Sales Tip of The Week

From Joe Crisara of ContractorSelling.com

I thought Roy Rodgers was the most famous Roy I ever knew. That was until I witnessed sales people trying to sell customers based soley on return on investment or ROI.

Let me try to clear up some misconceptions about attempting to get customers excited about this dry subject…

1. Ask The Customer What They Think Is Important. - I hope for all of our sakes we are asking the customers what they think is important when purchasing a new system before we select one for them.

I have always pointed out, that customers will buy for their reasons not yours. One reason I have found they will buy is the fear of shopping for an A/C guy on the hottest day of the year. (Imagine shopping for snow blowers on the same day that a huge blizzard hit town.)

The feature or benefit you start telling a customer without asking them if they wanted it first, is the very thing that will bury you. Let’s say you have the system all but sold and then you start doing a ROI worksheet. Then imagine the customer saying “Oh, Is there a unit that would be cheaper if it wasn’t so efficient?” Before you spill your guts on efficiency, ask if it will be a determining factor.

2. Let Your Customer’s Tell the ROI Story, Not You. - I have personally sold over $600,000 in home energy mitigation repairs in a year using the blower door or my knowledge derived from it. I never actually calculated the saving the customer would get from doing these repairs, the customer just knew by seeing the problems that they would save money.

What I did was ask all customers if I could call them in the next year to ask how much they thought they were saving. From this came some amazing testimonials which I then used in my advertising. Also, I would bring these amazing stories of money saved on my sales calls to help illustrate the potential of my services.

Let your past successful customer’s tell your story. Customers are unlikely to believe a salesman’s claims of energy savings anyway. In fact just writing that statement makes me laugh.

3. The timing as to when ROI is introduced is critical. - The time to get this ROI discussion over with is early in the discovery stage of the sale. The last thing you want to do is to start using it at the end of you sales call as a way to justify your position (That this is the best system for them) or your higher price.

If it is important to the customer, ask why they think it is important? What would they do with the extra money they would save? (This helps to turn something as oblique as energy savings into something real like a new swimming pool or a yearly vacation they could take)

4. Use ROI as a great tool to help uncover the customer’s budget. - You will undoubtedly need to talk about their expectations about the investment they are going to make.

Knowing the budget helps you to find a selling point for whatever products you hope to present. Without uncovering the customer’s expectation for how much they thought this would cost, you cannot work to raise the amount in their minds, (If they are think it’s going to be $1500 and you think it’s going to be $5000) or conversely, without knowing, you may be pricing too cheap. (They thought this would cost $10,000 and you come in at $5,000)

One thing I have found is that they will not tell you if you are too cheap. They may not buy because they figure that your promises of warrantee and service are too good to be true for that low price. You need to find this out before your presentation.

If the customer doesn’t think that saving money on energy bills is important, don’t worry. You will probably still sell, by coincidence, the most efficient product you have as a result of finding out what their biggest concern was.