Part of the reason people panic is that selling seems like a mysterious process. We can solve that mystery. Selling is like any other journey: the territory you are covering may be new to you, but it has been travelled before, and there are certain steps you can take to clear the way.
Each step you take along the way matters. Let’s look more closely at the selling journey.
Building up
Selling a product or service is, in many ways, like a building project.
I have been involved in two major renovations for both a home and a commercial building. Here’s how the process unfolds:
1. You speak with an architect who presents you with some plans, drawings, or visual examples of what your home or building might look like.
2. Once you approve your plan, you seek a builder to do the construction.
3. If you want to approach the build with confidence, you’ll also want to be involved in the builder’s plans and timelines. Using excellent project management tools is key.
4. Still, even the best-laid plans sometimes change. You might go back and forth and change a few parts of the plan.
5. Even when you get started, you need to keep in mind the need to be flexible, adjust to shifting timelines, accommodate last-minute decisions, and possibly suffer some setbacks.
6. You need to be nimble, but it’s hard, because there is a lot at stake, financially and emotionally.
7. Soon enough though, you start to visualise the final product and then watch your home or building take shape. Finally, you see your completed project in front of your eyes. All of that planning has paid off.
Following a plan and actually building that home requires discipline and principles.
It’s the same with sales, which unfold in similar stages. With both types of projects, it is important, to begin with, the right mindset, so why don’t we do that when it comes to constructing a sale?
Why don’t we plan the process that will let us get the result we want? Most business owners jump in too quickly, assuming that their product is so magnificent that people should just buy it.
Or, they don’t bother to plan. Usually, salespeople do not follow any particular steps or processes on the way to the sale of that product.
If you look at sales the way you look at building your home, though, you will see that there are certain processes you have to follow to get a good result. It does not have to be a complicated process, but you do need a plan.
Knowing a few simple steps in the journey to your sales is all that is required.
If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?
My favourite thing to do is to show you what’s working right now. It’s not as good as being a client, but it’s close.
2. Take advantage of a FREE 45-minute consultation
Need some sales support? Make an appointment, and let me take you through the past, present, and future templates.
3. Work with me one-on-one.
If you are wanting to take your product or service from face-to-face to virtual selling, then I have a product that may be able to help you. You can get started for as little as $250 a month. If you’re interested then email mike@mikebrunel.com and put ‘Virtual Selling’ in the subject line…tell me a little about your business and I’ll get you all the details.
Showing people how they can personally profit from your product can be one of the more creative parts of the sales process.
Consider the Dream Room at Gardner’s Mattress & More store. The Dream Room is a private mattress-testing room that allows a unique opportunity to try before you buy.
The room is essentially a sleep sanctuary adjacent to the showroom. The space is private and void of salespeople and other customers, so you can snuggle in and get comfortable. Gardner’s is the only mattress store in their area that offers such an experience.
I have never heard of any other mattress company offering such a service. You make an appointment, pay a $50 deposit, and spend time in Gardner’s showroom with one of their sleep consultants.
The consultant helps you narrow your mattress options to the one you feel best suits your sleep needs. Their team encases your mattress in a proper allergy- and bedbug-proof zippered cover and tops it off with extremely high-quality, fresh sheets and pillowcases, all for you.
Once you enter this Dream Room, you quite literally take a nap. This is your opportunity to “try before you buy.” The proprietors encourage you to bring a good book and relax. For couples, they encourage cuddling, although they ask that the bedroom activity stop there; out of respect for the room and future sleepers.
You can even bring pyjamas and your pillow and sheets if you want. This is a very creative example of the lengths that a business can go to in presenting its product.
For them, every sale is well worth it. Gardner’s average mattress costs around $4,000, and prices go up to a staggering $18,000. How do they do that? What they have created in their business is a sleeping experience, not just a price experience.
By now, their system will sound familiar. They know their product, match it up with the client’s needs, offer customised advice to each client, and make a presentation that clearly shows the customer what’s in it for them.
From here, they have to ask for the business and negotiate a price. If you look at their website, I challenge you to find prices anywhere.
The dollar signs are not there. Gardner’s strategy takes you out of the price war and into your personal experience.
There are, I am sure, plenty of mattress companies all over that town that sell off the floor at cheaper prices. Make no mistake; those stores have a purpose; what they sell and how they sell is fine.
Wouldn’t you still want to improve the experience and have more chances of building a relationship?
Positioning your business this way tells the consumer what you sell might be special.
Would you not want your client to know you offer an exceptional experience? The customer-savvy company has a better chance of selling their mattresses than the person down the road.
