(By Loyd Ford) How does emotion play into your selling? Do you think you make people buy radio? Buy digital? Or does it need to be their idea?
I am certainly not the first person to share that sales can be emotional for a seller. In fact, this is perhaps one of the key reasons people fail at selling. It’s like public speaking: there is fear in the water and some people cannot overcome it.
While you should always be aware of how emotion plays a role in sales, you should be careful to lower the intimidation factor by recognizing that there are basic areas where you can always improve and that should give you more confidence about 2025. Improve these things and you will make more money next year.
- Everyone wants to be heard. As sellers, we serve advertisers. That begins with learning to become better and better at listening and learning to rapidly recognize buying signals.
- People generally want things to be their idea. People talk themselves into things all the time. One of the keys to your job is to keep potential clients talking until they become a client. This is a whole lot easier if you learn to listen to them better because they probably feel no one really listens to them. When you show them you are listening, you will become more important to them.
- Despite most people having two ears and one mouth, most of us eagerly talk more than we listen. This is more difficult to master than most people think. The great salespeople are not the talkers – they are the listeners who can rapidly identify and lead a conversation to a desire to buy. It is about taking advantage of those moments.
- Controlling your emotions during your sales process and carefully listening for the emotion of the person you are selling to can really multiply your sales success. You want to tell a compelling story that can create emotion in your buyer. Learning to sharpen your storytelling skills and learning to watch emotion in your buyers can really multiply your sales to an entirely new level.
- Perhaps you shouldn’t think of sales as being something you do; It isn’t. Not really. Maybe you’d be better off thinking of it as something your prospect does because they sell themselves. The elite sellers excel at learning to be patient, mastering the fundamentals, and especially the math of selling and achieving the sales you want. It isn’t about what you sell. It’s about your time spent selling (very consistent prospecting + CNAs + presentations = better results). It is really your level of consistent activity to listen, uncover problems, and match them with solutions your potential clients can hear. It’s also about clients hearing directly from you often about solutions (even when you are not selling) and then allowing them to draw their own conclusions that lead to your cash register ringing more often.
The emotion formula to sales success is less emotion in you, and more emotion in your prospect.
Do you know your own closing ratio? If not, get with your sales manager and let them help you identify it today and help you improve it tomorrow.
Do you spend some of your non-selling time regularly seeing and understanding how other great sellers create more opportunities for themselves? This is a powerful part of investing in yourself and literally creating more income in your future.
The bottom line is that we are here to help others. That begins with being prepared, and open, consistently sharpening your listening skills along with your rapid identification of buying signs so you can close deals faster.
What do you tell yourself is the key factor to your sales success? I hope determining how much money you want to make as a seller and working the math on these things, especially consistently presenting opportunities to prospects that have needs, is very strong in your mix of keys.
Loyd Ford is president and chief strategic officer at Rainmaker Pathway Consulting Works (RPC). They help local radio with ratings and revenue. Reach him anytime at 864.448.4169 or [email protected]. Read Loyd’s Radio Ink archives here.
