Why the Hustle Has Failed You
You’ve been told that the secret to your sales success is to work hard and study. I believe you are reading this right now because you have done that and found it is not working. Hard work is definitely an important aspect to having a successful sales career, but it cannot be the sole thing you rely upon to make it happen.
To be successful, you must find a way to combine your hustle with knowledge. Not just knowledge as in product knowledge, but knowledge of how to get customers to want to buy from you. A key principle that I teach is that you gain more sales by becoming a better listener than closer. We all watch sales trainers that get hyped up and get us to believe that if we just learn the word tracts that they teach, that your success is guaranteed. Sorry, but that just isn’t the case. If you don’t have a captive customer that is truly interested in listening to you, your word tracts will not work. However, if you change your mindset and learn to be a better listener — and ask the right questions during a sale — you will find that many times a customer will close themselves.
Change the situation and think about yourself as a doctor and your customer is experiencing pain. If you were to go to your doctor and tell them that had pain in your side and that it must be cancer and told them that they need to get you into chemotherapy right away, what would your doctor do? Would your doctor tell you that you understand they understand you have pain in your side, but that they have a sale on heart transplants and try to close you on getting one? Based on that example, doesn’t it sound crazy that a customer comes in and tells you they want a new car and can only pay $350 per month and you immediately respond by trying to show them a used car?
Too often we are so interested in selling a customer something that all we do is try to push into a close with no idea what they will actually say yes to. Be their doctor and understand that they are experiencing pain somewhere in their life and that it bothers them enough that they came in to your business and are a looking for a remedy. In other words, they are tired of the pain and are looking to you to provide them with relief.
Stop trying to close and start listening to how they are describing their pain. Don’t listen with the intention of delivering the new word tract you just learned from some guy on YouTube. Don’t make it all about what you want.
“People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care” —Theodore Roosevelt
Ask questions to diagnose your customer’s situation and how to best meet their needs. Remember, you need to look to meet their needs, not necessarily their wants. Once you have an understanding of what is causing their pain and what they are willing to do in order to alleviate it, you will use your knowledge and experience to find the best solution. That is how you make people feel like you care, get an opportunity to build value by showing them how what you are offering will relive their pain points, and move forward with an effortless close that will lead to having customers for life.
