Employees don’t sell. They hate the idea. They don’t know how. Who could blame them? The boss blames the employee. The employee thinks the boss is a con artist. Selling, like all work, is supposed to be joyful. That’s not to say that everything should be a party; only that if you wake in the morning and hate the thought of going to work, you’re not doing it right.
The same is true for being sold. If a customer leaves feeling “sold” rather than “served”, someone goofed in a major way.
The trick is to translate that sales approach to your business. It’s not difficult and it will take a little practice but more importantly, it may force you to take a new look at the process of selling.
There are psychological instruments that predict whether or not an applicant has that killer instinct, that mental toughness and hunger that we mistakenly think is at the heart of a great salesperson. However, it may be that hunger worked in the old days but no longer.
Tips for selling service
POS Point: Don’t pitch…present. Showmanship is an art form of selling. In sales, hunger doesn’t get you sales. In sales, hunger keeps you hungry because it keeps you from putting the customer first. When the customer is more important than the sale, magic happens. I don’t remember who said it but it is better to make a customer than a sale because customers come back again. Customers who leave feeling sold rarely return. Get ’em once but never twice. Happy customers become your marketing program. Wounded customers become mere price shoppers, spoiling the market for all of us.
How do you turn selling into service? Follow these three important steps:
Reward high pressure service instead of high pressure selling.
Teach guilt-free selling.
Be an example of servant leadership and guilt-free selling.
Here is the context that separates high-pressure selling from guilt-free selling. The high pressure sales guy looks at a customer and says. “This guy has another dollar. I wonder what I could do to get it?” The guilt-free seller looks at the same customer and thinks. “This guy still has a problem or two that need solving. I wonder what I could do to be the one who can solve it?”
In the end the results are the same. You get the customer’s last dollar. The difference? One went for the dollar, the other went for the customer. It isn’t really a matter of content, only context. My guess is that customers can sense that subtle distinction.
POS Point: Sell a customer, get paid. Serve a customer, get paid again and again!
