What do all of the best sellers have in common beyond the ability to sell ice to an Eskimo? It’s not just ice, it’s premium ice that’s actually safe to melt into drinking water. You might wonder what they have that you don’t. Maybe a better question is, what’s your sales motivation? How can you use NLP to increase your sales and your profits?
Believe In What You’re Selling
How does a genuine belief in what you’re selling change your language? You sound more positive. You’re sure that your demo product will work as well as it’s worked the last 1,000 times you’ve used it. You have a higher sales motivation because you’re convinced that this product can really make people’s lives better.
It’s the difference between an overhyped product and genuine enthusiasm for a product that you have complete confidence in. “As Seen On TV” is no longer seen as special. A product that has a 4.5 out of 5 star rating on Amazon with a couple of dozen reviews is easier to sell because it has a good reputation with people who have actually used it. You want to be the one who sells that product because you can be more sincere about telling your target audience that the people who use it tend to love it.
Don’t Sell A Product. Solve A Problem.
“The salt levels in your swimming pool are a bit low.” When you own a home that has a salt-water swimming pool, I bet you would promptly pick up a bag of salt to add when you get home. That’s how neuro-linguistic programming is supposed to work. Customers buy from the salesman whose sales motivation leads them to believe that he can solve a problem they have.
Your customers come to your shop because they think you might have a solution to one of their own problems. When your sales motivation revolves around solving a problem instead of simply selling a product, you’re building a rapport with people who might become repeat customers. They start trusting you to actually listen to their problems and find a solution that works.
Speak Directly To Your Target Audience
Targeted advertising exists for a good reason. It doesn’t really matter how good your sales spiel is if you aren’t selling to the people who are most likely to buy from you. When you’re selling pool supplies, you should sell only to people who have pools. You develop language that speaks directly to the owner of a house with a pool who cares about keeping the pool in good shape. Your sales motivation is directed at that customer who brings a sample of pool water to your shop for testing.
The pool owner should feel like you get where he’s coming from even before he walks through the door of your establishment. Your sales motivation behind that 30-second commercial should be about showing your audience that you know what a pool really needs. Who is more likely to know what a pool needs, somebody who has hands-on experience with pool maintenance or somebody who sits in a shop selling chlorine tablets? If you think you know the answer, that’s the kind of thing you want to convey to an audience.
Brush Off Your Message
You might have heard of the traveling salesman problem. What’s the most efficient way to cover a territory full of potential customers? When selling to an audience, the one thing you never want to do is wing it. You should have a game plan for keeping the sales motivation going even when it’s a tough audience. It gets worse when your message is being drowned out by all the other sales messages that consumers are bombarded with every day.
The truth is that potential customers are used to businesses trying to sell things to them. Consumer Reports estimates that the average American sees at least 247 ads every day. These are ads from marketing departments with varying levels of sales motivation and most of them will be forgotten by the next day because the sales motivation in that particular company just didn’t exist. How can you use neuro-linguistic programming to make your message stick in a customer’s mind when they’re getting so much clutter every day?
This takes enough sales motivation to know the difference between planning a clever message that’ll stick and taking the lazy way out with a cheap marketing gimmick. That’s a cute mascot, but customers aren’t coming into your insurance agency because that commercial with the gecko was clever. They’re coming in because your sales motivation was enough for your message to get through.
Be Prepared For The Big Sale
You should always know your customer before he walks in the door, especially when that customer represents a potential major client. You can upgrade the client’s Information Technology infrastructure and you want to show that you can meet the demanding needs of a regional hospital. Your sales motivation in this case is to show your audience that you can provide the redundancy that a hospital needs so that physicians have access to real-time data at any time of day or night.
Any time you make a presentation to a client, you need to imagine that the client is just that demanding. He represents a client who has patients in the ICU unit whose lives depend on a no-excuses approach to providing real-time data. He’s probably considering two or three of your competitors and your sales motivation needs to be as high as it ever was. That means knowing how to sell not only to that specific market, but also to that specific client by knowing his facilities and requirements in advance. Your sales motivation will have to be enough for you to do the research before he comes through your door.
Celebrate Your Successes
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating a new partnership with a major client with champagne and appetizers as a backdrop. Besides helping to keep your sales motivation going when you need it the most, a modest celebration says to major clients that you appreciate having them as customers.
