The successful approach is simply an advance agent of the appeal, the talking points of what you have to sell.

Instead of jumping right in and talking about the features or benefits of your product before you’ve won your buyer’s interest, cloak the points and present them as something the buyer would want. Then you’ve got an interested audience – the first essential to the sale.

You must arouse the interest of the person you are talking to. In the approach it isn’t about buying and selling; it’s about this: raising the interest of the prospect. There isn’t a product out on the market today that this simple rule cannot be applied to.

Now, what would it mean to you if every person called upon was interested beforehand – had called in or sent an email to the company asking to look at your proposition? It would mean more sales, and lots of them.

Well, you can make the first few minutes you spend with a prospect act like a double-page spread in the New York Times, and turn indifferent listeners into real buyers. Here are the two steps and standardized practice of the successful approach:

  • Step 1 – overcoming instinctive antagonism to being sold (read more about it in my previous post)
    By getting over on your prospect’s side of the fence, and working with them, not at them.
  • Step 2 – arousing interest
    By presenting the points of your proposition as something they have long desired by establishing points of contact which make the prospect eager to go into details.

By the successful application of these two steps and the principles involved you have created the specialized situation of having your prospective purchaser interested and in a buying frame of mind. The approach can do no more. You are now ready for the presentation.

If you show your products and demonstrating – before you have won a buyer’s interest – is like shooting at a duck before it’s within range. There is no law of humans or nature, which says you have a reasonable right to hope to connect your bullet with the bird.

The successful approach is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Majer