Now that you’ve asked your customer a series of probing questions, it’s time to move onto the next step of the sales process. You’ll be using that information you obtained to hone in on a product or service you offer and recommend it to your customer. Let’s take a look at the key parts in this step.
First off, if you have no product knowledge then I highly recommend getting assistance from one of your coworkers. Explain what your customer needs and ask your co-worker what they would recommend. It’s better to ask for help than to lose the sale or have the customer return the item a few days later and lose out on your commission anyways.
Assuming you have product knowledge, then you take into consideration everything the customer has told you and you narrow down the products or services you offer and recommend one. Don’t just recommend a product, bring it out to them so that they can physically see it or play around with it. If it’s a service like a cell phone plan, then you can’t really bring it out to them. Bring them a pamphlet for the service, or a printout, so they have something physical in their hands to look at.
Sometimes more than one product fits the bill with what your customer needs, show them their options. At my work, sometime more than one cell phone plan or cell phone meet the requirements set out by the customer so I would show them both or sometimes all three cell phones that I think would meet their needs. Having product knowledge, you show them how each cell phone works and slight differences between them. Maybe the customer has a need for text messaging, I can show them phones with a full qwerty keyboard or phones with predictive text enabled. Let them play around with the options and let them choose. I find that customers like having options but become overwhelmed if they have too many options.
That’s only half the battle though. Now you have to prove to them that they need this product or service. How do you do that? Building value of course. You show them how your product or service can fulfill their needs and make life easier for them. I’ve told you before that customers don’t want junk, it has to be useful to them. Put yourself in their shoes. You work really hard to earn your money, do you want to buy something that you can’t use or doesn’t meet your needs? Outline to them how the product or service you recommend can handle the needs that they set out.
No matter how much value you put into your product the customer is still going to have objections to it, we’ll discuss that in the next step. It doesn’t hurt to spend the extra time building value in the product though, and think outside the box. I mean, not only how this product meets their needs, but how it makes it easy to satisfy the need. Don’t try to sell them on features they may not need or want, you might lose the sale.
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