Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Explain It To Me Like I'm Nine Years Old

Salespeople are under a significant misconception.  In 2013, millions of salespeople will meet with customers and talk about lots of different topics, EXCEPT the one thing that's most important:

Customers ONLY care about one core concept:  How will this decision impact my business or myself?

Let me put it a few other ways that other salespeople have found helpful;

  • Customers don't care about the speed, feed, tech or coolness.
  • Customers don't really don't want to buy your product or service - they only want to buy the positive impact that product or service will provide them.
  • Business Decision Makers make decisions on business impact.
If you're not relating your selling solutions to business impact, expect the typical sales cycle of:  being compared to your competitors, being evaluated mostly on price and getting similar success results you've had.  Isn't it time to make a conscious choice to engage your customers/prospects differently?

If you're ready to hear more, the next question you probably have is:  How do I do that?  Discussing business impact is difficult and there are a variety of ways get there.  Today, I have a new suggestion that came to me as I was having a discussion with my nine-year-old son.  

My son and I were discussing a complicated topic - how internet gaming servers work.  Believe me, explaining how hosted data centers work to a nine-year-old is tough.  At first, I tried to think about major concepts and attempted to simplify these down to understandable concepts - however, in about two minutes - he was lost.

Then I stopped and thought about what was important to him.  The answer came to me quickly:  He cares about how gaming servers help him to play more video games.  Take two:  I explained things only in how the details impacted how his games work when he sits down at his computer.  He was stoked.  I call this method:  "Explain it to me like I'm nine-years-old."

What are you talking about with your customers:  explaining features or demonstrating impact?


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