Part of your sales strategy should include making it easier to buy your products. What you do can make it easier for a buyer to make a purchasing decision. But, why leave your sales success in your buyer’s control? You can also make it easier to sell.
Try before you buy.
There are many customers who are afraid that if they buy your product or service that it might not work. They might be right to be concerned. Your products might not work unless you have proof of exactly the same situation, conditions and inputs as those at another location. What can you do? Encourage prospects to test your product or service for a limited time so they can evaluate it.
Just be sure you are helping your prospects to make a buying decision. How do you do that? You discuss with your prospects how they will determine that the test is a success. Just remember that some prospects will not be able to evaluate your products or services. You have to help them do that.
Help them evaluate.
You can help prospects move forward with a test by developing clear criteria for the evaluation. Part of the discussion will include what they are hoping to accomplish in their business. You need to understand what they’re trying to do by buying your product or service. You would use that information to develop the criteria for success.
For example, one of your prospects, a physical therapist, is a prospect for a pain cream you are selling. Physical therapists want their work on patients to be more effective or they want better options to reduce their patients’ pain. You could suggest having a survey completed by patients so the physical therapist can evaluate the effectiveness of the pain cream.
Just suggesting the survey isn’t enough. You would develop the survey. You don’t want to give a prospect more work to do so he can evaluate your products. You can develop a survey that showcases the strengths of your products and services when you know your products and services well.
You and the physical therapist would have ample data once he asks all his patients to evaluate your product and complete the survey. A review of the data would indicate how many patients saw a decrease in pain. Helping your prospects evaluate your products or services will help them buy and help you sell.
Get agreement before the evaluation.
Here’s the most important part of making it easier to sell. Before the evaluation, when you both agree on criteria for success and what success looks like, you must get agreement that your prospect will buy if the test is successful. What you say is, “So if this evaluation produces these results, will you buy?” It’s as simple as that. It must be stated. It is far more likely for you to end up with a sale if the expectation of your prospect’s buying is clearly stated and agreed on before the evaluation.
Sometimes prospects have to see it to believe it before they can buy.Your job in sales is to show a customer why he should want to buy your products or services. When they do, they are more likely to buy.