You are the most talented salesperson on earth. You sell the intangible.
Every other salesperson has the advantage that people can see and touch what they are buying… homes… cars… copiers… televisions…
You sell air… concepts… ideas… promises. That is a tough sale. But have you sat down and thought of ways to turn the intangible… INTO tangible things your client can hold?
Here’s one technique I used that worked really well. After walking a prospect through their current situation, we always found they could do the following:
- Pay less taxes
- Pay less fees
- Make more money
I’m sure you do something similar by showing the prospect how you can improve their current situation. BUT… how many times after showing them the thousands and thousands you can save them… did they just walk away? You can’t believe it! How could they possibly not implement this plan!
Do you want to know why? It’s because they don’t need to… they are living perfectly comfortably without your ideas.
They think, “Sure it would be nice, but why rock the boat when I’m living large right now?”
So here’s what I did to turn that “idea” into something they could actually hold on to.
I had a cigar box on a shelf in my office filled with $3,000 of fifty and one hundreds dollar bills. After I got done showing the client how much I could save them in fees and taxes, I asked them if I could show them how much money that was. They would always look at me strangely thinking, “Duh, I know how to do math!”
But they would always humor me and say I could show them. So, let’s say I determined I could save them $4,200 per year. I would then take the box with the cash down from the shelf… open it up and pull out the wad of cash. I would then count out the largest amount of money I could with the $3,000 I had on hand.
For example, I would say, “The savings we are talking about would be like someone walking up to your door every 6 months and handing you (and I would count it out a bill at a time)… 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1,000………. (All the way up to $2,100)—then I would push the money over in front of them on the desk.
No matter how much money they were worth… it got their attention. They would nervously laugh and ask if they could take it home with them. And I would simply say “Of course! That and more! Every 6 months you’ll get that wad of cash, just by making the changes we talked about today.”
Then, I pull the money back and neatly place it in my cigar box. Boy, oh boy, you could see the wheels turning in their head! This made the savings I was talking about real and it tapped into their desires and greed. You see, I gave them REAL money… and then I took it back. That is using a HUGE psychological tool. They are now suffering LOSS!
Try it and you’ll never again have someone nonchalantly walking away from the savings you are talking about!
