Housing Giants - August 25, 2008 - (Page 23) Demonstrating Have you ever considered how many model homes your customers will visit before they make their final purchase decision? That’s how many presentations they’ll have to endure. Once you think about it, you’ll realize that your customers’ biggest shopping problem is confusion. That’s your biggest problem, too. Your customers are hearing multiple benefit presentations. But how in the world can we believe that our customers are so dumb they need to be told what the benefit is? Value building is important. In today’s market, you need a value building approach that gets your customers discussing what they will gain and what that gain means to them. We continue to sell by telling our customers what the benefits are, yet we all agree that customers are smarter than ever before. Interactive value building is a good idea if you’re selling a low-priced product. Neil Rackham, in his revolutionary 30year sales research study, provides proof that features and benefits actually cause your customer to become price-sensitive rather than value dependent. He goes on to prove how presentations for a highpriced product actually bring customer objections. His research shows that the more you present, the less value your customers perceive, and the less value they perceive, the more objections they will have. closing tHe sale I once hired a gentleman by the name of Phil Thompson of the Strategic Planning Institute. His job was to teach me the art of value mapping, a process of determining consumer value attributes whereby you could graphically compare yourself against your competition. Once finished, Phil invited me to attend the institute’s value council meetings. Wow. What an experience. It was here that I learned what was happening in the world of sales outside the home building industry, in the world of selling highpriced products. My thoughts on selling changed forever. I was immersed in a group of Fortune 100 managers and the new sales research that was surfacing in their universe. I was astounded. It was completely different than anything that I www.Housinggiants.com 8.25.08.Housing giants 23 http://www.neilrackham.com/ http://www.housinggiants.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.