Tool Box
Issue No. 56 - Month/Month year
Use a concerns menu to boost sales
by Craig Stubing
Some salespeople think that to sell more, all they need to do is push their product or service harder.
Generally they're wrong.
In truth, our success as salespeople centres on our ability to help our customers do one or more of the following –
• Meet a need
• Satisfy a want
• Solve a problem
• Take advantage of an opportunity
• Get rid of an irritation
Let’s refer to these needs, wants, problems, opportunities and irritations, collectively, as ‘concerns’.
Because we don’t live in a ‘one size fits all’ world we can’t attempt to sell on the basis that all of our customers have the same concerns. We need to have a way to identify individual customer’s concerns so we can customise our offering to meet their particular situation. We also need to have a way of identifying our customer’s preferences and prejudices – if only to avoid putting our foot in it during the sales process.
The best way to do this is to employ the skill of conversational questioning. A Concerns Menu is an aid to conversational questioning. Its purpose is to make the questioning easier and more directed while avoiding shortcuts.
For users of the EASE sales format this article is about making the Ask easier and consequently the Show more effective.
What’s a Concerns Menu?
It’s a list of customers’ concerns that you have been able to help with in the past. List those recent instances where you have done ‘excellent work’ in meeting customers’ concerns. What were the most common six or so concerns? That’s a good starting point.
To convert these to a Concerns Menu, use a bullet point format with no more than three words per bullet point.
In my business one bullet point might be Lead Generation; another might be Closing Sales, and so on. Using your own experience you can design a Concerns Menu appropriate to your bu...
