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Annette's note: This is the second of a series of articles by Robert. Once again, because his focus is not direct sales selling or recruiting you'll have to work a bit to translate his wisdom into our Noah's Ark Workshop situation. But it's worth the brain effort. :-) Enjoy
Last week I talked about "missing the signs" of both bad
prospects and good prospects. (Annette's note - that post is here.)
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 people 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 VALUE
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.
*
© 2007 Robert Middleton, All rights reserved. You are free
to use material from the More Clients eZine in whole or in part,
as long as you include complete attribution, including live web
site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear.
The attribution should read:
"By Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Please visit
Robert's web site at www.actionplan.com for additional
marketing articles and resources on marketing for professional
service businesses."
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