True sales pros use psychology to sell more, the psychology of urgency, time, choice and stories. Let’s look at each.
The psychology of urgency
Another typical sales scenario involves the salesperson doing everything right – until after the first appointment. Then, suddenly, the emails stop, messages don’t get returned, and the lead runs cold, leaving you scratching your head wondering how that nice, friendly, responsive, involved prospect dropped off the face of the earth.
Does that ever happen to you?
What you’ve just experienced is a good sales process gone bad for the lack of a key ingredient: urgency.
As Stephen Covey says, there is a big difference between the “urgent” and the “important.”
In everyday business, the urgent category includes soothing angry clients, “putting out fires,” production stoppages, surprise inspections or audits by regulators, labor problems, media blowups, and things of that nature.
The important category includes things like making employees feel appreciated, upgrading to new office technology, listening to someone’s ideas, increasing your industry knowledge, developing good corporate citizenship (charitable, environmental, etc) and so on.
Guess which category is at the top of every executive’s agenda each morning when they walk in the door?
If you’ve positioned the product or service you’re selling as a “nice to have” instead of a “have to have,” – or even better a “have to have now” – your leads will run cold. Simply put, buying from you (even if it’s important) takes a backseat to the urgent matters of the day.
If you as a salesperson haven’t identified the pain, then you will get a less than urgent response. If you walk up to someone on the street and they have a nail sticking out of their knee- they would have a high sense of urgency to have the nail removed. This is the same with the prospect. When you can identify their “nail” they will want to move on it quickly.
In my seminars, I ask people to think about these questions:
•Why is it urgent for the prospect to ACT NOW?
•What is the incentive?
•How can you create meaningful deadlines?
•How is buying both an important *and* an urgent issue?
Again, I’m not going to supply you with gimmicky stock phrases or clever comebacks, but rather suggest that you spend some time and energy thinking about how to intelligently and professionally address legitimate buying obstacles such as “We have no budget,” “We have no need for this product/service,” “We’re happy with who we’re using,” and “This is bad timing for us.”
I don’t believe in the process of “overcoming objections” – sounds too much like fighting. And if salesis a battle, you’re going to lose.
One method I like to use is simply turning objections into objectives. In other words, if you can intelligently address the objection in terms of reaching a goal, agreement, or solution that addresses the problem, you will be well on your way to collaborating with your future customer on buying your solution.
For example, if the objection is “it’s too expensive,” you can show, in clear dollars and cents terms (and using numbers supplied by your future customer!) how your solution will save money, generate sales, increase profits, reduce costs, etc.
You’re turning the price objection into a value objective.
The psychology of time
A lot of sales trainers suggest using the personal touch: handwritten notes, personalized gifts, etc.
We think these are powerful tools, but for different reasons. Whether a note is typed or handwritten makes little difference in and of itself. Whether the note comes with a small gift (personalized or not) also doesn’t really matter.
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