THE ULTIMATE SALES STRATEGY FORMULA

The first step in the sales process is to have your prospect consider a significant goal they hope to achieve in the future.

This could be retiring happily, buying a house, their kids graduating from university, a business being successful, going on a 6 month holiday tour of the best restaurants in Africa, maintaining a comfortable lifestyle, etc.

At this point you want to extract as many details of what they perceive to be their ‘perfect’ outcome. As you do this you will help this person attach feelings of success to the successful outcome of this goal. This means you will use exploratory imagination questions & phrases like:

• ‘Imagine…’
• ‘What would that feel like?’
• ‘How do you envision…’
• ‘What does that mean for…’

Now that you have established a vision of the future that the client really wants you are going to take it away from them.

‘Between now and … what could prevent you from achieving your goal?’

At the top of the list of answers to that question are always a serious health conditions or death. And then you are going to help them to feel the impact and disappointment of not being able to have the goal they are working towards. You do this with the same sort of questions we used previously, questions that will make their conscious mind think that will also shift their emotional state.

‘How will you feel when the doctor tells you there is a cancer treatment that could double your spouses chances for survival but it isn’t covered by any insurance – and it costs $27,000 per month?’

‘If you don’t meet your income goal what will you give up? How will you feel not going on vacation with your children?’

‘How would not being able to take your family on that once in a lifetime planned vacation make you feel like? How would your family feel? Would they be disappointed?’

‘If your kids have to go to a different school because of a lack of money how would, I’m not concerned with how you would feel – you are dead, how would your spouse feel explaining to them that they can no longer go to school with their friends because there isn’t enough money?’

(I threw this in as an example of a real power question – it disassociates, triggers responsibility, calls up emotions, uses time displacements and all sorts of other stuff).

And here’s another strong question to twist the knife –

‘Just because someone, or their family, doesn’t reach all the goals they’ve set out for themselves it doesn’t make them a failure. In the worst case in a world where everything goes wrong, how close to your goal do you need to get, to make sure you never look at yourself as a failure?’

Okay, you have helped your prospect envision the future they want. You have shown them the benefits and they have experienced how great it would be. You then took that dream away from them and had them explore the alternative.

Now you just have to steer them towards a solution. How can they save the future which they now risk losing? Ideally you want them to feel that they came to the solution on their own and you do this by using lots of questions. There are numerous tactical methods that will increase your closing ratios from linguistic binds to presumptive statements however the single best piece of advice I can give to someone at this stage is keep asking questions about what the ideal solution would look like for them.

‘If there were a way to make certain that you reached your goal / to at least guarantee you reach your financial goals and potential…’

‘Would you want your plan to….’

‘What number would allow you to sleep at night?’

‘Who should be able to cancel the plan? You? The insurance company or bank? Both of you? Neither of you?’

‘Would you prefer a level payment and decreasing coverage or level coverage with a level payment?’

‘How much would you need for x to be able to sleep soundly at night?’

There are a multitude of reasons this formula gives you the best opportunity to sell a product. I won’t go into it in any great depth her but here are some of the psychological paradigms which make this an incredibly robust framework.

• The prospect takes ‘ownership’ of the goals of the meeting and you are trying to achieve the same thing, the same thing that they want.
• When we imagine a future situation and what our emotional state will be at that time we experience that emotional state, at a vastly diminished magnitude, immediately.
• We fear losses significantly more than we value gains. By ‘giving’ them a taste of their goal and then snatching it away we invoke all sorts of patterns and emotions around protection, fairness, fear of losing the status quo etc. Essentially they ‘own’ the ‘good future’ and you are helping them protect it.
• It allows the prospect to feel like they are in control and directing the process. Also its very hard for the prospect to argue with their own words.