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Sales Training – Persuading while you Speak
Alvin Day
Sales Empowerment Institute
There are many factors in successful selling including a captivating opener, good communication and presentation skills, and strong closing tactics. Perhaps one of the most crucial factors in successful selling is your ability to persuade. Persuasion should run through all of the elements mentioned above, the opening, the presentation and even the close. Persuading successfully means using language, presentations and an overall tactics that all point to your prospect saying "yes."
In this article we will discuss how you can make your language more persuasive. Increasing your communication skills in this way will result in your creating a more effective sales presentation.
WIIFM
Do you speak on the same frequency on which your prospect listens? Many sales professionals have a rigid routine that they follow in all presentations, waiting until they hit a certain spot before they start to list benefits. The problem with this strategy is that you will likely lose your prospect by the time your presentation gets to the things that actually matter to him or her.
From the very beginning of your presentation, you should be speaking in terms of WIIFM, What's in it for me? You cannot wait until you have reached a special point in your presentation: in a warm sales situation your prospects will quickly lose interest, even if he or she continues to listen politely, it will be hard to bring them back. In a cold calling situation, you may not even have this much, a click of the dial tone will shortly follow a weak opening.
Desired End States
This is a concept that goes beyond the movement that took us from features to benefits. Certainly, it is a great deal more effective to tell a prospect about the whiter whites a special chemical in your detergent will bring, rather than actually describing the chemical in scientific terms. However, you get one step closer to the sale when you focus on the desired end states.
To describe desired end states I will expand upon the detergent example above. My time working at a large consumer packaged goods organization made me privy to one of the greatest discoveries that the sales profession has ever seen, and the detergent companies were among the first to apply it
Do you remember a long time ago when detergent ads looked like something from a science class? They would have an official looking man wearing a white coat pointing at a graphic illustration that explained scientific principle behind some mysterious chemical that would do amazing things to your laundry. Today, these ads are completely different. You will see a happy looking family doing cartwheels in a meadow or a popular young man arm in arm with a beautiful woman.
Why the change? Instead of telling us about benefits, these clever sellers decided to focus on desired end states. The term refers to the feeling a person gets when he or she is using the product in question. Its effects go far beyond benefits. It is simply more persuasive to conjure the feeling a person will get when using your product or service as opposed to just discussing the technical steps involved.
So in the case of detergent, they will show a woman who does laundry for her family having fun with them in an open field, conjuring the feeling of a wonderful day spent with her family in a beautiful, clean environment. Also, they may show a man with lots of friends and a beautiful girlfriend who doesn't have to worry about not receiving social acceptance because his clothes are always fresh and clean.
If you can create sales presentations that focus on the WIIFM and desired end states from the very beginning, you will have your prospect's attention from the very beginning. The result of this will be a more persuasive presentation.
About Alvin Day Alvin Day is a Sales and Personal Empowerment Coach who has coached sales professional all over the world. His free sales training resource can be found at http://www.squidoo.com/sales-training-language.
Article submitted Thursday, June 12, 2008
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