LivingLife: Selling Benefits, Not Advantages

Like any other professional salesman with a technical background, we tend to spew out meaningless facts and figures to customers who seldom understand a thing of what we are saying. Take a communication solutions marketer who wants to sell you a laptop and keeps referring to RAM, ROM, GB or a maize flour seller who keeps talking cholesterol, calorific value and the like. Such salesmen are so knowledgeable about their products but fail to sell because the laymen to whom they are trying to sell do not understand their language. According to Ofer Reshef, a professional trainer and coach, salesmen should sell benefits of their products first not components or advantages. Ofer says that customers above anything else what to know the benefits of the products because that is the main reason why customers buy. So, for example, when selling Toyota Carina E one should begin with what the client will benefit from the specific brand, not how cheap it is compared to a Mercedes Benz or Volkswagen. It does not matter if a product is better than another one especially if the client is not interested or has never bought the other. Also, one is ill advised to start listing the technical details, like engine capacity, mode of steering which apart from being uninteresting, simply turn the customer off. He emphasized that the first priority for any salesperson who meets a client is to connect with him or her so that the customer gets to like the salesman. After establishing that connection, the customer will be receptive to the salesman’s ideas more than they would if they had just talked to them as a stranger. Ofer insists against much of common belief that salespersons should invest in creating long-lasting relationships as a safe strategy to win long term business from a client other than focusing on closing one probably unsustainable deal. In this era everybody is literary a seller in one sense or another. A marketer sells a product or service, a preacher sells the word of God to the congregation, a politician sells a message, an inventor sells an idea, a teacher sells education, a doctor sells healing etc. It is imperative for the seller to define clearly and briefly in the simplest language possible the benefit of their product. For example, a doctor does not sell a hospital bed or medicine, but sells healing. A teacher does not sell a subject but the ability to learn. A car seller does not sell a piece of metal but a means of comfortable fast travel from one place to another. A writer does not sell a story or book, but an opportunity for relaxation or a moment of personal discovery etc. So most of all every salesperson must know the benefit of their own product or else, they are selling what they do not know themselves. I wish you an eye-opening Sunday. http://Twitter.com/KelvinOdoobo