Don’t ever forget that you sell to people who are both valuable and vulnerable, just like me!

I work hard and aim to deliver the best work I can for clients, and I would even like to think that now and then, if not all of the time, people think that my work is special and distinctive in nature…or ‘valuable’, as they say. Conversely, when things stop working at home I am vulnerable to say the least. For example, my wife asked me to mend a cuckoo clock recently, which I did, and it now backs out and asks what time it is! So, I am OK at my work and hopeless at stuff I don’t know about, which in my case spans many areas. For example, I rarely go to my doctor and say ‘Hi Doc, my left ventricle is malfunctioning, my liver is also interacting negatively with my kidney; the lower lobe of my left lung does not feel right…and guess what, my oesophageus has just packed up!’

My doctor knows a lot about the physiology and anatomy of human beings and I know next to nothing, and so I leave everything up to him. Mind you, he is not as good as I would like him to be: I told him about a pain I had recently and he asked me if I had experienced the pain before, and I said ‘yes’, and then he said ‘I think you’ve got it again.’

Another example of my shortcomings happened when I was trying to buy a lawn mower many years ago. I walked into a store and the man serving said ‘can I help you sir?’ and I told him I was looking for a lawn mower, and he said ‘right, well the 4 strokes are on that side and the 2 strokes are on this side, so go for your life and if you need any help just give me a shout.’  What that man did not know is that I am not a member of the Australian Lawn Mowers Association, I have not attended any of their recent meetings…and I have never read a copy of the Lawn Mowers Gazette. In other words, I am a lawn mowing idiot and I need all the help I can get, although I do know that if you run over a budgie with a lawn mower you apparently get ‘shredded tweet’.

The point that I am making here is that all of us have certain strengths in our own areas of business, but when it comes to your work, the chances are very high that our knowledge is very low. So, if you have a product or service to sell, it might pay to say this to clients and prospects at the start of your selling conversations, ‘I study this area just about everyday, and I am sure the same applies to you in your business role, but I am interested to know what your current knowledge is of (insurance, real estate, lawn mowers, etc.).’ The answer you receive will indicate to what extent you should turn the knowledge tap on or off for the person you are talking to.

If the response suggests that the client/prospect is not a student of ‘your area of expertise’, then you can add this comment, ‘OK, what I will do then is take you through the very best ways I know of to achieve the best results in this area, and naturally, if you would prefer to move in a different direction I will help you with that too.’

I hope I speak for all clients and prospects when I say to you, ‘please understand that our intelligence in business is focused in areas we work in, and we are therefore unlikely to know very much about the product or service that you sell…and so please help us as we would like to help you, if you wanted to buy what we sell.’ This is an invitation to ‘down-sell’ and a clear negation and rejection of the up-selling process.

Finally, the professional use of your business intelligence represents a form of ‘visa’ to customers, entitling you to enter that part of their world that is concerned with family or business ‘success’. And in this instance, perhaps the word visa can be used to mean ‘very important selling advice’. The last point then is a question: ‘is your visa up to date and ready for active use?’