I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone who bought something because the salesperson said “we were founded in 1922″, “we have 300 employees” or “here’s a map to our offices”.

Customers buy when they know you’ll improve their future. Unfortunately, most companies sell by discussing their own past, rather than the customer’s future. Doing this is the total opposite of what the customer wants to hear…

To sell more, there are only two steps to master…

Step 1: Find the customer’s desired future.

Step 2: Prove you can get them there. This sounds like common sense, but it’s far from common practice…

Quick Self-Test

1.  Do the first half of your sales meetings focus mainly on your company’s selling points? Or on establishing the customer’s desired future? (It should be the customer’s desired future.)

2. When selling, who talsk more – you or the customer? (It should be the customer.)

3. Do you sell by discussing what you do (‘we are great at completing tax returns’); or what you cause (‘we are great at reducing companies’ tax bills’)? (It should be what you cause.)

4. Does your marketing collateral (brochures, website, etc) focus on what you do or what you cause? (It should be what you cause.)

Mastering Step 1: Finding the customer’s desired future

Finding their desired future involves…

1. Asking a question about their future (i.e. not yet about the job itself).

For example…

• What are you looking achieve?
• What is your ideal outcome?
• How will you know our work has been a success?

2. Asking lots of follow-up questions, to dig deeper and find out the customer’s true needs.

For example…

• Can you tell me more about that?
• Can you give me an example, to show what you mean?
• Use these question words: Whay is that? Where should we focus first?

3. Listen to their answers, and do not interrupt. Remember to WAIT, where WAIT stands for ‘Why Am I Talking?

4. Repeating steps one to three until you know the desired future.

Mastering Step 2: Providing you can get them there

Once you know your customer’s desired future (i.e. to reduce costs), you need to prove you can help them get there.

You can do this by giving…

• Examples – of where you helped others reduce costs
• Testimonials – where companies state that you have reduced their costs
• A list of customers – whose costs you helped reduce
• The total costs you have saved for all your customers combined
• Free advice – about reducing costs, to show your expertise

When you discuss your proof, do so with certainty…

“We can definitely help you reduce costs.”

“We recently helped a similar-sized company save £850,000.”

“What happened was…”

“And how I propose we would work together to reduce your costs is…”

This approach is really better

And finally, picture the scene… You meet a new prospect. You ask great questions. You discover they want to build market share in Belgium. You give persuasive proof you can help them achieve this. You know it will work brilliantly for them. They know it will work brilliantly too.

… Can you honestly imagine them then saying: “That’s all very well. But in what year were you founded?”