They get a commitment from you when you make an appointment in the Dream Room, strengthen it with a small deposit, chat about what you want, and then take a nice cosy nap.
That’s a sales commitment. More importantly, that’s the best presentation you can make.
PLUS, whenever you are ready…here are ways I can help you grow YOUR business.
My favourite thing is to show you what’s working right now. It’s not as good as being a client, but it’s close.
2. Take advantage of a FREE 45-minute consultation
Need some sales support? Please make an appointment, and let me take you through the past, present, and future templates.
3. Work with me one-on-one.
If you want to take your product or service from face-to-face to virtual selling, then I have a product that may be able to help you. You can get started for as little as $250 a month. If you’re interested, email mike@mikebrunel.com and put ‘Virtual Selling’ in the subject line…tell me a little about your business, and I’ll get you all the details.
In my blog The right advice at the right time, I talked about qualifying a client as part of your sales process before presenting your product or service.
Sometimes, it’s also important to develop a script for shorter or elevator pitches. These, too, help you to qualify a client.
The so-called ‘elevator pitch’ came out of Hollywood.
An aspiring actor or actress may have had only one chance to pitch an idea, and that chance may well have come in an elevator ride with a Hollywood executive.
They had the length of the ride to talk up an idea for a film, a role, or a script, so their story had to be quick and clear. These days, you’re unlikely to find yourself making an actual elevator pitch, but you still need to be succinct with any proposal, especially if time (or attention) is short.
If someone asks you what you do, you must engagingly describe your business so that by the time they leave your side; they want to become a customer themselves.
I recall doing an exercise for a senior leadership team that directly illustrates the concept.
We divided a room full of executives into teams of two and gave them questions to ask each other during an actual elevator ride.
They asked each other, “What do you do?” and “Can you tell me clearly what you offer in benefits at your business?”
The responder’s job was to get the questioner excited about the company and show how it could solve their problems.
The elevator rides were very revealing. Every story was different when the doors opened, and the riders reported on the responses. Every one.
It was pretty eye-opening because it was my company they were talking about!
The executives weren’t getting the right message across, and the message itself was inconsistent. They needed to learn to tell the company’s story, to feel comfortable even bragging a little.
As I say to my kids, if you’re telling the truth, it’s not showing off.
More Secrets
While there is no absolute formula for creating an elevator pitch, I’ve adapted the work of a well-known marketer, Eben Pagan, to illustrate the importance of emotion.
Like Pagan, I believe using the right words can help you focus on the emotional needs behind the client’s desires.
The key is to talk about helping, describe who you help, explain what they will achieve, and suggest what they need to do to get started.
Say, for example, you offer a weight loss program; your elevator pitch might sound like this:
“I help overweight women who want to lose more than 20 pounds get rid of their fat in as little as 90 days without starvation and without torturing themselves with a military exercise. Do you know any woman who would want to lose more than 20 pounds quickly?”
Here’s another example, if you offered debt consolidation services. Your pitch is a little different, but the pattern is the same:
“I help people with $10,000 or more credit card debt. I cut their monthly payments in half, and then I get them completely out of debt. Do you know anybody with credit card debt who would like to cut their payments and eliminate their debt in less than three years?”
For Mike Brunel, The Sales expert, I would say:
“I help salespeople who do want to come across as salesy. They want to be authentic and find out if their product solves a problem for their clients. If it does not, that is okay. Do you know anyone who has a problem like that? Anyone who would like a no obligation, free sales training audit?”
Who could say no to offers like these?
Develop your elevator pitch.
Use this template to create your elevator pitch. The principles behind the elevator pitch work across many formats and situations, but it is important to know what kind of environment you will be presenting in, so you can gear your content to your audience.
My favourite thing is to show you what’s working right now. It’s not as good as being a client, but it’s close.
2. Take advantage of a FREE 45-minute consultation
Need some sales support? Please make an appointment, and let me take you through the past, present, and future templates.
3. Work with me one-on-one.
If you want to take your product or service from face-to-face to virtual selling, then I have a product that may be able to help you. You can get started for as little as $250 a month. If you’re interested, email mike@mikebrunel.com and put ‘Virtual Selling’ in the subject line…tell me a little about your business, and I’ll get you all the details.
In this week’s blog, I talk about one of my favourite salespeople Joe Ades.
Sadly Joe passed away a free years ago, but this story is a great lesson for us all. We are all in sales, and Joe, the millionaire Potato Peeler seller, was just one.
A Showman Selling Potato Peelers on the streets of New York.*
“In the early 1990s, a man named Joe Ades began showing up in the bar at the Café Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week.
