You Should Sell to Your Customers…but Not Like This
Issue #2178
- WEALTHY: 3 ways to make a killing in a falling market (Andrew Gordon)
- HEALTHY: When it comes to your health, this is not an option (Craig Ballantyne)
- WISE: Goethe on stupidity
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- The difference between selling and pushing (Suzanne Richardson)
- Have a question for me? Here’s how to get a good answer (Michael Masterson)
- It’s Fun to Know… about see-through frogs
- Add "abjure" to your vocabulary
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Score Profits With This Offense
When the markets are shaky, what should you do? Go on the offensive by buying dirt-cheap assets. Here’s how billionaire investors like Warren Buffett and Richard Rainwater made a killing in a falling market:
- Don’t give automatic preference to companies with the cheapest assets. They’re not always the best deals. There isn’t a huge difference between buying something at 50 percent off and at 40 percent off. But if the half-off purchase goes up 30 percent and the 40-percent-off purchase triples in price, now that’s a big difference.
- Buy what you know. If it takes a lot of hemming and hawing to figure out if a company’s a good buy, walk away. It shouldn’t be that hard.
- Determine why the company’s price fell. It should have been either an overreaction to sell, a temporary setback for the company, or a fixable problem.
Trust your own knowledge and instincts. If you always follow other people’s lead, you’ll make dribs and drabs but never anything more.
[Ed. Note: ETR's Investment Director Andrew Gordon is the author of nearly a dozen books on energy markets, global countertrade practices, and the hot growth sectors of China and Russia. He's the editor of INCOME, a monthly financial advisory service that uncovers income-generating stocks that promise safety (first and foremost), along with much-higher-than-average profit potential.]
"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You Should Sell to Your Customers… but Not Like This
Zap! My AC adapter was dead as a doornail. Since I work from home, my laptop is my office, file cabinet, and primary means of communication with ETR writers and staff members alike. Panic started to set in. So I immediately called Dell to order a new AC adapter as quickly as possible.
I needed the adapter and I needed it right away, which meant that Dell had to do very little work to make the sale. But the sales rep I spoke to managed to make me so frustrated that I hung up and called Best Buy instead.
It’s possible that you or your salespeople are making the same mistake as the Dell rep. If so, you could be driving your customers away. Here’s what happened…
The sales rep asked me for my computer ID number so she could understand more about me and my computer. I told her that my AC adapter was dead and I needed a new one right away.
"Have you noticed that your computer is running slowly lately, especially when you have a lot of applications running?" she asked.
What does that have to do with anything? I thought. But, giving her the benefit of the doubt, I said, "Sure, sometimes."
"It looks like you’re using almost half of your memory," she said. "Would you like to upgrade?"
Okay, I thought, she either didn’t listen to my problem or she doesn’t understand my urgency. "Yes, I’ll consider that at some point," I told her. "But right now, I really need an AC adapter."
"Oh, of course we can do that for you. But I just want to make sure that your computer is running at top capacity," she said. "Would you like to upgrade your memory? It will really help your computer run faster."
"Yes, I understand that," I told her. "But I work from home and I need an AC adapter right away. That’s why I called. And once that problem is taken care of, I can think about upgrading my memory."
"But if you upgrade your memory now, I can offer you a special rate," she said.
"That’s not my problem right now," I said. "My problem is that I need an AC adapter."
"If you don’t upgrade your memory right now, you won’t get this special price," she said.
"Thank you for your time," I told her, and hung up. My next call was to Best Buy, who, it turns out, sells a universal AC adapter that works with my computer model.
Michael Masterson has said many times that customer service and sales should go hand in hand. That, in fact, if the product or service you offer is worthwhile, selling it is a service to your customer.
"If you limit the benefit you provide to that which – and only that which – your customer specifically requests," says Michael, "you are much, much less valuable to him in the long run."
But that doesn’t mean you should try to badger people into buying something they don’t want. And it definitely doesn’t mean that you should ignore solving your customer’s primary problem in order to make a bigger sale.
Michael puts it like this: "As businesspeople, it is our job to provide more and better products and services to our customers, to help them solve their problems, meet their needs, and achieve their ambitions."
The key idea here: You want to help solve your customers’ problems. In my example, my problem was that I needed an AC adapter. Had the sales rep helped me order what I needed and then tried to convince me to upgrade my memory, I would have been much more receptive to her offer. (I really do, as she suggested, need more memory.)
Michael points out that there are two types of selling:
- Pushing people (to buy things they don’t want)
- Helping people (to select those things they do want to buy)
Pushy salespeople try to get you to do what you don’t want to do. "Such salespeople should be tarred and feathered, run out of town, dunked, and pilloried," says Michael. "They are the same people who delight in not letting you merge into traffic and in cutting ahead of you in the supermarket line."
So when you and your salespeople talk to customers, you must do three things:
- Identify what your customer needs. I needed an AC adapter. If you work for a travel agency, your customer might need a hotel room. If you work for a paper company, your customer might need five reams of printer paper.
