Your Prospect Doesn’t Need Your Product

The approach to sales is often: How can I tell convince someone how great my product is and get them to buy it. While this may work for some companies, it’s a very expensive way to go about it. It really only works as a numbers game.

If you can tell 100 people that you are amazing and your product is the greatest thing since the introduction of the internet, sure you might get one person who buys. But that’s a waste of 99 prospects.

A good way to measure whether or not an approach is going to go over well is to judge it based on how you’d react if someone else applied it on you.

For example, picture someone trying to sell you a car and for the first five minutes the conversation took place like this: “Hi there! See this car? It’s a fantastic car. Wonderful, wonderful car. 0–60 in 6 seconds. Can you believe it’s one of the fastest mid-sized sedans on the market? Gosh, people have just been raving about it. Do you see the leather interior? It’s so luxurious, comfortable and great to drive…”

Would you be interested in buying a car from them? Probably not.

What if it went differently? What if you walked into a dealership and the salesperson approached you and said, “Hi there, what’s your name? Is there anything I can help you with today?” (You say, “My name is blank, I’m looking for a new car.”) He responds, “Well great, we do have cars for sale. Are there any particular features that are a must for you?” And so on.

He’d probably a better chance of selling you a car, wouldn’t he?

The second example is an example of a sales strategy that is customer-focused versus the first which is product/brand focused. When you focus on the needs and wants of the customer you greatly increase your odds of them buying. Why? Because by listening to their needs, you can give them the exact product that would solve that need.

This is why well executed Google Ads are so wildly successful. For example, someone is searching for “Where to find the best toaster”, and they see an ad that says: “This Was the Top Rated Toaster of 2017”. The person clicks on the ad because it is exactly what he was looking for, reads through the list and buys the Acme Corp. Self-Cleaning Toaster. It’s customer-focused.

The customer-focused approach is the answer to every single sales situation. Business to consumer, business to business, and business to government.

By focusing on the customer’s needs (whether that customer is a consumer, another company or a government agency) and tailoring your solution to them, you make the sale inevitable.

Self-importance based sales techniques are becoming a thing of the past. And thank goodness. More and more companies spring to life with every day that passes. The companies that are tailoring their sales efforts to understanding their customer’s unique pain-points and challenges are the ones who will inherit the future.

The truth of the matter is there are many great products out there. No matter what your niche is, there’s someone else out there who has a similar product or service with similar features.

The way to stand out and the way to close the deal is by being so customer focused that the potential client in front of you KNOWS that you care about them. I don’t mean that you care about the money they’re going to give you, I mean that you care about them, their challenges, their needs.

The truth is, they don’t need your product. We live in a world of options. But they’ll buy it from you if you use the correct approach in selling it.

Money follows certainty and trust. The easiest way to build certainty and trust with a sales prospect is by becoming intimately familiar with their needs and by highlighting how and why you care about them and how you can be there for them.

The best part of being so customer focused is that when you start closing deals with this approach, you’ll gain the most loyal customers you’ve ever had.