Effective Selling Starts With Self, Chamber Speaker Says
Successful salesmanship has less to do with subliminal suggestion, wearing the proper cologne or even making a gang-busters presentation than it does with a simple ability to be liked by prospective customers.
How to engender empathy and trust in prospective customers is the focus of a seminar today at the San Diego Marriott called “Effective Selling Techniques” sponsored by Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce. The seminar is part of the chamber’s series on topics of interest to small businesses.
Seminar leader will be Martin Goodman, the 25-year-old vice president of Welcome Labels of San Diego, a student of the art of salesmanship since his high school days. His company, which sells return address labels to apartment building owners that are given as favors to new tenants, will do more than $1 million in sales this year.
Goodman also gave the chamber’s sales seminar last year. Don Green, Chamber vice president, said Goodman sold him on the idea for the seminar after making an unsolicited pitch.
Learned From the Best
The Ohio native said he has culled his salesmanship ideas from the “best of the best”: from classic books including “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill and “How to Master the Art of Selling” by Tom Hopkins to sales training techniques developed by Xerox and methods outlined in Harvard Business Review articles.
“People buy on emotion, not logic, so it’s important to get people to like you,” Goodman said. “The secret in getting people to like you is founded in listening. It’s not ‘sell and tell’, it’s a listening exercise. So, the cardinal rule is sit on your hands and listen. Beginning sales people, especially, get so caught up in making their presentations that they forget there’s a person on the other end.”
Getting the customer to open up and talk requires asking “probing and open-ended” questions that stimulate the customer to describe his or her business problems. From such revelations, the attentive salesperson can craft a sale in the form of a solution, Goodman said.
“Fancy verbal footwork doesn’t do it,” Goodman said. “Usually the person you are doing it to is smart enough to know you are doing it to them.”
Needs Tumble Out
The more a customer talks, whether it’s about family, new products, or fishing trips, the more likely it is that the customer’s all-important “need” will “pop out on the table,” Goodman said.
“Sales is based on a needs analysis, but you don’t just ask them what they need. You let them tell you what they need,” Goodman said, adding that open-ended questions are likely to make the customer open up more.
A common mistake of sales people is their failure to practice their sales “materials,” which Goodman defines as, first, writing out the features and benefits of the product.
“Features have to be translated into benefits,” Goodman said.
