Selling and marketing are two very different
things, although they are closely related. Selling is
about you when you are in front of a prospect. Marketing,
on the other hand, are those strategies to position you
to be there in the most receptive and positive light.
Yet creative salespeople have discovered they can learn
a great deal from at least two types of marketing specialists:
marketing research and advertising.
Marketing research concerns itself primarily
with finding out what people want, while advertising seeks
to interpret how products and services will give people
what they want. Both functions are highly sophisticated
in today's complex business world, yet the principles
behind them are quite simple.
Needs-Satisfaction Selling
Marketing strategists use polls, interviews,
and a host of other tools to determine the needs of the
people they hope to reach with their products or services.
Then the advertising specialists develop ad campaigns
to convince potential customers their products or services
will meet those needs. It is a highly effective combination.
Yet salespeople have a distinct advantage over marketing
specialists: Market research people must rely on generalities,
and advertising people must address masses of people with
their campaigns - but salespeople can talk in depth
with individual prospects. That's one of the biggest
reasons salespeople will never be replaced by computers.
What that really means is that salespeople cannot only
explore with people what their needs are, but can also
determine how each of them perceives those needs. And
the perceived need is almost always a more powerful motivation
for buying than the actual need is.
Let me illustrate the difference. International Business
Machines, Inc. was struggling to survive in the highly
competitive office machines market half a century ago.
It seemed people had all the business machines they needed
and were not interested in buying more from a relatively
unknown firm.
The top salespeople in the company took a value-based
approach to selling and began to ask their potential customers
what they perceived their needs to be. "We need
better ways of processing information," came the
quick reply.
So the company revamped its whole selling approach. The
name of the company was changed to IBM. They called their
products "data processing systems and management
information systems" instead of office machines,
and started providing professional assistance in setting
up those systems.
Thus, by addressing their customers'
perceived needs, instead of trying only to sell their
products, they soon began to dominate the same market
they had almost failed at before.
What that means to you as a salesperson is simply this:
Once you discover what your prospect perceives his or
her most pressing need to be, you can build your whole
presentation around that need. It keeps you from wasting
precious time on trying to educate customers to needs
they may never believe they have, and it puts you in touch
with their strongest motivations for buying. It's
the difference between trying to create a need and helping
the prospect find a much-desired solution.
This brings me to this key principle:
It is always easier to sell to a prospect's
perceived need
than to create a need in the prospect's mind!
Failure to understand and use that simple
principle causes most salespeople to work much harder
than necessary, to miss a lot of sales they could make,
and to fail when they could succeed at selling.
Value-based salespeople always concern themselves first
and foremost with how the prospect perceives his or her
needs. It is an old truth that perception is reality.
To the successful salesperson this simply means that sales
is really the science of face-to-face perception. It is
addressing specific needs…presenting your product
or service to each prospect individually and personally.
It is not standard presentations, canned/memorized "pitches"
or a series of flipcharts or slide shows. Instead, it
is a carefully crafted presentation customized to address
each prospect's unique situation.
