There are many elements to successful selling including a captivating opener, good communication and presentation skills, and strong closing tactics. Perhaps one of the most important factors in successful selling is your power to persuade. Persuasion should run through all of the elements mentioned above, the opening, the presentation and even the close. Persuading successfully means using language, presentations and an overall tactics that all point to your prospect saying “yes.”
In this article we will look at how you can construct more persuasive language. Improving your communication skills in this way will result in your giving a more effective sales presentation.
WIIFM
Do you speak on the same frequency on which your prospect listens? Many sales professionals have a rigid routine that they follow in all presentations, waiting until they hit a certain spot before they start to list benefits. The problem with this technique is that you will likely lose your prospect by the time your presentation gets to the things that actually matter to him or her.
From the time your proposition begins, you need to speak in terms of WIIFM, What’s in it for me? You cannot wait until you have reached a special point in your presentation: in a warm sales situation you may have someone politely listen but quickly lose interest, it will be hard to bring them back. In a cold calling situation, you may not even have this much, a click of the dial tone will shortly follow an opening that doesn’t include WIIFM.
Desired End States
This is a concept that goes beyond the movement that took us from features to benefits. Certainly, it is a great deal more effective to tell a prospect about the whiter whites a special chemical in your detergent will bring, rather than actually describing the chemical in scientific terms. However, you get one step closer to the sale when you focus on the desired end states.
To describe desired end states I will expand upon the detergent example above. My time working at a large consumer packaged goods organization made me privy to one of the most important discoveries that the sales profession has ever seen, and the detergent companies were at its helm.
you may remember several years ago when detergent ads looked like something from a science class? There would be an official looking man wearing a white coat pointing at a graphic illustration that explained the inner workings of some mysterious chemical that would make your clothes sparkle. Today, these ads are completely different. You will see a popular young man arm in arm with a beautiful woman or a happy looking family doing cartwheels in a meadow.
Why the new direction? Instead of explaining benefits, these clever sellers decided to focus on desired end states. The term refers to the feeling a person gets when he or she is using the product in question. Its effects go far beyond benefits. It is simply more persuasive to conjure the feeling a person will get when using your product or service as opposed to just discussing the technical steps involved.
So using our example of detergent, they will show a woman who does laundry for her family having fun with them in an open field, conjuring the feeling of a wonderful day spent with her family in a beautiful, clean environment. Also, they may show a man with lots of friends and a beautiful girlfriend who doesn’t have to worry about not receiving social acceptance because his clothes are always fresh and clean.
If you can create sales presentations that focus on the WIIFM and desired end states from the very beginning, you will have your prospect’s attention from the very beginning. The result of this will be a more persuasive presentation.
