The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 76 Degrees – 9:11 a.m.
You’d think it would be pretty easy to sell something as valuable as a bag of diamonds. Courtesy of Cecil Rhodes and the marketing department of De Beers, we’ve had it hammered into everyone’s head that diamonds are rare and valuable. Everyone “knows” that. So how hard could it be to sell something so valuable?
A fair amount of the projects I work on involve systems to sell products and services that are quite expensive. Think upwards of $100,000–no small amount of money.
At this level, these are amazingly valuable products and services. They have to be to command fee levels like that. Considering the value, you might think that all you have to do is show some proof and whammo, people will just eat it up.
This is not the case.
You can’t just walk in with a proverbial “bag of diamonds” and expect someone to buy it. In fact, the more excitement you show about your diamonds and the more eager you are about selling them, the more resistance you will create.
Humans are trained this way. It’s not worth fighting, you have to work with it and use it to your advantage.
So how DO you sell a “bag of diamonds?”
You do it slowly. You do it systematically. You do it by design. Instead of SELLING, you engineer the opportunity where someone (the right someone) will want to buy.
This means the sales process is strategic, systematic, sequential and very well thought out from start to finish. The sales system is something you control that the prospect rides along. It’s like a train track. You don’t “make it up as you go,” and you certainly don’t relinquish control of the process to the buyer.
There are two reasons you don’t relinquish control:
- First, that would be stupid. 🙂
- Second, it actually erodes confidence in the buyer.
Read that second part again, because it’s important.
If you want to lead people to a result (that’s what advisors do), then there has to be a certain level of confidence in your ability to do that BEFORE people will say, “I’m ready to go!”
This isn’t the stereotypical fake confidence that people who are REALLY insecure conjure up to fool everyone. This is real confidence. This is authentic, “I don’t need you to be complete” confidence.
Part of the way you get this confidence is to earn it over time. The other way you get it is to give it to yourself.
The other part of this process is spending a lot of time working on empathy. You develop the ability to really step into someone’s shoes and view the world from their perspective.
When you have all this right, you no longer need to “sell” the bag of diamonds. People will just come to you and ask you if they can buy it.