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Sales Training Article:Imagination is the First Line of Activity
by Skip Anderson Selling to Consumers www.SellingtoConsumers.com
You sell closets and home organization cabinetry. That means you sell baskets, shelves, tie racks, and a host of other products as components of your designs for closets, garages, and other storage products for the home.
Tangible products are products such as computers, real estate, retail products, home improvement products, and lots of other widgets. But if you sell insurance, design, memberships, education, and services, you sell intangibles.
So, as a closet salesperson, do you sell a tangible or an intangible product
Tangible Attributes
Closet salespeople who are low or mid-performers focus mostly on the
tangible attributes of their products. These are the physical
qualities of the product, such as the boards or materials used to
build the system, the rods, and hardware. Certainly, customers who
buy closet storage systems expect these hard goods to be included in
their purchase.
But top-performing salespeople sell closets not only as tangible products; they sell them also as intangible products.
Customer Expectations
Sales training teaches us that most customers want to spend money on
what a product does rather
than on the product itself.
This is true of most closet customers, too. Shoe shelves or cubbies
might well be worth $100 or $200; but what is your customer willing
to pay to have all her shoes stored at eye level where she can see
them and select the pair she wants to wear with her outfit, versus
of having piles of shoes stuffed under her hanging clothes (the way
they’ve been for over ten years)? It
may well be that this is worth even more than $100 or $200 to your client, because of
how it improves her quality of life.
The real value in these shoe storage products isn’t in owning the physical shelves or cubbies, it’s in what these, and other products, do for your prospects; and that isn’t tangible.
The Presentation
Both you and your customers would benefit if you would present your products as if they were intangibles. You can do this by clearly presenting the benefit of the product rather than just the product itself. Here’s how one salesperson very effectively presented the benefits of shoe cubbies to her client:
“Including these shoe cubbies in your closet design will ensure that you will never again end up in your robe in the morning on your hands and knees searching for two matching shoes that will coordinate with your outfit. Instead, all your shoes will be at eye level where you can see each and every shoe you own, and you’ll be able to store them in such a way that you will protect your investment and keep them looking great for as long as possible. Both shoes of each pair will always be together, instead of the left shoe here and the right shoe under a pile of clothes on the floor. Thing how nice it will be to manage your shoes painlessly so you can now focus on the more important priorities of the day.”
[It’s worth noting that all sales presentations should always be customized to the specific prospect and his specific needs and desires.]
Benefits
In presenting shoe cubbies to her prospect, the salesperson was calling attention to specific intangible benefits of owning this product:
▪ It will be easy to select which pair of shoes to wear every morning;
▪ You will keep your shoes looking good;
▪ YOU will be looking good!
▪ You will protect your investment;
▪ You will put an end to your every-morning search for the right pair of shoes.
Uninspiring
Contrast that salesperson’s approach with this uninspiring presentation of a shoe storage product by another salesperson:
“Our shoe cubbies are made out of plywood, and they hold 24 pairs of shoes. If you need more than one shoe cubby unit, we can do that. They’re really popular with our customers. My wife has them in her closet and she loves them. You can really maximize your space with these cubbies.”
This selling approach is uninspiring!
Sell More
Competition in the closet and storage industry continues to increase
as product options and distribution channels continue to expand. But
increased competition doesn’t have to limit your sales performance.
You can become a more effective closet salesperson if you sell your
products as if they are intangibles, such as
internet service or
music or massage. Or
color.
Let’s imagine that you are a salesperson who sells
color. I know, “color salespeople” don’t exist, but what if they
did? “Color” is certainly intangible. How would you go about selling
purple to your prospect?
What would you say about purple? How would you entice your prospect
to make them want to buy purple from you?
A salesperson who sells color can’t present mundane physical
attributes; she has to be much more
intangibly focused than
that to be successful.
To increase your sales volume, pass up the temptation to sell the base physical properties of your product, and instead focus on the intangible benefits of owning your product. Customers are more willing to pay for what your product does rather than for the product itself.
This article may be distributed or reproduced as long as an attribution to Selling to Consumers and Skip Anderson are included, along with either a link to this web page (if in electronic form) or a statement including the web page URL (if in print).
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