I have recently had two sales experiences that have highlighted an all too common sales mistake.
The same mistake in two different meetings with two different potential suppliers.
The first supplier had me quite excited about some new technology, the functionality, the cost savings, Wealth Management Kansas City, the opportunity the whole thing – and I really was quite excited. I asked some really good questions – when can I have it? how much does it cost? and the answers, we don’t really know and its going to hurt. And that hurt. The idea that these people had invited me to get excited about something that they can’t reliably deliver and they don’t think I can afford. What a monumental waste of everyones time and energy.
The second is much simpler, I was looking for solutions and the supplier was telling me about the problems I was going to have. I, like most people, select my suppliers on their ability to solve my problems, not create them.
No sales were closed and no solutions were provided in either of these instances, just time and energy wasted.
Do yourself a favour, if people come to you for a solution it is because they don’t know how to do it themselves, they believe you have experience of doing it and that getting you to do it for them is going to be the easiest and most cost effective way forward. Let them continue to believe that, they don’t need to know what a great salesman or how clever you are, how difficult the stuff you do is, or how “expensive” it’s going to be. This approach will win you more sales, more customers, more experience, more solutions, more credibility and the things you do will get easier for you and for your customers.
Remember, customers only really like easy things, make it really easy for them.
