A Sales Story…with a Sad Ending
I took a call this morning that I was actually rather excited to take. We are marketing some medical products for a client of ours who is a physician and I got an interesting inquiry about marketing through an online community of physicians. This could be a great supplement to the other forms of marketing we are doing.
So I took the call and a pleasant sales woman and I began to discuss how she could help us market our producs. From the moment I asked her about the different “packages” she turned into a sales drone. I could tell she was literally reading word for word off of a sheet of “features.” She must have gone on for 5 minutes just listing feature after feature after feature, which as you know if you’ve spent any time at any of the courses I teach or reading any of my blogs and newsletters, features are useless, I need benefits! But that’s a subject for another day…
In any event, what happened is that first off, she didn’t know her information cold. If you are going to sell me something you’d better know what you have to offer and be able to recite it twice backwards in your sleep or face down at your favorite local “watering hole.” Take your pick which angle you prefer, but you’ve got to know this stuff inside and out.
But to get to my real point, she went from being an interesting human being during our “howdy do’s” to a lifeless piece of paper. She just took the most effective sales medium known to man, person to person selling, and reduced it to the equivalent of a pre-recorded voice message.
So, now that I’ve identified the problem, what should she have done? Be on the lookout for my next blog in a few days and I’ll tell you the answer.
