Real world experience and survey input has taught me that you can sell anything to anybody if you meet and/or exceed the following 8 prospect/customer/client objectives:
- Quality: Everything you perform must be of utmost quality or don’t get started. Competition is just too great to ease up on this one. Just like ‘Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO)’ so goes ‘Quality In Quality Out (QIQO)’. Your reputation is on the line for loyal clientele. The Zenith brand said it best many years ago on a TV commercial ‘Quality goes in before our name goes on’.
- Reliability & Responsiveness: This is my favorite because I’ve always prided myself on ‘doing what I say I’m going to do’ aka ‘walk the talk’. I have found that you may not have an immediate satisfactory answer at your disposal but if you get back to people with a promise timeframe that will suffice (and excite) most clients (and prospects) can live with that. 24/7/365 (within reason) accessibility and availability also play well here because it’s usually ‘the early bird that beats the worm’. Be in their face.
- Simplicity: You must adopt the adage ‘Keep It Short and Simple (KISS)’. Whatever you’re proposing as a viable solution must be easy to implement and use at a grade school level or it’ll backfire and cancel out.
- Creativity: Innovation and adaptation to change are constants in the marketplace. If you’re not consistently coming up with new ideas, products, and services then you’re going backwards, not just stagnating, because competitive benchmarking is moving forward.
- Flexibility: Pivot and shift to the situation at hand. Clients don’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer if they don’t have to. The ready, willing, and able (RWA) attitude to bend (‘flex’) standards and customize solutions are what will keep clients returning.
- Efficiency: ‘Get It Done (GID)’ within an agreed upon timeframe. Clients are busy just like you are and if you come to understand and respect their time then you’ll be fine.
- Price: This is actually the easiest potential client objection. This one should be a natural close, ‘a piece of cake’. Value = Price/Cost. The more value-add you offer the more that price concerns diminish.
- Versatility: You have to develop being more things to more people; by doing so, you will be able to differentiate yourself from mainstream competition. This will galvanize the edge that you need to not only sustain but put you over the top!
