The 7 Basic Fundamentals of Effective Selling:
1. Sell Yourself (Use A Good Story)
We live in a highly competitive world, but what better way is there to set yourself and/or your company than by telling a good story? We aren’t talking about Aesop’s Fables here, but if you could weave in a story of how you came up with the product or how you started the business, etc., that is your good story to tell.
Don’t think that you don’t have a good story to tell. Everyone has a good story to tell. You just have to find it. Was there some impediment in coming up with this product? Probably you almost never made it. That’s a story. Or maybe you got a single jolt of inspiration that suddenly put the idea of building this product and getting into this business in your head. That’s another great idea for a story.
Testimonials are also stories. They are stories of how other people used your product and what happened when they did that. The major plus point about testimonials is that they are said by someone else and hence they strike a better chord with the readers. In any case, stories work, whether they are your own or your users‟ testimonials.
2. Create An Undeniable Need
People have become more conscious about their money especially because of the recent economic problems that the world has seen. But it is still a good time to start business. People have money but they are only more cautious about spending it. The frivolous spending habits of people that we saw about three years ago have toned down miserably. But people are people, they will start spending frivolously again, but until then you have to make them see why they should buy something from you.
When people are convinced that they are spending their money on something useful, they won’t mind spending the money. It should be something that spells real utility to them.
3. Authority Positioning
This is actually where your actual sales expertise comes into play. Making a list of the benefits is actually one of the most common things to do. Everyone who makes a sales pitch for their product will do that. But what you have to see is how you can make it special so that your people can’t resist purchasing it.
One of the best ways to do that is to focus on how you and your product are better than the competition.
Speak of your special expertise in the area. Speak about why you are better than the rest, maybe it is the creativeness of your product or an added feature that makes it unique or maybe even your better support system.
Be as transparent to your public as you can be. In the baby boomer generation, it was all right if companies kept everything about themselves secret. People still bought. In fact, in those days, the more ambiguous a product was, the better it was this was the general feeling among the public.
Use forums and blogs to sell yourself. If you don’t have a blog, you can create one using Blogger or WordPress. People can then interact with you. They understand you are for real and that you have answers to their apprehensions. They get more convinced about you as a person. They don’t mind buying from you.
The best thing is that this will help you to rise above your competition.
4. Create A Sense of Urgency
What really improves a bargain situation is the sense of urgency. The feeling of get-your-credit-card-right-out-of-your-wallet-and-buy-this is what gets them every time.
There’s no reason why you shouldn’t use the creating a sense of urgency strategy. Even the big-name e-tailers and retailers use it as well. If you promote your offers using the sense of urgency strategy well, you should get a good number of buyers.
5. Reciprocity
When you give away things for free through your sales page or wherever you are promoting your stuff from, you are doing several things that directly benefit your prospecting game.
1. You are giving people a sampling of your quality. If your gift is really good, people somehow think that the real thing will be good too. 2. You begin a channel of communication with your people. Because you have given them something for free, the ice is already broken. You could now start making these people interested in other things. 3. You stamp your credibility. People understand that you really have some products that are probably made well too. 4. But the most important thing is that you are sending them on an emotional trip. Giving something away is as good as telling them- “Hey, you took something from me for free. Now it’s your turn to return the favor by buying something from me.” If the person was thinking about who to buy a particular thing from, they will think about buying it from you just because you gave them something for free earlier.
When online marketers build their lists, they often use this method. They set up a blog and give people an ebook or a subscription to a newsletter for free. In return, they ask people for their email ids. This becomes their list which they started tapping into. They send emails to this list about their products and state their offers if they have any. When people are convinced about the quality of their product, they are very likely to make purchases from them.
Give people things for free, but don’t do it without keeping a record of who you have given things to.
6. Make A Commitment
People who want to buy from you want to make sure that you will be there for them. They want to see your commitment. No one likes fly-by purchases in which they buy something and then lose all contact with the seller. This might work if you are selling something for a dollar, but for most things that people buy today, they want to see the seller remain involved even after the sale has been done.
There is a reason for that. They want to make sure that if anything goes wrong with the product, there is some remedy for that. Only the seller can ensure such a remedy. That is the reason people are promising so many money-back guarantees on the internet today. Take a look at just about any sales page on the internet and you will find that there is almost always a money-back guarantee. Sometimes these guarantees extend to up to 90 days. This is the period in which customers are free to buy the product, use it and check whether they will work for them or not.
You must also provide a good money-back guarantee. It should be of an ample time so that people are convinced that could nicely check the product and return it if they are not satisfied with it.
Most likely, they will never return your product. People are already very discerning when they buy and if you make everything as clear as you can on your sales page, and they will know exactly what to expect, and you should have very few returns.
But what people want more than the money-back guarantee is a support system that continues after they purchase the product.
7. Continuing to Hold Their Interest
Everyone is not going to buy from you the first time that you try to sell them something. Sales page conversions will happen, but they will be very low. In the offline world, it is much more likely that you have guaranteed purchases when people walk into the store, but even so when it comes to expensive things the rate of conversion is low.
The most important thing you must do is to keep the interest factor alive. When you have them on your list, you can keep them informed through your email newsletter. Remember that you shouldn’t send them such material without their opt-in permission because if you do so, you become a spammer, and spamming is a dirty practice.
The idea is to keep them hooked/interested. These people may have become interested in what you are trying to sell when they first visited you, but now they might be losing interest. When one of your emails comes into their inbox, their fading interest gets a shot in the arm.
“When you do the right things consistently, over a long enough period of time, you are positioning yourself to be in the right place, at the right time, when opportunity strikes.” Michael “MJ The Terrible” Johnson – Founder & Owner – Masters of Money, LLC.
The #1 Secret In Sales – https://www.therealmjtheterrible.com/the-1-secret-in-sales/
