Even though you know you can help businesses, why do you have such a hard time selling to them? In this video, we are going to talk about how to completely transform the perception your customers have about your products and services and how to crush your sales goals and make more money than ever.
I know that sounds like a lot to cover. It’s actually a very specific and simple change we need to make. It’s about how you think about your products and how your customers think about your product.
The Role Of Context
The reason your sales are ineffective is because you are positioning them without context. Everyone knows that content is king, just like cash is king and Bruce is the boss.
But what really makes content powerful is context. Your sales aren’t failing because your product sucks. They’re failing because you’re not providing enough context to your customers about why they should buy.
In this video, I’m going to provide you with the three pillars that you need to completely rewrite your product benefits, sell a desirable future to your customers and change their lives for the better.
I want you to close your eyes and imagine your dream holiday destination, forget reality or practicality, if I could take you somewhere, anywhere in the world right now, and you know you’d have a great time, where would it be?
Picture it vividly in your mind. Maybe it’s a beach with clean, pure wiped sands and crystal as your water gently lapping at your feet while you’re on a sun lounger having tasty, exotic drinks bought to you by somebody else.
Maybe you are high up on the Appalachian Trail hiking 20 miles a day, connecting with people all over the world. Impossibly tall trees shade you from the hot sun while a cool wind breezes past you carrying the scent of pine and fresh earth.
Whatever your dream destination is, how much easier was it to think about it while I was using descriptive imaginative language. That is what is missing from your sales process.
If I could give you two words that will accelerate your sales success, they would be, imagine and feel. I believe that no matter what product or service you are selling, the customer needs to imagine a happier, nicer life after working with you.
Even most standardized products and services such as accounting and bookkeeping and admin services could yield results such as taking a break or going on your dream vacation and experiencing that very scene that we imagined earlier.
Buying anything is an emotional decision
There is literally no such thing as a logical purchase. You might be very good at justifying the purchase after you’ve made the decision to buy, but the decision itself is always emotional.
Here’s the funny thing about the brain. Your brain is unable to distinguish between what is an imagined reality and what is actual reality. That’s an important survival technique from millions of years ago, where we would imagine being eaten by a lion in order to prevent actually being eaten by a lion.
Fear, just like every other emotion is created in the mind so when we go on descriptive story-based imaginations, our brain is unable to distinguish between what is imagination and what is actually happening.
When your sales process talks through the potential future life, which they are imagining your customers will connect to your product, they connect to it because they. Feel it pretend that we can skip forward in time and show your customers the happier, easier life that they’re experiencing. Having worked with you, what their life can actually be like a Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge style.
The emotions that they feel during that actual experience can be replicated purely through imagination before they’ve experienced it in the sales process and those feelings and emotions are what will compel them to make the purchase.
A customer who can clearly imagine their life being better after working with you will experience the exact same emotions that a customer who has actually worked with you and actually had their life made better will feel.
You need to get better at helping the customer imagine a better life after working with you and help them feel just how good that will be.
Three Pillar Sales Process
Pillar#1
The first question in our three-pillar sales process is what type of feelings do your customers want to experience and what do they imagine their life will be like in the future?
By the way, this will come up later. This is both for positive outcomes and negative outcomes also called consequences. Alex Hormozzi in his book 100 Million Dollar Offers talks about how great salespeople demonstrate that they understand the problem the customer has better than the customer themselves.
When you can clearly articulate customers’ problems to them better than they themselves understand them, it’s assumed that you are both closer to the sale and that you’ve understood the selling process.
Most sales processes taught and most business owners focus on talking about the product and the solution. Although it sounds counterintuitive, you actually need to spend more time with your customers talking about the customers problems.
But Mike surely my customers want to know about solutions. They already know what their problems are. They don’t want to go over those again. And that’s where you’re dead wrong.
During your sales process during both qualification and the sale, as well as the close later on, you need to dig into the customer’s problems, uncover their biggest problems, and why they feel that it is a problem.
Of course, your customers are aware of their problems, but they’re only aware of the problems which are important to them.
This is a really important distinction to make your customer’s problems are very individual and personal to them. And if you need to dig into it, spend some time on it and demonstrate that you understand their problem.
Yes. Most customers will say either they haven’t got enough money or they haven’t got enough leads or some other obvious problem.
You need to do two things. First, get them to define what they mean by I haven’t got enough money or I haven’t got enough sales. And then you need to ask why that’s a problem for them.
It might seem like a stupid question because of course aren’t sales important to everyone? Of course they are. But the reasons that sales are important to a business is very, very different.
The difference between someone wanting to be able to pay their mortgage compared to acquiring a new company or going public or selling are wildly different. All of which are categorized with we are not making enough sales.
Mike: You mentioned you’re not making enough sales. What do you mean by not making enough sales?
Customer: Well, I mean, we don’t have enough clients buying from us. I mean, revenue is pretty stable, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Mike: Okay. What’s the impact that’s had on the business.
