Why? Very simply, people don’t want to be sold to.
If you don’t believe it then keep doing what you do.
If you’re open to what neuro sales knows, what social scientists know, but what most companies don’t know then this will be more than just interesting – if you embrace it, you will change your business.
Buying and selling are very different journeys. Buying for many is a pleasurable process where you happily exchange money for something you want or need.
Selling, on the other hand, is an uphill process of influencing and trying to convince someone that they want or need what you are selling. Lots of psychometric companies will tell you that sales people need to be high ‘I’s and maybe high ‘D’s – influencers who are dominant because it’s all about overcoming objections, coercion, manipulation and sometimes worse. In some offices you will hear the cry “what have I got to do to make them sign the contract – do they want blood?”. Sounds like hard work to me.
You’ve also probably heard “Sales people need to be tough, hard-skinned, like armadillos” just to reinforce how hard it is to sell. And to some extent you need to be tough and deal with hard knocks, but in business we all do – it’s not the monopoly of the sales division!
If you’re still thinking about it, ask yourself a simple question,
When you go shopping, do you go to buy or be sold to? Is the sales assistant helping you buy, or looking at their commission and pushing a sale?
Now what’s the difference in your business?
So to improve your performance what you should be doing is engaging and educating your buyers. If it’s a cohesive story and they need it, they’ll want it and buy it. You didn’t sell it to them.
That may have shocked you but it’s true and neuroscience is proving it. Selling is a tough job, and a losing battle. Likewise, being sold to is mostly not enjoyable to a customer. Customers switch-off.That’s why people have built-in sales resistance, that’s automatically and unconsciously triggered at any attempt at selling them. Customers turn into can’t do, won’t do monsters – ‘they shall not pass!”
You may have a great product, at a great price, that does a great service for your customers. But the message is
STOP SELLING
– if you’re selling you’re not going to get anywhere.
Follow the very best salespeople – stop selling and in fact never sell – create the circumstances for buying to take place, and sit back and simply let people buy.
As ever, the choice is yours – be a can do person educating and engaging your customer. Or create a won’t do, can’t do customer who will find every reason not to buy.
Just in case you don’t get the message
Please help your sales people to stop selling