Your Function As A Sales Professional

Your Function As A Sales Professional
By: Alvin Day

Are you on a mission to save the world? Take heed, it might leave you broke. Many salespeople, uncomfortable with the title, feel it necessary to justify the function of their job. Instead of admitting freely that their objective is to get people to buy the products and services they sell, these people insist that they serve a higher purpose of connecting prospects with things they need. If this is your objective, you may have trouble reaching your quota.

Through my many years in the sales profession and my unofficial observations of human behavior I have found one fact to be true. People often worry about their needs. They think about the future consequences that they may suffer if they cannot find a way to fulfill these needs, but they rarely act upon them. Conversely, people take action when they find something they want. For some reason, the urgency of a desire is greater than that of a need; the masters of the selling game know this instinctively.

Take the following example: Jessica creates a new website that provides people with a software tool to clean their computer and eliminate errors. Her copy reads like a technical book that explains all of the problems people may have if they do not use her product. She goes on to list a few testimonials and talk about how effective her software is. To her surprise, she gets very few downloads. People visit her site, scan through a few pages but almost none of them buy. Since everyone who finds her site has to have been looking for ''computer clean up'' services, why is it none of them seem interested when they get there?

People visiting Jessica's site typically have a computer problem and have expressed a need for the software that she sells. They have not gone as far as to buy because they have not yet received enough incentive. Yes, their computers are moving slowly; yes, they are aware they may have a virus; and yes, it is also possible that they could lose everything on their computer if it crashes before they act. However, these consequences are perceived to be so far off in the future that they cannot have any effect in the present.

So what should Jessica do? If she waits for people to be desperate enough to download her software, say because their computer just crashed or they just lost valuable data, she would be relying on third party circumstances. Instead, she should change her copy to change the need for a solution to their computer problems into wants, creating a strong desire to fix the problem that brought the visitors to her site in the first place. She can do this by creating urgency as well as including emotion and feelings in her copy.

When Jessica masters the language that can bring urgency to her proposal, she will learn how to turn her product from a need to a want. This will increase her performance as she will find that people will act upon their wants while they only worry about their needs.