I hope you guys profit from this as much as I have.
The single most important factor I’ve seen to guarantee success in selling, is finding people who are highly likely to buy from you.
This is a little different from “qualifying”. You are looking for the ability to buy, but you are looking for more than that. You are looking for evidence that they are likely to buy, because they have done so in the past.
Here are a few methods I’ve used that are highly profitable. Enjoy.
People who habitually buy, what you sell, will buy from you.
Selling online marketing programs, or leads, or anything generated online to help a small business….can be thought of as advertising. And here is a truth. Some business owners never buy advertising…ever…from anyone. Some business owners buy almost any advertising offer they get. These are usually the more successful business owners. You want to talk to these guys. Why spend time trying to turn mud into gold? Just find the gold.
People are more likely to buy if you sell, the way they like to buy.
People who buy from infomercials, are very likely to buy from another infomercial. Online buyers are online buyers. Mail order buyers, and people who buy from other sales letters mailed to them.
When I sold in the home, I would ask “Has anyone ever showed you a product or service, in your home?”. If they did, I would say “Tell me about it”. And everything they told me, would help me know what approaches they liked…and what they didn’t. I wanted to know if they bought, and why/why not? Think of all the ways you could use that information.
If I went in the home, where another in home salesperson sold them something in the past, my chance of making a sale just shot from 40% to maybe 75-80%. Really.
Do you accept credit cards? Do your prospects usually pay with a credit card? The chance of them buying, just went up.
There is a buying cycle. In my core business, it’s about 5 years.
One of my salespeople once came to my office after missing a sale. He said “That woman would have never bought from me. She had one vacuum cleaner that was ten years old, and one that was five years old. And they were both very expensive models”.
And what did this mean? It meant that this person is used to buying a very expensive vacuum cleaner..every 5 years. And it was time for her to buy a new one. (I grit my teeth, just recalling the incident)
So, what did I do? I went to other vacuum cleaner sales offices, of other brands, and got the names of customers that bought 5-8 years ago. I offered to give the dealer the trade in I got. Honest, almost all of these people let me do a presentation, and about 90% bought.
People who are already thinking of buying need to be able to find you…to give you money. In your town, today, there are maybe 10-100 people that are actively looking for what you sell. Where are they looking? Not the Yellow Pages, but online. You need to dominate the page one Google search results. They find you, call you, and these are the easiest sales you’ll ever make. But they have to find you. This is what paid advertising does, it finds the ready buyers. But online? You can do this for free…and if you do it right, it stays for years.
Every single month, I bring in between $3,000-$8,000 in profit, to my retail store, from videos that I put on Youtube 2-5 years ago. Magic.
Small talk pays. People buy from people they like.
How many people engage you in small talk in a month? 100? 1,000? Don’t pitch them, but I almost always ask what they do for a living…am I really interested? Not really. But they will now ask what I do for a living. I used to say “I own a retail store”. Now, I say “I sell $800 vacuum cleaners for $399”, and then I change the subject. 90% of the time, they just ignore what I said and move the conversation on. But about 10% of them stop me, and ask “What do you mean?” or “How do you do that?”
And I say “Well, when we are having a sale, most of our vacuum cleaners are 40% off. We sell high end vacuums, that last for decades”…
And you know what they always ask? “When is your next sale?’…and you know when my next sale is? Always? Right now..and it ends Saturday.
Results? Yup, a few a month come to the store…a few buy…and it’s another thousand dollars or so in profit. Not Earth shaking, but easy…
Think about how you could craft a fast answer to “What do you do for a living?”. Something that takes less that 10 seconds to say. Something that identifies prospective buyers, and doesn’t irritate the no-buyers.
When I’m talking to prospective clients for my local online marketing service, I say “I provide leads and sales to businesses that already have a website”, and then I say “pass the mustard (or whatever is the next natural thing in the conversation)
I know a consultant that does nothing, except attend conferences, and engage people in conversation……and he makes a high six figures a year.
If you would like to find out all the highly profitable ways to prospect, you can get it all, in my book on Sales Prospecting
