Offering
Options
After you’ve
gone through the process of clarifying your customer’s
problem and establishing those areas of concerns or issues of
greatest importance, you can start working on the process of offering
options. In order to properly offer
options, you need to act as a trusted advisor. You must become
a sales professional who is truly acting in a consultative manner,
seeking to determine the best solution that will truly meet a client’s
needs.
By offering
options, you are able to determine that which is most attractive
to your client based on the value they will receive and the risks
they will avoid. This phase of the sales process occurs more as
a discussion than a sales pitch. You are advising the customer,
looking to solve
the problem. You are not pushing one specific product or service.
To be effective, your final recommendation must to fit the need.
It is in this manner that the relationship
will be strengthened and the client will be more likely to buy.
As you talk
to your customer, find out about their
priorities. Help them visualize possible benefits and risks
of action or inaction. Do so in a genuine manner that shows a desire
to help rather than sell. If you’ve been working with the client
long enough and have built a strong enough relationship, they should
be very open to this process.
Pose “what if” questions to make a transition
into this phase, to establish the demand for a possible solution
and to put them in the right frame of mind to accept various options.
These questions
should be generic and not necessarily focused on you and your product
or service.
“What
if your customer base
would have access to a larger inventory of industrial solutions,
enabling you to compete head to head with a larger distributor?”
“What
if the cost of maintenance would be eliminated by using a higher
grade product?”
“What
if the delivery
problems you had faced in the past could be eliminated?”
“What
if there was a way to make the service accessible to all of your
employees from a web-based portal?”
“What
if you could recoup part of your investment by disposing of excess
inventory?”
In essence,
these questions will allow you to gather useful information. The
customer
will tell you if these questions are important to them or not. They
may not care about the cost of delivery – they just want to make
sure the product is there on time so they can get it on the shelves.
You are working
to determine the best option for the customer and, in a sense, they
are selling themselves on the best course of action. Once this
has been established, your customer will be more receptive to a
recommended solution.
Some examples to consider:
Sales Rep: “What if there was a way
to clear out the excess
inventory in storage in a way that would allow you to recoup
your original investment?”
Customer: “This has been a big issue. We have several
older servers on hand that are quite powerful but they just don’t
meet our company’s
demands. We’d love to find a way to sell them to someone else.”
OR
Sales Rep: “What if there was a way
to provide a dedicated Technical Account Manager who would be focused
on your company?”
Customer: “I can’t begin to tell you how much that
would help. With our current
supplier, we have the toughest time getting a hold of someone
when we have a problem. Half the time, when we do reach someone,
we feel like we’re dealing with a warm body that doesn’t have clue.
It’s terribly frustrating.”
OR
Sales Rep: “If there was a way to customize
the order based on
your specifications and not on pre-determined options, would
that be important?”
Customer: “Oh, I’d definitely say so. We’ve had
the toughest time finding someone who can meet our specs. We don’t
want something off the shelf – we have specific needs.
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