How To Sell A Product: 6 Sales Tips And Printing Sales Collateral Your Business Needs
How to sell a product to a customer:
- Your go-to first step: know your customer.
- The obvious: know your products.
- Dig deeper.
- Be prepared to overcome objections.
- Choose your channel.
- Don’t stop growing.
You’re able to come up with innovative new solutions for the market. You wouldn’t be an entrepreneur if you couldn’t. But can you commercialize your ideas and make them sell? Do you find yourself Googling “how to sell a product” on a daily basis? You’re not alone.
Research suggests that this is one of the biggest challenges businesses face. This gap is the result of a lack of formal processes and effective talent-management strategies. It’s a big problem, because it limits the return companies reap from their R&D spending.
Simply put – you need to become better at selling your products and/or services.
We found that the best companies develop organizations and cultures to support salespeople in rising to the challenge. The Media mafia has a killer sales team that assists in closing deals and onboarding our customers correctly.
- Your go-to first step: know your customer.
“Make it your business to find out all you can about their business.” You should make sure you understand their position in their organizational hierarchy and how their business works before you try to sell them anything they might not actually need.
- The obvious: know your products.
Every business owner should be well versed in all of the features and benefits of what they’re offering. Super obvious? You’d think so. But if your business carries many different lines or services, then you may be missing that ‘killer benefit’ in one of them that will seal the deal, if you aren’t fully aware of what’s available. For example,
You need to sell a benefit, not a product. If your client is not benefitting clearly from your product, you will be hard-pressed to get them to buy.
- Wrong: “This car has a reinforced safety roof.” (feature)
- Right: “This car keeps your family safe.” (benefit)
- Dig deeper.
People don’t buy features, they buy benefits, but sometimes we can forget to look at what we’re selling through the customer’s eyes. Open up a dialogue with the customer, make sure you understand their needs, then relate your product to those needs and sell the benefits.
- Be prepared to overcome objections.
There are few certainties in sales but one thing you can bet on is that customers will have objections. Don’t take it personally.
It can be hard to remember that a customer is not objecting to you. They’re usually objecting either to their need or to some aspect of your product. The trick is to probe until you understand their specific objection (and often it will really come down to just the one thing). So identify and articulate that specific issue, then put it in perspective and give your counter argument.
Challenges come with onboarding clients to our artwork process. Not everyone understands our print-ready standards – especially the terminology and concepts.”
- Choose your channel.
“Over the phone selling requires more attentive listening and being more descriptive. It has a larger audience reach and it’s more time and cost effective for both the client and business. Face to face selling has its advantages in that you can rely on the client’s body and social cues. These are factors that help in determining early on if it will be a sale or no sale.”
- Don’t stop growing.
The fundamentals of sales are always the same, but the tools and techniques that you can use to apply them are constantly changing. Explore new tactics, talk to new people and keep stretching yourself in new ways.
