What Should You Be Selling?

Are you on a mission to save the world? Take heed, it might leave you broke. Many salespeople, uncomfortable with the title, feel it necessary to justify the function of their job. Instead of admitting freely that their objective is to get people to buy the products and services they sell, these people insist that they serve a higher purpose of connecting prospects with things they need. If this is your objective, you may have trouble reaching your quota.

Through my many years in the sales profession and my unofficial observations of human behavior I have found one fact to be true. People often worry about their needs. They think about the future consequences that they may suffer if they cannot find a way to fulfill these needs, but they rarely act upon them. Conversely, people take action when they find something they want. For some reason, the urgency of a desire is greater than that of a need; the masters of the selling game know this instinctively.

Take the following example: Peter would like to recruit his friend into his new network marketing venture. She and Peter have often talked about her lack of finances and her need to find a way to raise her income. Knowing that she is struggling financially, Peter feels this should be an easy sell. He tells her about his fast success in the business and shows her copies of the commission checks he has received since joining. He is quite surprised to find that she expresses no interest in the opportunity and turns him down.

If his prospect had already told Peter how much she needed to make more money and that is exactly what he was offering, why did she still refuse to act? The answer lies in the difference between needing and wanting. His prospect suffered from credit card debt, she had virtually nothing in savings and could not afford to join a retirement program. She needed to pay off her debt, she needed to start saving money every month and she needing to begin contributing to a retirement fund but none of those things had an immediate effect on her life.

Had she arrived at work earlier that day to receive a pink slip, she would have been much more receptive to any opportunity to make money and may have given Peter’s program a try. The point is, when the perceived consequences to not acting upon an issue are in the future (twenty years from now upon retirement) the motivation simply is not enough to act. However, when those circumstances are pushed forward (because of say an unexpected job loss) the motivation to act immediately appears quite suddenly.

So what should Peter do? Wait until she gets laid off? No. He should seek to turn his proposal from something his prospect needs into something she wants. Create that urgency himself without waiting for some third party circumstance to do it. He should also move from speaking about facts and logic to speaking about emotion and feelings.

When Peter masters the language that can bring urgency to his proposal, he will learn how to turn his product or service from a need to a want. This will increase his performance as he will find that people will act upon their wants while they only worry about their needs.