If your company offers services rather than physical products, attempting to sell them can pose peculiar challenges that wouldn’t so much apply when it is tangible items you seek to shift.
Unlike with such products, you can’t really show a customer how services work or let that customer easily see these services’ features and merits. However, here are some techniques that you can use to tailor your sales strategy specifically to effectively selling services.
Sell yourself – because you are the product
You might not be selling a product… except that, well, you should be. In attempting to sell services, you should also aim to sell yourself. Consider yourself the product!
This means getting a prospect to perceive you as reliable, trustworthy and likeable. However, this might not be possible before you have first built a relationship and rapport with this prospect. This applies whether you are a doctor, lawyer, accountant, investment advisor or something else.
Understand what the prospect requires
In asking a prospect questions that enable you to discern their problems, you can also form a stronger connection with that person by showing how genuinely interested you are in their needs.
As a prospect becomes more revelatory, they will also start trusting you more, explains Small Business Trends. However, simply knowing precisely what they need can also feed effectively into your efforts to sell to them, as the following point will make clearer…
Advertise the expected outcomes rather than the service
To put it strictly: the prospect won’t care about your actual service, but instead what it will do for them. Therefore, you should promote exactly that – the outcome which they can expect should they begin using the service. Business Insider highlights a “fine line” to walk here…
While showing the prospect how you have met needs of clients like them, you also need to preserve the secrecy of confidential client data and show how you can flexibly meet this prospect’s unique needs.
Focus on local audiences
For companies offering local services, local audiences can be especially potent sources of revenue. This bears emphasis if you are promoting via the Internet, which has a global reach.
Admittedly, the need to target local audiences can vary between businesses. A B&B owner, for example, might be willing to attract clients from abroad; however, a hairstylist is unlikely to generate a particularly large amount of business from casting their net similarly wide.
Provide easy ways for leads to reach you
While a company offering physical products can often depend on customers purchasing at brick-and-mortar stores, if you offer services instead, this strengthens the onus on you giving leads easy means of getting in touch with you – whether by phone, email, physical mail or online form.
Though the above might seem an obvious point to many people, you could be surprised by the difficulties which some sites place on visitors seeking to contact staff. An array of more complex sales techniques can be learned if you also enrol on our sales courses.