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Sales Masters Guild Mentor, Toby Acton, introduces us to his Sales & Negotiation Training with the statement “Nobody likes to be sold to, but everybody likes to buy“

 

Everybody likes to buy, but nobody likes to be sold to.

 

That is an often-quoted statement in sales trainings, but it is steeped in truth and reality. I believe that the statement originated from a quote by Dr Earl Taylor, President of Dale Carnegie Training:

“Nobody likes to be sold to, but everybody likes to buy”

 

I guess that the reversal of the original quote emphasises the fact that there are indeed hungry buyers out there for our products and services, we just need to “let them buy” – we simply need to create an environment where our potential clients are comfortable to part with their hard earned money because they can see that our product or service has value for them.

 

So how do we “let people buy”? How do we create that environment where they are happy to buy without feeling that they are being sold to?

 

This is what I cover in my Sales & Negotiation Training day. This is a highly interactive workshop for business owners and sales staff who are ambitious to really understand the psychology of selling, and buying, in order to make a dramatic and rapid improvement in their sales figures.

 

The challenge, as I have said in a previous blog, is that many business owners fear, and even hate, sales. They hate those sales conversations that are essential to business, and essential to get right in order to transition enquiries into income.

 

Many people think they are “not good at sales” because they see it as trying to persuade someone to buy something, a process that they have to do to someone.

 

To my mind, sales is simple. It is a simple conversation between two people, at the end of which one person happily buys from the other. So, it is something that we should be doing with someone, not to them.

 

In my one-day workshop, I teach and encourage people to look at their sales conversations not in terms of “How can I sell to this person?” but more in terms of “How can I serve this person?”

In order to do this, we must understand what must be done in order to have hungry buyers wanting to buy from you . Remember, they want to buy – so why will they buy your product or service?

 

Architecture of Sales

So, we start the sales workshop by taking a step back and looking at the big picture and understanding why people buy from who they buy from: People will buy from you because they have faith that you will deliver the product or service that they want.

 

This faith is underpinned by trust and belief in you – they must have trust and belief in you before they will have faith. So, how does someone gain trust and belief? This develops over time as they learn a bit about your story and your persona, and they have plugged into your ethics and your values. So, you can see that it is all about you and what you represent – they buy into your overall brand. For this to all have happened, obviously, you have had to come up on their radar.

 

They must have become aware of you, aware that you exist, aware of what you do and aware of who you do it for.

 

You can see this architecture in the diagram below, showing the basic psychological building blocks that underpin successful sales.

 

 

 

Client Avatars and Value Proposition

Once we have established an understanding of this architecture, we are then able to move on to determining who your ideal clients are – your client avatars.

 

Those people who you want to attract to you and establish that trust and belief so that they have the faith to buy. By being clear in these avatars, you also have clarity on your brand and the marketing of that brand to attract them.

 

On the day, we will work together to determine your ideal clients’ emotional desires and emotional pains. Why emotional? Simply because everyone buys on emotion – full stop. People will buy what they want, long before they will buy what they need – they buy with their hearts, not with their heads.

 

So, by establishing these core emotional desires and pains we can ensure that the core offer of our product or service matches what our prospective clients are looking for and that we can present that offer in such a way that they can perceive the value of it – this is the Value Proposition.

 

During the Sales & Negotiation Training workshop we will work together to produce a simple structure that will enable you to form a clear value proposition that will convey your core offers to meet you ideal clients’ core desires and pains.

Sales Conversations

So, all this “groundwork” prepares us to have effective sales conversations. Those all-important conversations that transition prospects to customers and to business and income. Or, in the case of existing customers, the conversations help us to develop the relationship and transition them on the customer journey to repeat clients and the mature clients.

 

In the Sales & Negotiation workshop we work together on a simple structure to assist you in your sales conversations. This structure consists of 5 key elements:

 

1. Establish rapport
2. Ask qualifying questions with intent
3. Find a core desire or pain
4. Link your service to that desire/pain
5. Trial close and handle objections

 

Getting a clear understanding of these five elements takes up a large part of the day on the workshop and will be the subject of a whole blog in the future.

 

Now I just want to stress the importance of using such a structure as it gives you confidence where having a sales conversation. You know the simple steps and you know where you are at any time. If you are not getting the results or you feel that you are floundering and losing your prospect you just go back to an earlier stage and re-address it.

 

If you are getting objections or don’t get a positive response to your trial close, it is often an indication that you have not successfully established the link, in their mind, between your service and what they are looking for.

 

If you are not able to link your product or service to them, you perhaps need to go back and establish what their desire or pain it is – what their Dominant Buying Motive is. If you are having trouble identifying what that is, you may have to ask more and deeper qualifying questions. If you are simply not getting meaningful responses to your questions, their barriers may be up and you will have to work harder at establishing or re-establishing rapport.

 

So, if you get the first 4 steps right, the closing is generally smooth and positive and there should be no objections as you have covered everything upfront.

 

Remember, the whole purpose of this exercise is to “let people buy”. To have these hungry buyers out there want to buy specifically from you. By having an understanding of the architecture of successful sales and establishing who your client avatars are and the value proposition that you are going to present to them, you place yourself in pole position to be able to offer them what they want to buy.

 

Then having a structure to your sales conversations that is systematic and easy to follow gives you confidence and makes the whole process straightforward, comfortable and effortless for yourself and the person who wants to buy. It basically makes it an easy and, dare I say, a pleasurable experience for both sides. And they will buy.

 

Because, people love to buy – just don’t try selling to them!

You can find out more about Toby and book onto any of his Sales & Negotiation Training from booking page or his Sales Masters Guild Mentor page.

 

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