How to Double the Effectivieness of Your Words in Selling

As a salesperson, perhasps you have mostly been taught to sell the benefits of your product. That's a good advice, but good is not enough. I have a little tip that can increase the effectiveness of mentioning the benefits of your product.


The technique is to mention the PAIN after the benefits.

Many salespeople only sell the benefits without leaving something at the end. The usual pattern is like this:

Feature --> Benefit

For me, this is less effective. This technique cannot drive much your prospect's emotion.

Try to change the pattern into this:

Feature --> Benefit --> PAIN

Pain means the consequences or loss that your prospects will experience if they don't buy your product. This technique is especially true if you meet prospects who have less interest or lack of awareness of their problems.

Let's take some examples:

Sell benefit only:

"Using this accounting software will make your work 30% faster compared to your manual system"

Sell with PAIN:

"Using this accounting software will make your work 30% faster compared to your manual system. If you don't use this accounting software, then you will continue experiencing the complicated accounting calculation, not to mention the human-errors that take hours to fix them."

If you were the prospect, which approach that drives you more to purchase the software?

My experiences tell me that the second approach is more powerful. At my early times selling the restaurant software, I used to tell my prospects this way:

"Mr. Prospect, this software provides you with sales report that you can access at anytime, so you can always get the information you need only with single click."

Usually, the respond was lukewarm. Then I decided to change my approach to sell the pain like this:

"Mr. Prospect, this software helps you create the sales reports automatically that you can access at anytime you wish. If you don't implement this software, I'm afraid you'll have to make the sales reports manually that take a lot of your time, not to mention the human-errors..."

This approach results in more-excited prospects. They want to know more about my solution. They are engaged. They feel the pain, and the pain drives their emotion to buy your product.

You will sell more if you know how to "scare" your prospects. Try it yourself.

I Use These Prospecting Tips and My Sales Doubled!

In my previous post, I've mentioned that prospecting is very important in sales and it's the first sales skill you have to master. Now, I'm going to share some tips of how to execute high-result prospecting.

1. Target only to qualified prospects.
Many salespeople try to sell to everyone or every company. It's a great sin in sales. As the result, you may expect a lot of rejections, sales slump, frustration, difficult appointments, and so on.

If you want to sell more with less depression, rejection, and frustration, you should focus only on your qualified prospects. A professional salesperson selling luxurious cars won't waste their time persuading the factory workers to buy the cars. They target only to the executives with six-digit income.

In my early career selling restaurant software, I approached all restaurants I could find on the streets, at malls or some commercial estates. I repeatedly heard the words of rejections as most of them had already implemented the software from another vendor. One day, I met a restaurant manager who advised me to focus only on opening-soon restaurants to sell my software. Since then, I'd increased my sales significantly.

2. Make a profile or criteria of your qualified prospects.
Do you make a list of criteria of your qualified prospects? This is very useful to help you determine whether a prospect is qualified or not.

What are the criteria of qualified prospects? It depends on the products you sell, the price, the segmentation, your competitors, your company, and other related factors. In my case (selling restaurant software), the profile of my qualified prospects is like this:

- Opening soon restaurants --> they surely need software to manage the operational
- Mid-size restaurants or above --> small restaurants have more resistance to use software
- The owner is IT-minded --> some restaurant owners refuse to use software because they think it's difficult to operate.

In general, a qualified prospect must fulfill at least these three criteria: need, urgency, and capability to buy. If one of them doesn't exist, it's likely the prospect will not buy.

You can start making your own profile and use it to help you decide if a prospect is qualified. This can save a lot of your sales efforts and time. Ask yourself what kind of prospects in your business field that can be classified as your qualified prospects.

3. Find the clues of "I-Want-to-Buy-Now" prospects
Prospects needing the type of product you sell is the no. 1 prospect you have to pursue. They need your product, they're ready to spend their money, and they need it NOW. The question is how to find such prospects.

Many times, there are clues of prospects-in-need if you are aware and alert. For example, if you sell CCTV camera, the clues of your qualified prospects are the offices or houses that are recently broken in. You can find the clues from newspaper, internet, business journal, daily conversation with people around you, current issues, etc.

While ago, I read a sales article of a sales consultant who uses newspaper as her source of finding new qualified prospects. News like company mergers, sales drop, product launching, are good "clues" for her to sell her service.

Opportunity might appear anywhere unexpectedly; we just need to open our eyes.

I'm New in Sales, Where Should I Start From?

If this is your first day as a salesperson who has to sell to companies, you'd probably have no idea about what you should do. Due to it, most salespeople spend their time in the office doing email blast. It's quite easy and comfortable to do, but danger awaits you if that's what you always do.

A friend of mine works in an IT provider. He's new and has just started his job. He's responsible for getting more clients. In short, his job descriptions are much the same as a salesperson. At the first day of his job, he didn't know what to do or where to start from. As the result, he just sent a lot of formatted sales emails to any address he could find in Yellow Pages or internet.

This is what most rookie salespeople do. I also did.

Before you start selling, there are three important things you need to learn first. Here they are:

Product Knowledge
Have a good product knowledge before you go out to sell. Trying to sell before having information about your product knowledge is like going to the battlefield with all the great weapons but you don't know how to use them.

Company Knowledge
You need to know, for example, what procedural actions you have to take if a prospect agrees to buy, which sales form to be signed in when a sale is made, whom you should contact in your office for the shipping, what the terms of payment are, etc. Every company has different policies and procedures in this matter, so you better ask your manager about them.

Competitor Knowledge
The legendary Chinese war general, Sun Tzu, would agree with me. We have always been taught about how great OUR product is, but rarely about our competitors. It makes us falsely believe that the product we sell is the greatest product in the market. Having confidence that your product is a great product isn't wrong, but never assume that it's the greatest one and no competitors could match the greatness of your product.

Discover why some companies buy from your competitors, what the weaknesses and strengths of your product compared to theirs, how their sales force sell it, and so on. You could search it from internet, newspapers, or (this is the most valuable source) directly from your prospects.

If you are new, spend most of your time in the office learning those there important subjects. You don't have to master them all in every detail; it's too much wasting time. Just learn what you need to know sufficiently and necessarily.

I'm not saying that email blast is ineffective or shouldn't be done. In fact, this friend of mine got a lot of positive responses from the emails he sent. The problem was he just couldn't answer excellently what his prospects asked because he hadn't mastered well these three basics.

Remember, in B2B selling, the questions your prospect would mostly ask about are around these three topics. If you cannot answer them convincingly, even for some simple questions that you're supposed to be able to answer, it will quickly turn off the prospect's interest and ruin your credibility.

Do your homework.