Selling Skills Best Practices, Part 3: Grow the Need, Shrink the Cost

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Become a Better Seller: Grow the Need, Shrink the Cost

The key to effective selling is to grow the need in the mind of the buyer and to shrink the cost. Joe Friedman highlights why this is so and how to get better at doing it. Previous clips in this series looked at The Biggest Mistake Salespeople Make and The Second Biggest Mistake Salespeople Make. 

Selling Skills Best Practices: Grow the Need First

Let’s talk about the order in which you need to sell. Think about the part of the sales process where you’re shrinking the perception of the cost of the solution. When someone objects to the price, you’re doing objection handling. When someone wants to talk about the service levels, the terms that they will get, any add-ons—you’re negotiating at that point. If they have a problem with their perception of the quality—whether it’s real or imagined—that, in their mind, is a cost of doing business with you. All of those things happen and get addressed at the tail-end of the sales process. 

So, what’s going to happen when the seller says “Are you willing to commit to the next step?”, and the buyer says, “No.”?

Think about it—whether you are the buyer or the seller—when you get to the objection handling phase, when you’re trying to negotiate, what’s the next step? The next step in the minds of both parties is Closing.

So, what’s going to happen when the seller says “Are you willing to commit to the next step?”, and the buyer says, “No.”? Will the seller next say, “Oops! I didn’t grow the need big enough, I need to jump backwards and ask some more questions.”?  That’s not going to happen because it’s counter-intuituve. Both parties expect Closing is the next step. For that reason, you must always grow the need first—before any mention of your product is introduced.

ZEHREN♦FRIEDMAN offers a full range of selling skills courses to help you sell better.

Read more here: http://zehrenfriedman.com/skills-training/sales