Page 118 - Lighting Magazine June 2018

on the mark
Mark Okun is Business Contributor to enLIGHTenment magazine and President of Mark Okun Consulting & Performance Group. He has more than 30 years of hands- on retail experience training and coaching sales associates in the lighting and furniture industries. Mark@bravo businessmedia.com
several we need to drop. One of them is the as- sumptive close. This was used at every point in a presentation. No ma er where the customer was in the sales process, we assume they are buying now. Today this same technique is con- sidered blatantly insulting and transparent.
The change needed to make this closing method desirable once again is to ip it. From the start of our interaction, we must still as- sume the client is going to buy the item, just not from us. There are too many outlets of the product alone to take that for granted. What they can’t get anywhere, but in a showroom is knowledge.
The new concept to assume is that the client is under-educated on the products they want and it is our job to teach them. When provid- ing speci c product knowledge that the client may or may not know, close with an assumptive question: “Were you aware of that detail?”
If they respond “Yes,” follow up with, “Why is that important to you?” The client begins to tell you every reason why they want this item. Now you no longer have to assume the client’s rea- sons to buy and can focus in on why they need to buy from you.
The wayback MachiNe
Way back in 1977 I read my rst sales book by Joe Girard titled How to Sell Anything to Anybody.” Joe is listed in the Guinness Book of World Re- cords as “The world’s greatest salesman.”
Years later this book, along with several others, became part of the required reading list during the standard three-week sales training program I pioneered.
Girard, referred to his “Rolodex” (a prehistoric version of Outlook) as a Ferris wheel and each card was a seat for his clients. Today, with a host of digital resources at our ngertips for CRM, staying in touch with clients is easy, and the seats we have and the notes we can make are unlimited.
As an example of using the Ferris wheel method, early last fall a client received their merchandise from me and mentioned they would like to do landscape lighting. A note was made and put into the calendar with an alarm. The alarm came up on March 31; we still had snow with more predicted. I reset the date to April 6, and on that day a quick call was made to the client to see how they made out through the winter and to see if they wanted to get ahead of the rush and complete their land- scape lighting design we had touched on last fall. The response from the customer went like this: “Thanks for calling, are you psychic? We were just talking about our gardens, when can you come out?” By the time you read this article the job has been designed and installed.
NOsTalgia
We may become sentimental for the processes of the past, but like Yellow Page ads, we will leave them behind and never see them be useful or have the power they once did. The information that was provided in that distinct book is now at the touch of your nger or within the sound of your voice. Have you thought of a voice strategy yet? It’s coming!
If you have an old-school method you love and hate to part with, tell me about it, and we can try to adapt it to the clients you’re working with today.
And, as always, Happy Selling!
116 enLIGHTenment Magazine | june 2018
www.enlightenmentmag.com