Customer: We haven’t been able to give our team any raises recently and competition is taking our customers from us. We’re also noticing that because customers are moving to our competitors, we’re unable to invest in training and it’s becoming a bit of a downward spiral.
Mike: Wow. That sounds pretty serious. Tell me what you mean by a downward spiral.
Can you see how if we keep unpacking the customer’s problems and understanding why it’s impacting them and how it’s important that we are focusing on the problem and getting to the root of the reason why they would buy from you?
Pillar#2
Another question we can ask is what are the consequences if this doesn’t change?
Mike: If we don’t get out of this downward spiral, what do you think is likely to happen?
Customer: It means we’ll have to take some pretty drastic actions to stay profitable or even afloat, maybe even downsizing and losing some team members.
Mike: How does that impact you personally?
Customer: Like, I feel I would be failing my family, failing my team, and failing my customers.
We’re selling the problem. We’re digging into it. Just like we sold potential futures by getting them to imagine a perfect dream holiday, we’re now getting them to live through and experience their problems.
Not only does this give you a better understanding of what they’re really buying, but they feel more connected to you because they’re experiencing that problem right now with you.
We’re also selling them the consequence we’re making their fears more real. We’re digging into why this is a big deal and what it is that they’re actually afraid of. It’s also important during your content and copy.
I could list every single individual component of a luxury car, like a Porsche or a Ferrari. I could talk about engineering precision or the materials. But the sale will be made instead of when I talk about how amazing will it feel to pull up to your friend’s house in this car, especially after the year you’ve had?
Won’t this car just sum up all of your success? You might roll your eyes at that, or you might agree with it but it works.
We buy things because of how we feel about the purchase
We all buy things because of how we feel about the purchase. We want to buy a feeling we want to buy futures. So rather than talking over and over about the features your car has, talk about the futures your customers will experience after they buy from you.
I wanna live in a world where all business owners make as much as they want, selling what they want while feeling like they’re contributing to something meaningful. I mean, doesn’t that sound awesome.
That’s why I started this channel. I want to help business owners like you make all the money that you could ever need building better futures for your customers, but they won’t know about the better future that they could have unless you tell them.
Pillar#3
Now we’ve reached the solution part of the sales process. This is where we close the customer and get them to exchange for what we have.
Remember the close is the exchange. It’s when they believe that what they have, the money, is worth less than the future that you are offering them, which is the product.
There’s a point during the sales process where you’re essentially going to ask, “So, would you like to buy from us?”
There are hundreds of different closes and ways to position the solution. I’m sure that I’ll cover that in another video.
The decision of the close, however, is essentially to take action now and make a change in order to reach your desired future or stay here and risk facing the consequences.
Your solution needs to make it easy for the customer to buy, reach their desired future, and escape their fear.
Future pacing sales technique
My sales team use a technique called future pacing, where we lay out the steps that the customer’s going to go through during the solution.
For example, we’ll take payment today and get you signed up right now immediately. We’ll book an onboarding call for you so you can get absolute clarity on how best to start getting your results based on what you’ve told me.
The first thing that we’ll be looking at is a campaign for your low-hanging fruit, bringing in an additional $10,000 within 30. That’s gonna get you closer to your $50,000 a month, increase in revenue and give us a little bit more budget to expand on the other marketing campaigns that we have in mind.
It’ll also begin to ease the pressure of having to think about reducing staff numbers or worrying about your competition, taking those customers away from you.
How does that sound? Does that sound like it’ll get you to your weekend holiday in the sun with your family even sooner.
Can you see how we are explaining the future again? We’re talking through their desires, and the potential consequences and we’re talking through the actual future of buying.
We’re assuming that they’re going to buy and that the action they’re going to take in the future is working with us.
The more you talk about the tension between where they are now and where they could be given that they don’t make a change and where they could be if they join you, is where a decision to make a purchase lies.
If they don’t feel that you fully understand their situation or their current problems and where they want to go they’re not going to buy, but it doesn’t matter what the product is that you sell. All that matters is what they want to experience.
Accounting and bookkeeping services could give someone enough financial wherewithal to start sleeping better at night. A marketing campaign could allow an owner to take time off with their family. A new sales script could enable a business owner to sell their business and retire.
If someone is hesitant to buy, we just need to go over the future that they want, the consequences they could be facing if they don’t change and the actions they need to take in order to make that change.
Don’t Make This Sales Mistake
Now, a lot of people confuse selling with giving away information.
Lots of salespeople talk about giving value on calls and coaching customers to a sale. While there is truth to this, most people take it too far and try to basically give a free coaching call to a customer in order to demonstrate how much they know.
The closest that you should ever come to giving content away to a customer should be when you explain to them how to buy from you and how you work with them. Customers aren’t buying accounting or marketing or a new bed they’re buying peace of mind and status and a better night’s sleep.
You need to get more clear about the future you are selling and the future they want and the future they don’t want. The clearer you are about the future you can sell the faster your sales will grow.
