No doubt you have heard of the seven cardinal sins of the Christian religion – wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony? But did you know that there are also seven lethal sins of selling? And they’re deadly because they’re toxic to your business and your bank account.
Unfortunately, if you commit even one of them, you’ll find that your sales leads will shrivel up and die right before your eyes…
If you want to capture the attention of more prospects and increase sales, you need to stop committing all of these deadly sins.
Are you guilty of:
- A lame approach or introduction?
- Wasting your prospect’s time with stuff that is important to you but not to them?
- Failing to identify and understand your customer’s pain?
- Forgetting to give your audience a clear message why they should choose you?
- Selling products, features or benefits instead of solutions to their pain?
- Neglecting to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can cure their pain?
- Making it easy for them to talk themselves of out of the sale? or
- Giving too many options (or not asking for the sale)?
Thankfully, there is a cure to help you increase sales and it is a whole lot simpler than you might imagine. Which is lucky for you – because right now, you are killing leads and losing sales with each sin that you commit.
Everyone knows that a solid, consistent stream of prospects and sales are vital to the health and success of your business. And right now, you are spending a lot of money each month on activities and communications where 99% of your audience chooses not to buy from you. It’s a lot of money to waste on sales presentations, calls and emails that aren’t working, isn’t it?
Now depending on which deadly sins you are committing (one, two or all seven of them), many of your prospects have gone to one of your competitors to get their pain cured. I would like to show you exactly where you went wrong and what you need to do to fix your message and increase sales. I want to show you how to turn your message into one that your audience is dying to say “YES” to.
- Keep the Lights on – Often presenters switch off the lights in a room so that the slides can be read more easily. Besides encouraging the decision making part of your prospect’s brain to fall asleep, this fatal move also diverts attention to the screen – when you need to do to increase sales is have your audience focus their attention on the conversation you are having with them.
- Capture attention upfront – In order to stand out and be remembered, you need to open with a question, story, myth-busting statement, or picture that is relevant to your audience. The best way to increase sales is to show them you understand (and can solve) their #1 source of pain.
- Stop wasting time on you – Never waste your time telling potential customers about you. 100% of your message should focus on your prospect or customer, and how your solution will cure her pain, keep her safe, or make her life better. If you message is relevant and your customer is engaged, it will increase sales.
- A picture is worth 1000 words – Your brain is hardwired to process visual cues and act before you have time to think things through carefully. If you want to connect with your audience and increase sales, you need to present fewer words, graphs and statistics and start showing them in pictures how their life will be better with your solution.
- Simplify your message – Most slides have far too many words on them to be persuasive. Less is more – if your audience is too busy reading, they cannot possibly engage with you and your key message. The brain can only process and memorize 3 or 4 key points at a time. If your message is more complex than that, it simply will not be remembered.
- Use stories to communicate your key points – messages that cause your customers to reconnect with or rediscover strong emotions from their past and associate those with your solution, are 10x more likely to trigger the part of the brain that decides.
- Crank up the contrast – In order to trigger a decision quickly and increase sales, you must stand out. Your customer needs to feel the difference between your solution, your competitor’s solution, doing it themselves, or doing nothing.
By mastering these 7 steps, you are now ready to go back to the beginning, rework what you say and how you say it in order to influence a speedy decision in your favour and increase sales. These 7 steps will help you to STOP falling prey to the 7 deadly sins of selling that we talked about earlier. They are going to help you increase the effectiveness of your message and also reduce the amount of time and money that you need to spend chasing leads and sales.
When you make it easier for your audience to see and grasp your message, he/she is more likely to decide and will on some level appreciate the fact that you have not wasted his time and energy with stuff that wasn’t important to him.