If you earn a living by being a salesperson, no matter what you are trying to sell, you will be successful as long as you are willing to listen to your potential customer. Although listening takes a few minutes of your time, by doing so, you will ensure that you can provide the right solution rather than throwing suggestions out there and hoping someone will take what you are offering.
A good example of this is my experience with various dentists. As everyone knows, it can be extremely costly to get dental work done. A recent visit to a brand new dentist left me feeling overwhelmed. Rather than asking me what I wanted to do, he simply gave an excellent sales pitch on how I needed a certain treatment and that I would need to cough up thousands of dollars in order to get it done.
He went on and on about how important teeth are to the human body and told me how my teeth would end up if I just left them as they are, and the pitch went on. Unfortunately the dentist never bothered to take the time to actually find out what was important to me. If he had asked, I could have spared him the trouble of giving me a sales pitch for an expensive treatment that I would never want to pay for.
By contrast, when I visited another dentist, after taking a thorough look at my teeth, he asked me the simple question I had been hoping for. He asked me what I wanted to do. He told me he could do anything I wanted, but that he wanted to make sure it was meeting my needs. I informed him that was is of utmost importance to me is to simply maintain my existing teeth for as long as possible and fix the ones that absolutely need fixing. The dentist, having listened to my needs, simply told me he would write up a list of recommendations so we could get the ball rolling to do just that. That was it. No sales pitch, no preaching about the importance of expensive treatments, he was willing to work with me.
That is really all it takes to be a good salesperson. Listen, listen, and listen some more. Before making recommendations or providing advice, first take a moment and find out what is important to your customer. You will earn their business every time and will likely also get valuable referrals from your satisfied customers.
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