How to help prospects with the buying decision.

Sometimes prospects find it difficult to make the buying decision even when they want or need the product or service. What are you methods for helping prospects with the buying decision?

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SalesPractice.com - The Definitive Source for Sales Education on the Internet.

Great question!

1. Prospects find it difficult to make buying decisions because they love the status quo. Change is difficult for prospects, even if they want and desire something, but they don't realize that when they hesitate to make a buying decision, they are in fact making a default buying decision of "no".

2. To combat this, salespeople should establish, and then increase, sales momentum. Sales momentum starts at the very beginning of the sales interaction with the prospect, not at the end when it's time to close the sale.

The sales process is divided into small steps, and surpassing benchmarks at each of those steps helps to establish this sales momentum. Although the prospect has complete freedom to bow out of the buying process at any of these steps in the process, if they choose not to and instead remain engaged in the buying process, the result is an even stronger sales momentum. By the time a closing question is asked, the likelihood of a "yes" is highly probable.

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Selling to Consumers
B2C Sales Training

Asking questions to explore the decision.

Example: "What would you need to believe in order for you to feel compelled to act on this right now?"

I'm a firm believer in the process, so, the prospect "being ready to make a decision" should never be an assumption. If you've genuinely done the job in terms of qualifying this prospect (ie. "the timing and mandate to act"). The stage is set.

Remember that there are numerous closes throughout the process (closing for meetings, closing for commitment to you/your company/the offering, etc.) and asking the 2 hardest questions for young sales people:
1. is there anyone else involved in the decision; and,
2. (once you've repeated the qualifying questions), is there anything else?

After all, you don't want to put your agreement on the table to hear, "oh, by the way, we're going Chapter 11"!

If all of the steps have been covered (identifying the need and gaining commitment throughout), it's time to close.

Good luck and good selling!
Pat