The nickname for a camera in the Royal Navy is a ‘me, me’. Whenever anyone pulled out a camera onboard ship, everyone would sit up and say ‘me, me, me’.
That’s because we all consider ourselves the most important person. Don’t believe me? Well consider this; the last time someone showed you a photograph of yourself within a crowd of other people, who’s the first person you looked for, and on whose image did your eyes linger the most?
Still not convinced? Okay, try this one. When was the last time you met a friend in the street and the conversation went like this: your friend says: “Hello mate, how are you?” You reply: “Great, how are you?” Your friend responds: “No, I don’t want to talk about me. I asked how you were.” I’ll bet, not only can you not remember the last time it happened, but that it’s never happened, because we don’t really care how the other person is. It’s a flippant social greeting. It holds no sincerity, because it’s always about ‘me, me, me.’
Purchaser perspective
When you’re considering a sale, always look at the sale from the perspective of the purchaser – it’s the only one that affects the deal. What do they want and when? How much do they want to pay? You can then design your pitch around the answers.
If you are selling to a corporate client, take time to investigate by checking its website, getting copies of promotional literature, and looking at its service and thinking how you can enhance its business.
There are only three ways to increase the profit of any company; increase sales, decrease overheads or increase prices. So, think how can you save them money? How can you increase the sales of their product or, how can you enhance their product or service so that they can justifiably increase their prices?
You will hopefully now have a list of improvements you believe you can make to your prospective customer’s business or lifestyle. You now need to list these in order of the likely impact of each statement. Pick the most high impact statement and use this first in any communication you intend to have with the client. This is because if the prospect reads or hears nothing other than this statement, you will get your message across, and that message is ‘what’s in it for them’.
Two seconds to play with
They have a saying in politics; you have to get your message across between the doorstep and the bin. You may have only two seconds to get your message across. Use it well.
A negative stance
Due to bad treatment from poor salespeople interested in the sale from their own selfish perspective, some potential clients have adopted the stance of ‘the salesperson is always lying in order to make you buy something you don’t want’. This attitude must not be discounted. Indeed you would do well to expect every client to share this belief. If the salesperson remembers ‘that everything the salesperson says is a lie and that everything the potential client says is the truth’, the sale becomes easier. If the salesperson can get the client to say good things about his product, the client is more likely to purchase.
If you believe that your product will save the client money, and you say: “I believe this will save you money”, you are looking at the sale from your perspective, and the client may take the attitude that you would say that, wouldn’t you? As an alternative, imagine you ask the client if saving money is important to them, and they say yes. You tell them how much your product costs and you ask if that’s less than they currently pay, and it is. You then ask if they would like to know a little more about your product. How else can they answer but ‘yes’? They – not you – said that saving money was important to them. They – not you – said it was cheaper. If they said they didn’t want to know more about your product, they would be making themselves hypocrites – and that’s not going to happen. This all came about because you have looked at the sale from the client’s perspective and not your own.
During the Korean war, Chinese interrogators ‘converted’ a record number of American soldiers without torture by using this method. They would start by asking the soldier if the democratic system was perfect and without faults of any kind. No rational person could answer this with a ‘yes’. They would then ask: “So you believe there are faults in the democratic American way of life?” The soldier had to say ‘yes’ because he had just said so, and would be betraying his ego to say otherwise.
It’s about the other person
Changing tack a little, say you meet someone for the first time in a social environment, and that person asks you what you do for a living. If you answer, ‘I’m a mortgage broker’, you’re thinking about it from your perspective. You’re saying ‘I am this, this is me, this is what I do’. What’s in it for the other person? Remembering that it’s all about the other person, perhaps a better way of responding could be, ‘I work in finance, but we specialise in saving people money on their monthly mortgage repayments’, or ‘we specialise in showing people how to repay their mortgages years earlier than intended’. Now there’s something in it for the other person.
In both the commercial and social environment there are no guarantees of a sale, and I’m not suggesting you take clients prisoner and brainwash them. But if from the start of the relationship you approach it from the client’s perspective, a favourable outcome is more likely.
