Selling Products is for Wimps

Service sales professionals are the real players in sales. Why do I say that? I say that because the sales experience should be a night and day difference for the buyer. The way an experienced sales professional sells should differentiate you, and set you apart from other sales people. The potential client shouldn’t think of you as a sales person at all.

The way people are trained to sell products has an immediate negative impact on the buyer. Picture the car sales person. Before you even get out of your car you already hold an adversarial mindset toward the sales person. Your defenses are on red alert, and you’re very guarded about everything you say and do.

Unfortunately, because of the way they’re trained most car sales people won’t last long enough to have to worry about repeat business and referrals. They’re desperate for a sale. And because they’re desperate they’ll do most anything and say most anything to get the sale now. They have no problem using any and every heavy handed sales tactic they can think of to get you to act now.

Products are tangible. The potential buyer can touch it, smell it, perhaps even taste it; so before they make the buying decision they can have an experience with the product. They can imagine what it’s like to own it. When the actual experience matches the expected experience the potential buyer is likely to buy.

Add to this the fact that in most cases ready buyers come to you to buy the product, and it’s easy to understand how selling products is a cake walk compared to selling services. When you can’t sell someone who wants to buy a product you have right there that’s pretty wimpy. A lot of product sales isn’t much more than taking orders and collecting the money.

When service professionals try to use product sales tactics to sell their services it doesn’t work very well at all. Your potential clients aren’t looking to be sold they’re looking to be helped by someone they can trust. And we all know people don’t trust sales people. We’ve been trained and conditioned not to trust sales people throughout our life. The more a sales person pushes you to say “yes”, the more determined you are to say “no”.

In a service business your very existence depends on your ability to open and build on relationships. It’s nearly impossible to make it in a service business unless you earn repeat business and referrals. You have to set yourself up for life-time sales not one-time sales from the start. That means by definition you simply can’t allow yourself to be perceived as a pushy sales person by your potential clients. They must think of you as a trusted advisor not a pesky, dreaded sales person.

Your potential clients can’t experience your service until they make a buying decision. Unless you can provide a free trial service where they actually do have the experience, a free chiropractic adjustment or dental cleaning for example, you have to help the potential client imagine having the service before they actually get it. To do that you have to help the potential client create the vision of having the outcomes your service produces in their own mind.

When you reach out and make that initial connection with potential clients those future clients aren’t necessarily in the buying stage of their decision making process. Therefore, you need to filter for the ready buyers and focus on them first. Then you need a way to nurture and develop everyone else building a relationship with them enabling them to become ready buyers.

The service sales professional is a true professional able to increase sales and profits by the very way they approach the sales and buying process. They have a process for developing potential leads entering their sales funnel, and a process for helping those leads become new clients. From the potential clients perspective they don’t feel like they’re being sold. Instead they feel like they’re helped and guided to the right decisions for them by a trust advisor. Both the process and the experience are vastly different from product sales.

Once you’re able to transition from a product based sales process to a service based sales process you’re results are immediate and dramatically improved. Your approach to starting and nurturing connections and building them into relationships means you easily develop and maintain a sale funnel that consistently and predictably produces new clients for you. So if you’re trying to function in a service business using product sales techniques isn’t it time for you to find a better way?

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