5 Selling Tips for the Promotional Products Professional

The 5 Basics to Selling Aren’t Hard.  Caring Is Hard

There are only 5 basic elements to selling anything from Amway to iPhones, or from insurance to yourself.  Doesn’t matter.  Same 5 things.

1.  Enthusiasm.  Passion.  Engagement.  Positive attitude.  Call it what you will, but if you are not enthusiastic, passionate, engaged, and positive about your product, the company you work for and your own role in the sale, why would you expect your client or buyer to feel passionate about buying your product or service.  Either get enthusiastic or get another career.

2.  Find the Need and Fill It.  Listen.  Care.  You’ve heard this adage before:  No one will care how much you know until the know how much you care.  Anyone can hold up a product and give 30 seconds or maybe even 5 minutes on its bells and whistles.  That isn’t selling, it is performing, teaching, hawking. 

Before you can truly sell a product, you need to know what the buyer wants.  No assuming allowed.  Ask pertinent questions with follow ups.  Now use the answers to help you weave your story about the fantastic benefits you have to offer that will solve this person’s needs, hurts, or desires.  Sell the benefits.  Support those with the features.  Sizzle first, then steak.  Most of all:  Care!

3.  Learn to Love Objections.  Don’t be dismissive, argumentative, defensive, or disingenuous.  A customer who nods along with your presentation is likely about to nod off.  The interested customer will almost always have questions and objections to everything from color to price.  Be clear about their question by asking questions about their questions or objections.  Now that you are clear, explain the benefits that will meet the objection. 

4.  Trial Close.  Take their temperature.  You needn’t do a trial close on a $10 item.  But when selling items in the hundreds of dollars or more, you want to check out the client’s emotional investment before asking for the order.  If you care about providing this person with the best possible solution, you will want to determine if you and they are on the same page regarding that solution.  Take the most important benefit and feature.  Ask if your product or service seems to be fitting that benefit.  If yes, move to another benefit and ask again.  If yes, you are ready to close.

5.  Embrace the close.  Help the shy sheep to move.  A close should never be seen as aggressive.  A close is a polite thing to do.  It is no different than asking for someone to pass the salt and then thanking them for doing so.  When it is pretty obvious that everyone agrees on moving forward, the polite thing to do is for the seller to ask the buyer if they would like to make the purchase. 

My new close is:  “So, should we do this?”  stated cheerfully. It has been very successful.  The age old close is the choice close:  Do you want the red one or the green one?  Cash or charge?  There is also the assumption close; you merely move on to sell accessories or related items.

So, there you have it.  A nutshell of how to sell.  These are easy to remember and easy to do.  The hard part is the discipline to CARE ENOUGH about the other person and their needs.  That’s right.  Most salespeople care more about the process, their own ability to spew knowledge, their commission, their ego, or the line of people waiting than they do about making sure that they customer in front of them has a fantastic experience during the sale and after the purchase. 

The result is a failure to ask and listen, then ask and listen some more.  Then truly hear what is being said by this unique person.  If you do this part right, the rest will be remarkably easy.