- Identify what else could benefit your customer – something that would make his life easier or better, something that he may not realize he needs. I need more memory for my computer. Your travel client might benefit from a package of dinners and shows. Your paper client might need some envelopes.
- Solve his immediate problem first… then go for the additional sale.
"Taking an order and fulfilling it… without finding out how else you can help your customer… is a major service failure," says Michael. "You must develop your business in such a way that you can provide more and better products/services on an ongoing basis.
"So long as you are helping your customer understand how your product can achieve his desires or solve his problems, he is prejudiced in your favor. You lose your prospect’s interest when you start talking about other things – your desires and interests, for example, or the product features that don’t concern him.
"So don’t sell him, help him. Begin by finding out what he wants and needs – and then (if and only if you can really help him) make the strongest, most specific case you can make that his desires will be achieved and his problems solved."
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Reader Feedback: "I love your daily ETR e-mails."
"I love your daily ETR e-mails. Thank you for taking the time to write and send them."
- Jeff Turner
Coconut Creek, FL
Use It or Lose It
Knee pain and weakness are two common excuses for avoiding exercise, but these are actually the two biggest reasons to get moving. And I’ve got good news about an exercise program anyone can start with.
European researchers studied the effects of five weeks of bed rest on muscle size and functional strength in 10 healthy males. What they found was that the inactivity decreased muscle strength by 20 percent, reduced muscle size in the lower body by up to 12 percent, and even decreased bone density by 2 percent.
So if you are tempted to "take it easy" because you have a problem with your knees, you have to start exercising as soon as you can or face severe consequences, such as weaker bones and, eventually, the inability to do normal daily tasks.
My recommendation is to purchase an exercise ball. (You can get one on the cheap – for less than $20 – from a big box general retailer.)
Lie on your back with your legs straight and your heels on the ball. Squeeze your abdominals and your glutes (your butt muscles) and bridge your hips off the ground. Your body should form a straight line from feet to shoulders. Now bend your knees and roll the ball back in toward your body. This works the hamstrings as well as your calves and glutes. After you roll the ball in, slowly roll the ball back out. Keep your body tensed while you do the exercise. Do 10 repetitions and then take a one-minute break. Repeat twice.
Build up to three sets of 15 repetitions over the next two weeks, doing the exercise every other day. Your knees and functional strength should quickly improve – and then you will be ready for more advanced exercises.
[Ed. Note: Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne is the creator of the Turbulence Training for Fat Loss system. If you want a free online source of information, motivation, and social support to help you improve your health, lose weight, and get fit, sign up for ETR's free natural health e-letter.]
Have a Question for Me? Here’s How to Get a Good Answer…
I try my best to give good answers to the questions ETR readers send in… but it’s not always easy. Some of the e-mails we get are so vague, I can’t even guess what the writer wants to know. So here are a few "rules" that will make it possible for me to give you the best possible answers to your questions:
1. Keep it pithy.
In general, it’s best to limit your entire e-mail to 100 words. If your e-mail goes on and on and on, the information you’re really looking for gets lost.
2. Give me some details.
Don’t say, "I have recently started a new business and I need help with marketing." That tells me next to nothing. Tell me, very succinctly, what your service/product is and how it is unique. Then I can tell you something useful about how to market it.
3. Ask a specific question.
Don’t say, "My uncle has offered to set me up in a business. Do you think that’s a good idea?" Tell me (briefly) exactly what the deal is – and then ask if I think it’s a good idea. If I don’t know what you’re talking about, I can’t give you any suggestions that will be of real value to you.
Okay. So… what do you want to ask me?
E-mail your question to AskMichael@ETRfeedback.com, and I’ll do my best to help you.
It’s Fun to Know: See-Through Frogs
For many people, dissecting a frog in biology class was a traumatic experience. However, thanks to a Japanese scientist at Hiroshima University, frog dissection could become a thing of the past.
He’s bred a frog with translucent skin, through which students can clearly see its organs, blood vessels, eggs, and so on. The researcher said he bred the frog in response to the controversy in recent years over the alleged cruelty of animal dissection, which has prompted many educational institutions to turn to computer simulations.
(Source: National Geographic)
Do You Need To Start Out Small?
If you don’t have an Internet business yet, or if your company is smaller than $1 million then you need something different… something that lets you start off small.
One man I know turned $10 into over $500,000. How’s that for starting small!
Let me show you how to get a similar Internet income stream running for almost nothing.
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Abjure
To "abjure" (ab-JUR) – from the Latin for "to deny upon oath" – is to renounce under oath, abstain, or shun.
Example (as used by A.B. Yehoshua in A Journey to the End of the Millennium): "He closed his eyes as he raised the goblet to his lips and took a small sip of the cool liquid, and then his face paled as he understood how sublime the taste of the forbidden drink was, and how easily one might become enslaved to it. There and then he resolved to abjure it totally."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007
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