“I go fishing up in Maine every summer,” Dale Carnegie wrote in the mid 1930s. “Personally, I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I find that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I go fishing, I don’t think about what I want. I think about what they want. I don’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangle a worm, or a grasshopper, in front of the fish saying, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have that?’”
This story prompted me to ask, why not use the same common sense when fishing for customers?
Secret #29: If you want to motivate other people, it’s more important to think about what they want, rather than what you want.
To succeed in sales, we have to motivate potential buyers to “want to” take action. But we also have to recognize that different people are motivated differently. While some people are motivated to run fast toward Gold Medals, many others will run even faster from German Shepherds.
By position benefits in a way that motivates both, you can potentially double the perceived value of your product or service, which significantly increases your probability of success in making a sale.
Re-Inventing Your Trade Show Strategy
Trade shows and vendor fairs are basically marketing vehicles for business development. One could, therefore, assume that the most effective trade show strategy is the one that produces the most traffic and generates the most leads.
Vendor booths at regional convention centers are teeming with outstretched hands and smiling faces, as sellers attempt to share their story to cautious passers by.
Sound familiar? If so, would you be willing to make a few strategic adjustments to significantly increase your expected return on these marketing investments?
Free Audio Excerpt: The Herd Theory
My first book created quite a stir when Chapter 3 opened with this sentence: Traditional reference selling is highly overrated.
That divergence from traditional sales thinking shocked the establishment as virtually every sales training program created in the last 40 years talks about the importance of reference selling.
References are important—but so is differentiation; and it’s no longer an effective to use references just like everyone else. In Question Based Selling, our goal is to show sellers how to be different from everyone else. One way to accomplish this is to create a sense of momentum in your sales using The Herd Theory—which is a technique that ironically leverages “everyone else.”
Did you see my Centerfold in “Go?”
You know those wonderful in-flight magazines that keep passengers occupied and entertained while stranded on the tarmac? Well, I trained the sales team for Ink Publishing earlier this year in London. They are the company that produces most of the leading in-flight magazines. As a result of their sales training, Ink Publishing has featured me and Question Based Selling in an article called "Selling Points", to appear in Go Magazine, which will be in the seatback pocket of every Air Tran Airways flight starting January 1st.
Not scheduled for an Air Tran Airways flight any time soon? You can simply download the article right here. Hope you enjoy!