10 minutes of your time to show you this system, and you can decide for yourself if it applies to your company and your salespeople”

If your response to your offer isn’t “What is it?” or “Really?” “How do you do that?” you should rework the question.

Action Exercises:

• Determine the exact number of prospects you must reach each day and week to achieve your sales and income goals.

• Write your most important goal at the top of the page, write out 20 answers to that question, and take action on at least one of them daily.

• Design feedback mechanisms to collect and review testimonials ( such as email surveys ).

• Conduct regular market research among your satisfied customers; find out what benefits your product offered that caused them to buy from you rather than someone else.

• Take control of every factor your prospect sees, hears, feels, and does. Do this by reenacting the customer experience with your staff and point out the flaws in the buying process.

• Rehearse positive affirmation before every sales pitch, and visualize yourself as a doctor of selling.

Now for your specialized learning challenge:

The Capital Challenge: 

The Capital Challenge is an actionable quest where you will implement the research from this article to reap the benefits of these strategies.

Here is today’s Capital Challenge:

Sell every day for the next month.

Let’s answer the question of how this will work:

You will start with something you will sell; whether you already have a business/product/service to sell, we will use this.

If you do not, you will find a theoretical product/service to sell.

For example: you will create a fake business that sells an AI integration service, or a business that sells customizable stickers.

No matter your start the format is the same:

Conduct Heavy Market Research:

Answer these questions about your target market:

Who exactly is your ideal customer?

What benefits do the competition sell that sets them apart?

What are my ideal customer’s pain points?

Design a Sales Method:

Prepare either a sales pitch, sales copy, or sales system to use for your potential customers.

This will be executed by working in order after your market research to compile the information you discovered and form your target audience's most common questions and pain points.

Now design a pitch/system that walks your customer through this seamless process to meet their needs.

Your Next 30 Days:

This will be the time spent researching, organizing, and executing.

The last part of the challenge is going out into the field and practicing.

This can be cold calling, cold emailing, trial runs with your family/friends, or in-person cold outreach.

The goal here is to practice selling anything, a lot of times so that you can get down the process.

Try switching up what you sell, how, and who you sell it to.

Record your progress, and continue past the 30 days to improve your sales skills.

Now start selling, and be ready for a lot of rejection!

We Want Your Feedback!

Additional Resources: