Do you agree that a lot of qualified prospects do not finally give the orders? As a salesperson you try your level best by giving a great presentation and handling their objections but they still do not take out their cheque book and close the order. Did you ever wonder why does this happen?
Friends, my name is Rakesh Sharma and I empower business owners and sales people to grow their business and maximize their profits. Today I am going to share with you the secret of – “Why are orders not closed despite the best effort?”
So stay with me till the end of this article. Also I recommend that you make notes and action plans based on these trips, because as we all know, only practice makes perfect!
So let’s begin, friends this is a common experience that there are a number of prospects who appear to be convinced but still do not give orders. The prospects do not buy because they are afraid of making mistakes. All the prospects have a previous experience where they have been cheated by some sales person, and they do not want to repeat the mistake. Therefore before writing the check they want to ensure that their decision is right.
In other words we can say that they are not giving the order because they do not have full trust in you yet. They don’t find you credible enough so that they can give their hard-earned money to you.
Friends, creating credibility in the prospect’s mind is the biggest challenge in front of every salesperson. All the efforts of a salesperson are primarily only in this direction. The sales pitch is created to ensure that finally the salesperson is able to create enough credibility in the prospects’ mind.
A prospect has lots of doubts about the quality of product, reliability of the product, after sales service, utility of the product and many more. The salesperson tries to build the credibility and wants to get the order but he does not succeed every time. As per my experience, just building credibility with the prospect is not enough; rather a salesperson has to build ‘Mega-credibility’. What I mean by ‘Mega-credibility’ is that a sales person has to create a condition where the prospect has 100{2facf265810d5c64deca339a00197305ceb917dadef902f2426694cb75f36e2b} trust and he does not have even an iota of doubt in his mind. Then you will be able to convince him to take out his cheque book and write the cheque for you and close the order.
So today I am going to give you 5 most important tools to create the condition of Mega-credibility with your prospect so that you can convert him into to a customer.
1. You as salesperson: In the entire sales process YOU as the sales person are the most important aspect for creating the mega-credibility. All other things remaining constant if the prospect is not having enough trust on you then, he will not buy from you under any circumstances. The product, the company and all other things come later. The moment you enter into the prospects office, he starts judging you from your appearance, your punctuality, your communication your preparedness and so many other aspect of your personality. So as a salesperson you are the most important aspect of building the mega-credibility with the prospect. Therefore you have to ensure that you are well groomed, properly dressed and also punctual and disciplined. You got to be e well prepared with a good presentation and must position yourself as an expert of the product and the related information. You must have good communication skills and must ask the right questions to investigate the prospects needs. You must tailor your presentation in such a way that your product really fits into the prospects needs. Other things keeping aside your positive attitude and further more importantly- integrity is going to influence the prospecting decision. Therefore make sure that you stay positive throughout your conversation and with high level of enthusiasm show the prospect how you are offering a dream product and how his needs will be fulfilled by using your product.
2. Testimonials: Most of the prospects have a pre-conception that salespeople are liars. They are morally compromised and have no ethical integrity. They feel that the sales pitch is exaggerated. The sales people will sell what will get them the maximum commission. Prospect feels that salespeople are more interested in selling the product which suits them rather than what actually fulfills the customers need. Because of such beliefs of the prospect they do not have full trust on what the sales person says, moreover they fear trusting them completely. But most of the people believe in the words spoken by an unbiased, neutral third party. This is called the influence of a social proof. Therefore, sales people must collect testimonials from their satisfied customers and use them well during the selling process. Social proof or testimonials come in different forms. As a sales person you can take the testimonial from your satisfied customer on his letterhead, an email or you can even make a video while they are speaking about their good experience with your product. Of all the three, video testimonials work the best! You must use the testimonials for addressing different questions and objections of your prospect. Testimonial will help in building the mega-credibility and will help in bagging the customer’s order.
3. Your sales presentation: All businesses are “show business”. Prospect have a tendency to believe on what they see by their own eyes. Therefore, make sure that you create a great presentation, with all possible visual aids. During your presentation you can share the photographs of other customers using your product. You can show the pictures of some of the big projects where your product has been used. Do not forget to show the photographs of some of your satisfied customers with the some statements from them. If possible during the presentation you can also show them some samples of your product. Product demonstration is another good way of presenting your product. In the automobile sector a physical demonstration of the vehicle plays a major role in decision making and credibility building.
4. Product Trial: The best tool for building mega-credibility is product trial. The try and buy approach works very well in most of the sales situations wherever it is possible. The product trial also works very well if you are selling some services. The product or service trial gives the first-hand experience of your product/ service to your prospect. During the try and buy process the prospect gets to know about all the features and benefits of the product/ service and they get convinced without too much of effort from sales person. Further, it also reflects the confidence the salesperson has in the product, it shows that the product is awesome enough to sell itself and the salesperson needs to do no convincing in order to make the sale. This is one of the most infallible tricks in the book!
5. Return on Investment: Another important credibility building tool is the proof of value addition. The prospect wants to know, how your product/ service is going to help him in getting the appropriate value. Therefore, all the sales people like to share the proper calculation of return on investment of their product. Lots of customers, especially the B2B customers operate on the concept of internal rate of return. If you are able to explain and demonstrate the return on investment or internal rate of return or if you are able to show the value by calculating the cost savings time saving or effort saving through the use of your product, it will definitely lead to creating mega-credibility and you will definitely be able to get the customer order.
Friends, beside these there are many other tools which you can use for the purpose of creating the credibility with your prospect. Will share with you all that in some other article. But if you follow even these five tools you will be able to add a huge value to your selling process and you will be able to improve your conversion ratio significantly!
My mission is to support more than 1 lakh business owners and sales people in coming 3 years and help them scale up their business and profitability by providing them quality business growth tools. You can also become part of this campaign simply by sharing this article with all of your business friends.
Thank you very much… Happy Selling!
