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Sell Them What They Want

Written by: Cheryl A. Clausen

Article Overview: Imagine you’ve decided you want a red mustang. You can just see yourself zipping around corners hugging the pavement. You see heads turning in admiration as they watch you whiz past. You can almost feel the wind in your face as you cruise along with the top down. You envision heads turning staring at you and your red hot car when you stop at the traffic light. You know they’re thinking if only it could be them.

Sell Them What They Want

Imagine you’ve decided you want a red mustang. You can just see yourself zipping around corners hugging the pavement. You see heads turning in admiration as they watch you whiz past. You can almost feel the wind in your face as you cruise along with the top down. You envision heads turning staring at you and your red hot car when you stop at the traffic light. You know they’re thinking if only it could be them.

Excited with anticipation you head off to the dealer. Today’s the day. Today you’re going to stop dreaming about it and make it happen.

As you park at the dealership a salesman comes to your door to greet you. He compliments you on your current vehicle and asks how he can help you today. You tell him you’re just looking and ask where the mustangs are parked.

The salesman points in a general direction and then says, “Before you go over there you just have to stop and take a gander at this hot black King Ranch we just got in.” You tell him you aren’t interested in a truck today. However, he literally drags you over to the truck.

He talks you into test driving it. The entire time you’re in the truck he insists on telling you about every darn feature the stupid thing has. He tells you how he can get you a fantastic deal today and today only that you’d have to be crazy to pass up.

Once you get back to the dealership you get out of the truck and quickly leave the dealership. No truck, no mustang, and no intention of buying anything from that dealership ever.

What happened? This is an example of the salesperson trying to sell the wrong thing to the wrong person. While the salesperson may have gotten a huge commission on the truck he ended up with no commission because he refused to sell you what you wanted to buy.

I know you would never intentionally make this mistake. Unfortunately, when you talk about products and their features you run the real risk of making this costly mistake. The better approach focuses on what the potential client wants to begin with.

A truck buyer and a mustang buyer are very different buyers. They want entirely different things from the vehicle they drive. That vehicle represents entirely different benefits and emotions to those buyers.

If you take the time to learn about your buyers from the onset you’d never make that mistake. You’d read the magazines they read and see how those vehicles are talked about. You’d read the questions those readers ask about those vehicles. You’d see how other advertisers successfully talk to those buyers.

When you understand your buyers you could successfully talk with them about what they care about, and about what they want to buy. It’s easy to sell someone what they want, and nearly impossible to sell them what they don’t want. Why make things harder than they need to be?

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Article Tags: admiration, anticipation, compliments, costly mistake, gander, intention, mustang, mustangs, pavement, red hot car, risk, salesperson, stupid thing, traffic light, whiz, wind in your face, wrong person



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