Your sales “experience”

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An increasingly important aspect of the sales process for outside sales professionals is differentiation. These days, when a person says “differentiation,” it can mean all sorts of things. When I say it, I specifically mean the emotional experience a buyer has with you through the sales/buying process.

The sooner you can create an emotional bond (and I don’t simply mean good-old-boy bond) with your buyer, the sooner you will make the sale. That emotional bond may be in terms of your personal rapport. It may be the buyer’s need or want for your product. It may be the way you came to meet the buyer (i.e., a third party referral). Either way, you win if you bond.

As competition increases in markets, products and services are seen more as boring commodities, with little variation between suppliers. How do you rise above that? Hint: price is a bad answer.

The connection between buyer and seller is a little-discussed topic. Oh, we all talk about building rapport and relationships. But there’s more to the story. We’ve got to go beyond asking a lot of personal questions and simply “showing an interest in others.” And when presenting our solution, we’ve got to go beyond explaining how our solution works for them.

No, assuming we’ve got a viable product or service to begin with, we’ve also got to consciously work on how we say our solution can help and the emotions we need to stir up to develop desire. It’s a challenge in creativity most salespeople aren’t up for.

The most powerful approach I’ve developed for making this happen is to tell stories. Short, to-the-point, lesson-is-clear stories. I start the story with who I am and why I do what I do. I move to the company I work for and how we help people. I then focus on the specific product or service in question. I use vivid descriptions of the before and after of working with me. I sprinkle in as many quick but heart-touching details as I can without getting long-winded. And I do all of these things NO MATTER WHAT I’M SELLING.

My thinking is this just before any sales appointment: twenty minutes ago, another sales professional was in here offering a solution to something. Twenty minutes after I leave, same thing. How will I be remembered? How will my solution be remembered? What value will I add to this person’s day.

Try this approach. You will win more sales and enjoy what you do far more than you do today.

Other thinking/resources: Craig Elias article, Deana Berg article, and the best of the bunch…a powerful blog post by Scott Jones.