Celebrating your successes works even when you’re not actively selling to clients. When you clear your desk of paperwork, you can also clear your head of anything that might distract you from being at the top of your game when it comes to sales motivation by taking a moment to celebrate that fact. Then you can face your next potential client without anything that might imply that you’re not completely focused on the meeting. That way, you can avoid destroying that all-important rapport with clients with anything that resembles an implication that you have more important things to do than meet with them.
Keep That Positive Attitude Going
It’s not always easy to ignore negative things like a missed sale that would have brought you a huge commission. Staying positive just means you learn from them without dwelling on them for too long. Keeping that sales motivation going even during the bad times means acknowledging that you’re just not going to score every sale. This helps you avoid the downward spiral of continued negativity that can kill your sales motivation, seep into your sales language and affect customers’ mentality.
Staying positive also means not unnecessarily exposing yourself to negativity. It can be as easy as turning off the TV or at least changing the channel when bad news is being aired. You want to focus on making sales even if it means you have a ball game playing in the background and you shouldn’t even feel sorry about turning that off if your favorite team is losing. The fact that the Cardinals are getting whooped in the World Series again should not affect your sales motivation in any way.
Take It In Manageable Steps
You probably have life goals. You want to sell enough that you can get out of the sales department altogether and take your career to the next level. If you can keep the sales motivation going long enough to double the sales goals that corporate management set for you for the next six months, you could probably do it. The trick is to make sure you’re not trying to bite off more than you can chew because you can kill your sales motivation by burning yourself out.
The point of taking it in reasonable stages is that not only do you want to avoid burnout, but you also don’t ever want to sound desperate to make a sale. It’s okay if you only sell five more Internet service upgrades this week than you did last week.
Boost Your Sales Team’s Motivation
Nothing breeds sales motivation like recognizing success. A public compliment when somebody did an especially good job today encourages them to keep their sales motivation going. Just try not to look like you’re recognizing the same person each time so you aren’t accused of favoritism – and, anyway, if you have only one good salesman on an otherwise mediocre team, you might want to rethink your employment approach.
Acknowledging that somebody did a good job doesn’t have to cost you anything, especially if you can keep it simple. Many businesses recognize an “Employee of the Month” as a way to give a silent nod to that employee who knocked it out of the park by scoring a major new client. It’s not really about the reserved parking space that’s closer to the door. It’s about encouraging your employees’ sales motivation.
Don’t Let Your Bad Days Suck Your Sales Motivation
Everybody has rough days in which they can’t even get their sales motivation going for anything. You just heard that the big potential client decided to go with a competitor even though you thought you did an especially good job with that presentation. You want to make sure you can get your stride back because there will be other opportunities to score a big sale. The trick is to make sure that bad day does not turn into a bad month or a bad year because you let it suck your sales motivation.
If you’ve already had a long string of bad days, that might be the time to step back and analyze the factors that might be affecting your sales motivation and the language you use to sell your product. Have clients been noticing a deterioration in your mood because you haven’t been sleeping well? Did you lose all enthusiasm for the products you’re selling? A single bad day need not be the end of the world even if you were really counting on that big sale if you can bounce back and keep your sale motivation going.
Know Your Product Inside Out
One question I actually got from a potential customer when I worked for Sprint’s customer service department: “How, exactly, does a DSL Internet connection avoid interfering with regular phone service?” An Information Technology professional might have been better qualified than I was to answer that question, but I knew that DSL uses a different kind of signal than traditional telephony uses, so these signals can avoid canceling each other out. That’s the kind of thing you’ll need to know if you want to sell to customers who are going to be testing your sales motivation by asking tough questions and watching you demonstrate a product. When you’re selling to an audience, you want to make sure you’re always selling from a position of authority and confidence so that your customers believe that your sales motivation is high enough for you to actually know what you’re talking about.
Sales motivation is more important than even most people whose jobs involve a lot of selling realize. Keeping that sales motivation going might take more than keeping that large commission in front of your eyeballs. You want to feel like you accomplished something beyond simply scoring a bigger paycheck. That way, you can keep plugging away long after that vacuum salesman has gotten sick of the sight of vacuums – not to mention the attitude of potential customers who were never going to buy anyway.
