When selling, the development of the relationship between buyer and seller may be considered as three distinct actions:
Educate, Influence and Persuade.
In this blog we look briefly at Education.
Education is an important start in selling. Your prospective customers need to know what can be done to fulfil their need and specifically, what you can do for them. They need to know the facts and it is your job as salesperson, to make sure they have all they need to make an educated decision.
Can you ‘spin’ it? Spin used to be a balanced and accepted term meaning a way of describing things with emphasis. This could be a positive emphasis or spin, or negative, according to how you wished to influence the prospect. As an example: ‘the car seemed keen to accelerate and be exciting to drive’ has a positive emphasis or spin to it. Alternatively, to say: ‘It was too easy to reach and exceed the speed limit as the accelerator was very sensitive’, paints a more negative picture of the same characteristic.
Spin should be used with care as it is very easy to begin to exaggerate a point to make it in your favour. The ethicality of this is questionable as you are moving quickly from educating to influencing, and likely not in the right way.
Buyers are not idiots. They are most likely trained to counter spin, misdirection and all pressure selling techniques. Those in sales that give honest answers and deal fairly with the customers, are the ones most likely to win the available business, both short and long term.
Education is the first of the 3 distinct actions on the development journey between buyer and seller. In the next we will look over Influence. And in the final, we will go over Persuade.
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