S.A.L.E.S Part 1 - Solving Problems

Solving People's Problems

Hi my name is Marc Hogan. I'm a sales and communication trainer and public speaker. Over the next 5 videos I'm going to share with you my SALES system. Before I do that I want to ask you a question, what do you think separates a great salesperson from a mediocre one? Is it their communication skills? They way they persuade clients? Or is it their perseverance, doggedly pursuing the sale? Or is it in fact their attitude to sales? You see, my belief is that we as salespeople spend all our time talking about targets and deadlines and inoculating against objections and even closing the customer.

I mean who in their right mind would want to be closed? "That's it, you're looked in now, I've sold to you once, you're closed, you're never getting out!"

What if we changed our attitude to selling? Rather than looking at a customer as someone that has to be 'sold' to, what if we looked at selling as solving people's problems? That's what the first S in my SALES system stands for Solving People's Problems.

How does that make you feel? How would that affect the way you speak with a potential customer for the first time? Whether you are there to help them save money, become more efficient, improve employee retention, no matter what you sell, the first thing you need to think about is what problem does my product or service solve?

Let's take this slightly further. If our attitude is one of helping customers to solve their problems, how will that affect our performance? How will it affect the relationship with a customer? How does that attitude drive our behaviour? Do we spend our time, perhaps even before we go and see the customer, learning all about our product, learning about our competition, learning about the customer's industry? Do we spend time before we call them up or go and see them researching their company, perhaps focusing on the individual customer themselves what does a Google search tell you? Have they written articles, won awards, led projects?

If you need to prepare a presentation do you spend an hour before you go in changing a couple of the slides and updating the date from the presentation you gave to the last company? Or do you spend the time thinking about what this customer would actually want to know? If I were them, what would I need to know? And then spend the time preparing your presentation or pitch.

The moment you move from salesperson to problem solver, it will change your behaviour and it will change the way customers respond to you.

So when you've finished watching this video, my challenge to you is to take your product or service and think about what problem(s) your product solves. The second element of that is to look back honestly at your previous sales customer relationships and think about how that relationship could have been different if you'd spent more time trying to understand and solve their problems rather than focusing on your bonus and trying to close them.