DD Checkup 9: The Golden Rule of Selling Technology

Welcome to your Weekly Check-Up with DemoDoctor!

In This Video:

I'm going to teach you how to make the customer the hero and the product the means by which your customer can achieve what they really want.

When's the last time you went to a hardware store? Were you just there to shop around for some random tools? Or were you there because you have a specific project that would require a specific tool in order to be completed?

My guess is the latter.

My guess is that you probably had some home project that you were working on, or your spouse asked you to work on and it required maybe a special tool or a series of tools that you needed to perform the job and complete the project.

Why does this matter and how does this apply to software sales?

I'm going to share with you something that I refer to as the Golden Rule of Selling Technology:

He or she who buys a shovel, doesn't want a shovel. They want a hole. But they don't just want a hole, they want a fence or a tree. But they don't just want a fence or a tree. They want privacy or shade or flowers or fruit.

The mistake that we make in software sales is we fall so in love with our shiny shovels, we want to show up and just talk about our shiny shovels and how wonder our shovels are and not about the project or the objectives that people are trying to complete.

Questions to Ask Yourself About What You're REALLY Selling:

What are my customer's objectives? What do they REALLY want?

How will my product of software get them what they want?

Call to Action/What to Do Next Week:

1. Engage in discovery in the early part of a sales opportunity. When a customer or a sales counterpart comes to us and asks us to engage with a demonstration or technical presentation we need to make sure that we ask the appropriate questions to probe the sales counterpart to understand what are their objectives, what are they trying to accomplish and to get engaged with the customer and the prospect. We want to make sure that we understand what is is that they're trying to accomplish, so we can give a demo for it.

2. In preparation for that demo, we need to make sure that we build the story around what it is that they're trying to accomplish. Focus less on the features and functions of your platform and focus completely on how is it that your solution and your platform is going to help your customer, your prospect achieve that objective or meet those requirements.

3. When you deliver your demonstration, do so in the context of telling a story. They story should always start with their objective, in the context of what they're trying to do, and making them the hero of the story. Your product should be a side story. Your product should simply be the means to get them to the objective that they're trying to get to. Your product should not be the star of the show.

Learn more at www.demodoctor.com and get a FREE chapter of my Amazon best seller!

Remember: People buy from people and the most effective sales engineers routinely develop healthy habits to consistently deliver winning demonstrations.

See you next week!

Chris