They aren't actually buying what you're selling
A sales lesson at 16: it wasn't the organ
I bet you don’t know what your customers are really buying from you.
“Of course, I know!” You think.
May I say this another way?
The bad news: No one really cares what you’re selling.
The good news: People care a lot about what they desire for themselves, for people they love, and for their lives.
Somehow, then, to be successful in sales you have to connect what people deeply want with what you are selling. How can you make that connection?
First, may I ask a couple of questions?
Did you choose sales as a career? Or did it choose you? Remember when you were small, and your grade schoolteacher said
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Did you or anyone in any of your classes ever say
“A salesperson”?
I didn’t think so. Firemen, nurses, presidents, doctors, sure. No salespeople. Ever.
Most of us somehow found ourselves pulled into a sales career, drawn through an inescapable confluence of opportunity, innate aptitude, drive to do something, joined with a burning need for income. Over the course of my life, despite my very best efforts to explore many other careers, I was drawn, again and again, to sales roles.
At 16 years old, I had an experience that transformed my understanding of sales and what it meant to be sold to. In fact, it changed the way I look at a lot of things.
It was a a lesson that never left me - and shaped my career.
I’ve always loved music. As a teenager in the 1970’s my parents bought the amazing Lowrey Teenie Genie electronic organ. Micro-processors were just appearing in products, creating whole new capabilities that had previously been inconceivable: electronic calculators, games, watches, and now, organs. Few people had a piano in my community and, I assure you, no one had their own organ - until the Lowrey Organ company started selling electronic organs. On our Teenie Genie, with just a couple of fingers, I could play music that sounded like an entire band or orchestra was in the living room. It had a drum section! Synthesizers! Bass! Violins! Horns! And, while its capabilities were quite pedestrian by today’s electronic instrument standards, in 1973, the Teenie Genie was amazing. I couldn’t get enough.
After school, I would play that organ for hours, gradually improving, actually getting half decent. Eventually, my parents upgraded to a much nicer organ, with even more features. In that process, I had a chance to get to know the sales manager of the music shop.
One day in conversation with the manager, while mom was having one of her organ lessons, I talked my way into a job. It was a straight commission job, selling organs. I’d get 10% of anything I sold.
Their sales model was simple. We’d haul one of their cheapest (but still quite expensive) instruments into a department store. I’d stand there, playing it until someone stopped by to listen. Then I’d strike up a conversation, play some more, answer any questions, and hopefully sell them an organ.
But like most sales models, just because it was simple didn’t mean it was easy.
I quickly learned that no one wanted to buy an organ.
However, after a month or so of abject failure and endless rejection, I learned something completely unexpected and ended up selling quite a few organs. And I earned a substantial amount of money in the time I was there. But still, I’m pretty sure no one wanted to buy organs, even though I sold many of them.
Wait, how is it even possible to sell organs when no one wants to buy them?
Because I started to figure out that, although no came to the store wanting to buy an organ, there were quite a few people who:
· Had always wanted to play music and had thought they never would be able to do so
· Yearned for their children to be able to learn and play music
· Craved hearing and learning to play the music of their youth
· Wanted to feel young, in love, or more alive again
· Deeply desired a way to escape from some part of their lives – loneliness, sadness, loss, or just plain boredom
· Wanted to provide any of those benefits to someone they loved
My sessions there, playing song after song in the department store, were almost like some type of therapy for people walking by. With music cascading from the instrument, shoppers would stop - mesmerized by what the music touched inside them - and they would talk. I’d listen.
Her husband had died, and she wanted to learn to play the music they had both loved.
A couple came by. She dreamed of playing and he would do anything for her.
Another man noticed how easy it looked and I would let him play (with my instruction) and his eyes lit up at the thought of, at last, being able to make music.
Parents would allow me to teach their children a couple of things and I’d watch them look at each other realizing their child could be able to learn music.
On and on. Over and over, they would tell me personal, profound things about themselves and their lives – losses, loves, desires, regrets – all while listening to music spilling from the Teenie Genie.
And absolutely none of any of this was about selling an electronic organ. But when we finished and silence settled over us, some of those folks would see how they could get something they deeply desired for their life by purchasing an expensive organ.
Looking back – this was my first, great lesson in sales.
People don’t buy what you sell.
People buy what they already desire, need, can’t do without, or crave.
Your job is to understand how what you are selling will give them what they so deeply want.
And when you can clearly and simply connect what you’re selling to their big, important, unmet needs, you can sell even an expensive product that no one currently has a budget for, or even has place for in their home.
What a lesson!
Now taking this approach to sales means you need to turn your thinking completely around. This isn’t about the number of features of your product. It isn’t even about your product. No. What will buying this product from you mean to them, their family or organization, their lives? How will it change their life, make some dream come true, solve some awful problem they have?
In contrast, when you’re embedded in the typical sales thinking of product, features, pricing, competitors, sales processes, etc., turning around your thinking can be surprisingly hard work. We’re all quite good at thinking of things from our own perspective. But we can only know this magical, transformative world of service by looking fully from the customer’s perspective.
Here are some questions that you can ask to get into this way of thinking:
Who is your customer? As people, organizations, parents, their roles and aspirations. Who are they as human beings?
What deeply held human needs can your product or service touch or address?
What cravings or yearnings can be satisfied by a purchase?
What can a customer do with what you are selling and why does that matter to them?
How will you demonstrate that? Showing their need being met is infinitely more powerful than telling them that it could be met.
How can you ensure that the customer feels there is little or even no risk?
How will buying this from you transform their lives? What will that transformation look like, for them?
Frankly, isn’t this the way you’d want to be sold to? By someone who understands you, your situation, your company, your deep human needs. Someone who is really delivering a product or service that fits - that makes an incredible, positive impact on your life.
Selling this way isn’t easy, but it is profoundly satisfying for everyone involved.
In retrospect, starting at the tender age of 16, my career essentially was being a therapist and translator. I brought new technologies to human beings who, up to that point, had had absolutely no need for any of that in their lives. Yet it was technology that could work magic in their lives — if I could make that connection.
To make these connections requires careful preparation, thinking, practicing:
dialing in and refining, understanding needs,
developing ways to expose those needs,
understanding how those needs relate to what you’re selling,
finding clear, simple ways to communicate and demonstrate satisfaction of the needs, and
developing methods for reducing and eliminating risk.
This homework is core to successful and satisfying buying, which has to happen for you to make the sale.
Oh, and, yes, while making lots of sales is great, the real payoff is helping people in ways - and at a depth - that they could not have imagined before you came along. Long after your commission check is gone, that satisfaction – of making a difference in their lives - is something you will treasure.
What do you think? Do you remember your first sales lesson?