Last week I talked about "missing the signs" of both bad prospects and good prospects. If you miss the signs, you waste your precious marketing time and energy.
Just as important are three other critical steps in the selling process - steps most miss entirely.
Once you have an interested prospect who is ready to speak with you about your services, many people feel that it will now be easy to sell the prospect.
But that's not always true.
Getting an appointment doesn't mean a "slam dunk" sale. Many things can and do go wrong in the sale process. It isn't selling tactics that are the problem, but the fundamental approach to selling.
Let's look at four critical selling areas that impact the clients you attract and the money you make. They are:
1. Your Ultimate Outcome
2. The Right Prospects
3. The Selling Process
4. Your Package and Pricing
1. Your Ultimate Outcome
Have you ever had a prospect show real interest in your services, only to discover that this person misunderstood what you were actually offering?
It happens more often than you think. The prospect thinks you do "Customer Service Training" when you really offer a program that "helps your clients increase the value of every new customer by two to three times."
Because we usually sell our process and not our outcome, it's not unusual that prospects get confused. The problem is, you called your program "Customer Service Training" and the prospect looked at it as a commodity, expecting to pay a only few thousand dollars.
What you really offer is an in-depth program that offers so much more. But because you didn't promote the "Ultimate Outcome" of your service, prospects tend to lump it in with other training courses and don't see the real value.
2. The Right Prospects
This is what we discussed last week. If you are offering the aforementioned program, which will dramatically increase the value of every customer, you not only want to get the message right, you want to deliver that message to the right prospects.
Not every business owner is willing to make the commitment to increase the value of every customer. You are looking for the "Sincerely Growth Oriented" prospects who will fully appreciate the difference such a service will make.
And just as important, as your time is limited, you want to screen out prospects who will waste your time. Not everyone who says they are interested, really is, and you have to learn how to read the signs and separate the wheat from the chaff.
3. The Selling Process
When you have the right Ultimate Outcome message and are getting in front of the right prospects, you are going to have more opportunities to engage in productive selling conversations.
But selling is more than telling the prospect, "Here is what we have, here is how it works, and this is what it costs." This misses the most important part of the selling process: "Here is the VALE that you get and what it will mean to you."
If you fail to structure your sales process to focus on value (what your services really mean to the prospect), you'll end up losing a lot of sales you thought you had in the bag.
4. The Package and Pricing
Even if you do everything correctly, it's not unusual that you will package and price your services in a way that does not pay you what you're worth, and the client doesn't get the full value they expected.
How is this possible? The mistake so many make people is to price their services based on time, not on value. If you are selling an Ultimate Outcome, you need to be paid for it. If you sell your services as a commodity, you will never receive enough money for the time and effort required to produce the result.
For instance, you might sell a "Customer Service Training" that has very good content for a price of $3,000. Yet the chances of that training being implemented are rare. The client loses their investment and you don't produce a "portfolio result."
If you delivered an in-depth program, that actually increased the value of each of your client's customers by two to three times, what would that be worth? It could be priced at ten to fifty times what your commodity training would fetch!
What is it costing you?
If you're not applying these four powerful selling ideas, what is it costing you? If you understood and applied all of these powerful ideas, what might that mean to the long-term success of your business?
The More Clients Bottom Line: Mastering selling has little to do with run-of-the-mill selling tactics. Mastering each of the four critical selling areas discussed here will give you previously unimagined leverage to attract the very best clients, earning you what you're really worth.
How are you creating leverage in the selling process? Please share on the More Clients Blog.
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