It’s no secret that sales holds the key for an increasing income and a fantastic lifestyle. The more you can sell, the more money you’ll make. Given enough time, enough practice, and enough skill improvement, there really is not limit to how much money you can make.
This opportunity doesn’t exist in any other field. Even high paid positions like doctors and engineers can only gradually increase their salaries.
But if you can sell? If you can convince people that your product is worth more than the asking price? Then you’ll be on the fast track to wealth.
So what are the best sales techniques?
They can be thought of in three different, very general, categories.
Personally Magnetic Sales Techniques
The first one is salesperson specific. These are the sales techniques of the guy who can sell ice to Eskimos or sand to nomads of the Sahara. This requires an incredibly amount of charisma and personal magnetism.
While this can be cultivated, and is certainly a wonderful set of skills to have, this is a long time process.
Product Based Sales Techniques
The next is product specific. This is when you let the product do the talking. If you’ve got a good product, it’s easy to sell. Somebody selling iPhones doesn’t have to do much work. People are convinced to buy one before they even walk in the shop.
Of course, because these types of products tend to sell themselves, there’s not a lot of need for highly skilled salespeople like yourself, so consequently there’s not a lot of money in this. It’s easy, and there’s little rejection, but you won’t be buying that house in the Bahamas any time soon.
Customer Based Sales Techniques
The last category is customer focused. I know, sounds like some corn ball idea from the personnel department, but bear with me here. There’s money in this. A lot.
A charismatic salesperson will take a product that the customer may or may not want, and use his mad skills to “talk them into buying” it. There’s tons of manipulative techniques that can leverage the person’s weaknesses, or use clever “take-aways” “puppy dog closes,” or applying various laws of scarcity and social proof.
But in the end, these are high pressure, confrontational, and ultimately get plenty of rejections that we all hate so much.
But there’s an easier way. A simpler way, and a much more profitable way.
Why don’t more salespeople use this? My own personal reason is it takes away that huge “ego boost” that so many sales people subconsciously crave.
But if you want to make tons of money, this is all you need.
Meta Model Magic
Basically, it involves using something called the “meta model” from NLP. This is basically a set of questions designed to get more specific information about something that somebody just said.
They were originally used for therapy. For example, the client would say something like, “I feel afraid.” And then the therapist would use the Meta Model to find out who they were afraid of when they were afraid, what they were afraid of.
These therapists quickly found that when they took somebody’s fears, or inhibitions about life, and got very specific about where they came from, it was very easy to dismantle them.
Being afraid of your father when you accidentally broke the window when you were six is a much easier to deal with emotion than being afraid of authority figures in general.
As it turns out, this pattern works wonders for sales people.
Let’s say you’re selling widgets. And the person you’re talking to is maybe interested in buying a widget, maybe not.
Instead of overpowering them with features and benefits, and using your mad skills of persuasion and social triggers, which may quickly send them packing, simply use the Meta Model instead.
Find out what they want a widget for.
Ask them if they’d ever bought a widget. What were the good things? What were the bad things?
Ask them to imagine their perfect “widget experience.”
What is it like? How do they imagine using their “ideal widget?”
Ask them if they’d purchased something similar to a widget in the past. How did they know when they could make a decision? How did they make a decision.
The reason this is so easy, is because you’re simply asking them questions. You aren’t suggesting or selling anything.
And once they start thinking in terms of their perfect widget experience, (while conveniently sitting there in your widget shop), they’ll convince themselves to buy your widget.
Once they start imagining all the good things about all the widgets they’d ever experienced, those good feelings will naturally start to bleed over onto you and your widgets.
In effect, they’ll hypnotize themselves into buying your widget, for their own subjective reasons. You don’t even have to know what these reasons are.
Now, this won’t get you that big, fat ego boost (Yea! Closed another one!), but it will give you plenty more sales, with plenty less stress.
All by asking some simple questions.
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