Sales Tip: The Best Way to Sell Benefits - Get Articles by John W David |  |
> Get Articles > Revenue Generation > Sales Tip: The Best Way to Sell Benefits Sales Tip: The Best Way to Sell Benefits Download as PDFJohn W David jdavidpplyahoo.com Perfect Sales Call http://perfect-sales-call.com The BestWay to "Sell Benefits" I think I have calmed down enough to write this article. Let me explain. Recently, a good acquaintance of ours sent us an article that appeared in our national rag. The article was written by some self-styled sales training guru and was extolling the value of selling benefits when making sales calls. Our acquaintance thought it was an interesting perspective. What upset me was this. Benefits-driven sales calls became the vogue about twenty years ago. And, for the most part, it was as misunderstood and abused as its sister form of selling: "Value Selling". Benefits selling is not the final answer. And, to write articles that it is just causes injury to those sales people who think it is. Let's set the record straight and get you pointed professionally. Begin with my previous article on Your Five Best Value Benefits http://internetmarketing-proshop.com/sales/best-value-benefits.htm What separates Your Five Best Value Benefits from the myth and fiction of baloney benefits-driven sales presentations are these: a) There are three kinds of benefits: Real, new benefits for your prospect. And, the best of the ones that are in place currently with that prospect. In other words, what are the benefits that they consider benefits and which are what they are currently enjoying through whatever product or service they have in place... now. To ignore that statement is to place your benefits in your Summary Presentation in jeopardy of argument or dispute. You have to know what these are before you offer your own bundle of benefits. Otherwise, you will most likely trip over your prospect's / customer's belief system built around positive experience with the incumbent product or service. That could be deadly. This is most often the trap sales people fall into. The third kind are those benefits which, in your Summary Presentation, clearly distinguish you are the irrefutable best product / service resource to satisfy that prospect's needs, wants, or desires now and over time. That's where you want to be. b) Benefits are benefits only when your prospect or customer says they are. A Benefit, without quantification, qualification, and admission as such by your prospect or customer, may be only a perceived advantage or worse, an argument in which your benefit is your opinion and their present benefit is their belief. What a way to lose a sale and an account! If you use that approach that caused this article for you, then you are into what Tom Hopkins' describes as: "Ready! Fire! Aim!" It is no better than just tossing a bunch of it against the wall and hope that enough of it will stick. It's just a more advanced version of pointless feature selling. Because, if your prospect / customer doesn't find it relevant to her, it is just either a feature or a promised advantage. And, an Advantage without proof of relevance is just an argument and a horrible way to lose a potential account. c) Your prospect or customer says it is a benefit only when s/he perceives a sense of increased betterment from what you offer as a superior benefit over what she has at present. One of the primary reasons you brain storm to determine your Five Best Value Benefits, which then constitute your USP or Unique Selling Proposition, is to cause much needed points of market identification and separation. You need those points of identity and separation not only for your company and its products but also for you and your career. Important! In your Summary Presentation, you modify your Five best Value Benefits to match up with, for example, their five worst dissatisfactions. Done properly, this can be s huge boost to your close ratio, value per sale, and gross revenues / incomes now and a career booster over time. d) For new benefits to have increased value, their impact value has to be established in your Summary Presentation only. Since people buy in structured systemic sequence, placing your new benefits into the Summary Presentation and in the right order makes them Best Value Benefits that your prospect or customer can identify as well as, most importantly, articulate as Best Value Benefits. e) The value impact of the existing or old benefits have to be stripped away and replaced. Please, be sure you are doing this. One of the greatest failings that sales people make when earning a sales conversion is leaving in place the old regime. The best way for new paint to stay is by stripping away what is already there. The same is true with upgrades of a software program or even when making management changes inside your company. Unless everyone is released of the old way of doing things, the new way can only be contaminated by even minor adherences to the old. Your best value benefits will stick best only when the old are purged from their system. f) Best delivery of your bundle of benefits in your Summary Presentation is testimonial-style. For example, I could say that "we help our customers increase their sales ratios by 90%... etc" or I would be better to say, "Our clients experience a sales growth of 90%..." The first statement is effectively an open statement that may or may not be client-driven. Certainly, if it begins with the word "we", it is immediately about us. Wrong start. The second approach refers to a client group of which the prospect may become one and thus experience the same results. And, it begins with "Our clients". It's about them. It's delivery is testimonial style. Or I might just deliver it as a testimony: "To quote one of our clients, I have doubled my productivity and income in just four months". What else is there to say? So, say nothing. g) Create Integrated Dependency into Your Five Best Value Benefits. I'll give you a very simple case in point. We write articles for specific journals and tabloids and some news publications all over the world. We are even printed in in-house newsletters of large corporations. However, very few of these publications have any contractual obligation to print our articles. Soooo... what do we do? Each article for each newspaper makes reference to the next issue and how it is going to help the reader's business or sales career. And, that they will find it only in....... that particular business journal. Hence, the reader wants to read it and will be looking for it. And, the newspaper is a little bit on the hook for having to provide it. And, our readers have been known to be pretty jumpy when they don't find the article they expect and are looking for when they plunk down their nickel to buy the paper. That's integrated dependency. Try it, yourself. If you have a good to great product or service, it becomes an awesome best value benefit to, in this case, our reader, the publication, and to us. Note: Reader Publication Us is the order that works. If any of those three components is placed in the wrong order, we all lose! Well, my dear reader, now I feel better. Because, now I know that if you had read that other drivel, now you know how benefits-selling really works. Ciao for now, John W David Master Sales Trainer / Keynote Speaker http://internetmarketing-proshop.com http://perfect-sales-call.com How useful did you find this article? This article can be downloaded freely from http://www.get-articles.com and used on your website or in your ezine so long as the author is credited and their resource box left intact. 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