Joe was also a five-nights-a-week man, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne and was never alone. On most nights, he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis.
Even by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard.
He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, had him pegged as one of the “owners”—the tycoons who live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments.
The Café Pierre was way off about Joe, or so it decided after some probing. If no one was brave enough to ask him where he lived, quite a few people asked him what he did for a living.
“Holding his glass of champagne by the stem, ” Joe said simply, “I sell potato peelers.” The probers had a good chuckle over that. “Right,” they all said. “Now pull the other one.”
While walking the streets in the months that followed, some of the probers, who may have still doubted him, came upon Joe in the middle of a spiel with a crowd gathered around him at some busy corner.
He sat on a campstool, peeler in hand, and performed all manner of surgical wonders on carrots, zucchini, and Idaho potatoes. A long slab of Lucite served as his worktable, which rested on storage bins filled with all his produce.
The table and his campstool were so low to the ground that he worked from a perpetual crouch, like a catcher.
Meanwhile, he kept up a constant patter, belted out at the top of his lungs in a scratchy, theatrical Cockney singsong.
After three or four minutes—not before—he announced the price of his “machine,” as he called it, produced a wad of bills from his left coat pocket, and began dealing peelers as fast as he could to the outstretched hands flapping money in his face.
As if all this weren’t astonishing enough, he had on his beautiful café attire, only now bits of potato peel flecked his lapels.
He bowed his head low over an operation; sweat from his brow coursed its way down the bridge of his nose and dripped onto the cuffs of his Turnbull & Asser shirt. Joe is still working the peeler in New York.
This past December, he turned 72, but unless there’s snow on the ground, he’s out pitching. Joe loves the peeler, which he sells for $5. “I love it for several reasons,” he says.
“It’s portable; it works; I never get a complaint. Never. When people first see it, they don’t believe it. They buy it sceptically and cynically. They can’t believe it will do what I say it’ll do, but they take a chance and buy it.
And during the sale, somebody will walk past—always do—and say, ‘I’ve got one of those. They’re great!’ And it’s true—they’re not shills. You don’t need a shill with something like this.” The Swiss-made article is a gleaming frame of stainless steel that fits in the palm like a carpenter’s plane.”
Joe is the only one in the city who has it—a true boast he saves for that moment in the pitch when he names his price, and the wad comes out (in the street game, a moment known as “coming to the bat”). In private, Joe says,
“The Company in Switzerland that makes the peeler will only supply people who can demonstrate the product. You have to buy a minimum number, and the minimum quantity is far more peelers than one store could handle in 20 years. If you saw the peeler hanging up in a store—for a dollar—you’d walk right past it. It has to be demonstrated.”
His selling locations have no fixed pattern. One never knows where Joe will turn up. “I like to be an event,” he says. “Boredom sets in when people expect you.”
In part, Joe is making a virtue of necessity. He has no license to do what he does, and he often gets moved by the cops, who all know him. “All of them have nicked me in the past,” he says. Joe pushes his gear through the streets on a hand truck, which he calls a trolley in his English way.
He and the trolley are often stopped by strangers, ready with a heartfelt line: “Sir, you’re the greatest salesman in New York!” He likes the recognition and is never ungracious, but privately he quibbles over the word “salesman.”
“I couldn’t sell one-to-one,” he explains. “I couldn’t sell real estate or cars, for example. What I like to do is a pitch to a crowd, draw a crowd together, and have them give me their money.” —Reprinted with permission from
“The Gentleman Grafter” by Howard Kaplan, Vanity Fair, 2009.
This is an inspiring story about being a professional conversationalist. A Salesperson. A potato peeler in New York selling $5 kitchen tools to a crowd of people on the street. He lives a full and wonderful life, where he dines out on the fruits of his profession with his beloved every evening.
Joe was not a salesperson but a performer. His stage was the street, and he worked hard. He knew people would buy it if he put on a dazzling show that solved their problems.
Never forget that selling your stuff can also be a show.
Sales take many forms, but we always do it one way or another.
Have a great week, and talk soon.
PLUS, whenever you are ready…here are ways I can help you grow YOUR business.
My favourite thing is to show you what’s working right now. It’s not as good as being a client, but it’s close.
2. Take advantage of a FREE 45-minute consultation
Need some sales support? Please make an appointment, and let me take you through the past, present, and future templates.
3. Work with me one-on-one.
If you want to take your product or service from face-to-face to virtual selling, then I have a product that may be able to help you. You can get started for as little as $250 a month. If you’re interested, email mike@mikebrunel.com and put ‘Virtual Selling’ in the subject line…tell me a little about your business, and I’ll get you all the details.
