The Psychological Steps of Selling
Part Two of a Four-Part Special Series
By Adam Radzik
Marketing & Sales Coach

In the April edition of The Radzik Report, our readers learned about Step One – “The Need.” In this edition, you will learn about identifying a partial solution.

You have already established that the prospect has a problem that needs to be solved. Often, the prospect already has a vendor who is providing the service that you wish to sell. For the purposes of this illustration, let’s call that vendor Seymour. So why is the prospect talking to you to begin with? Because the prospect doesn’t like Seymour’s answers to the problem.

Now, in the second stage of the sale, all your smarts will come into play. You are going to have to provide the prospect with some perspectives that the prospect has not heard from Seymour. You are going to have to be quick, creative and pragmatic. Your objective is for the prospect to say, “Mmmm, interesting!” and think, “Seymour did not come up with this idea, and it’s a good one. Maybe I should use this person instead of Seymour.”

But why only identify a partial solution? Because the prospect is likely to take your very clever idea and bring it right to Seymour, because the familiar is addictive and we like to avoid change. So you never give the whole solution up front.

In my sales coaching over the last 30 years, I have often used the example of walking into a bakery and noticing that there is a plate with small samples of cheesecake on the counter. The hope of the bakery owner is that once you taste the morsels, you will say, “All right, Debbie, give me a cheesecake – the one with the strawberries on top.”

But the bakery never gives away an entire cheesecake, because why would you pay for a cheesecake when you would be getting one for free? So be careful: Don’t give away your whole “cheesecake,” because they will smile at you warmly, but you won’t make any money, honey!

Now a terrible-but-true story: I met a man whose job it was to hire consultants for a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. Let’s call him Bob. Whenever the company had a need, they instructed Bob to go out into the marketplace and find the required services. Bob’s modus operandi was to contact various consulting organizations and ask them how they would go about solving the problem that the company was facing.

After receiving their bids, he would tell each one that he personally favored their proposal, but that the company had not supplied enough details as to how it would go about diagnosing the problem − details that Bob then encouraged them to give him. Each consulting company, eager to be the front-runner in the competition, would lay out its process in far greater detail, and he would once again let each one know that it had submitted the best proposal, but that frankly, their proposal was a bit thin on the implementation phase. Each company would comply once again, spending thousands of dollars of its time to reveal its entire approach.

Bob now had everything he needed and passed along all this free information to his company, which regarded him as a clever and shrewd buyer. Smiling proudly, Bob informed me that he hadn’t purchased one dollar’s worth of consulting services in the three years that he was with the company.

I wanted to kill him!

Moral of the story: Don’t give away the whole cheesecake!

Chapters include: · The War of Words · The Well is Drying Up · The Sales Coaching Session · You Need a Better System · Getting Better at Networking · Sales Are Down 50% · A Master of One · Keys For Selling · Winning Against the Competition

Other new CD titles are listed below.

• Quick Advice on Better Business Management
• Why Cross Selling Doesn't Occur More
  & Marketing Your Firm to Laterals
• Firm Acceptability Rating
• Company Acceptability rating
• Quick Advice on Better Business Management
• Quick Advice on How to Act Before During and After the Argument
  

CD's will be available for $25. Please Contact SIC for information.