What Do All Sellers Sell?
First and foremost – Change.
And guess what?! Change sucks.
People hate change! Hate it!
Guess who also hates change? Prospects and buyers.
It doesn’t matter what the widget is – a new house, phone, software, whatever.
Change is hard. It requires people to build new neural pathways.
When people are presented with change their mind resists. They start to think and feel…
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- Will this work? What if it Doesn’t Work (Uncertainty)
- What will I have lost if this doesn’t work out? (Loss Aversion)
- Do I trust what I am buying and from whom? (Trustworthiness & Credibility)
If sellers don’t definitively address these things during the sales process, they will have a difficult time becoming ‘Sales Nobility’.
The majority of people don’t change for the sake of change.
To change, people must believe they have a problem worth the effort change requires.
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- Investing the time to plan and find better alternatives
- Executing contracts if necessary
- Coming up with ways to pay for it
A golden rule in sales is the greater the pain, the greater the urgency to change.
Sellers are responsible for helping to illuminate the severity of the pain prospects may be experiencing. Without getting beneath surface-level pain, pain that only requires a band-aid to fix, sellers will find it difficult to consistently and predictably make sales.
The emotion your prospect expresses when they say their
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- house is too…
- phone is too…
- software is too…
will clue sellers in on whether the prospect is seriously open to going through all of the mental gymnastics their mind will put them through once the idea of changing is introduced.
The better a seller’s skills at using tonality and asking probing questions to uncover the extent, size, and impact of the problem, the better a seller will be able to…
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- Determine if their time is worth spending with the prospect
- Gauge the emotional toll this problem has cost their prospect
- Tilt the odds of their prospect changing in their favor
Do these things well and a prospect will form their own conclusion, with the seller’s assistance, that they have to fix this now.
Failing to do these things well will cause prospects to object…
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- Now is not a good time…
- We have other priorities…
- I have to think it over…
To avoid this fate sellers should be convinced their prospect has a problem worth their time.
Through dialoguing with the prospect, sellers should be persuaded there is a legitimate problem worth the effort required to change.
If a seller believes there is, they can move with purpose and urgency to help fix the problem while putting the buyer’s mind at ease concerning their natural feelings of uncertainty, loss aversion, and trustworthiness.
After all, sellers’ sell change. And change is hard.
Don’t change the way you sell. Don’t sell. Choose your hard.