Risks and rewards

Risk and Reward
By Reed Sawyer
Every transaction involves risk and reward. If you sign up for a new cellphone, you are taking the risk that: A) the cell phone will work. B) The network will be reliable, and C) that your information won’t be stolen by someone else because the network is insecure. Why do you buy? Because you believe that the risks are outweighed by the rewards. If you didn’t believe that, you would never buy a product.
Since the fear of pain is always greater than the desire for gain, eliminating risks or minimizing risks is a more effective sales tool than emphasizing rewards. In other words, you must acknowledge the risks, address them, and minimize them before you tell about the benefits.
How do we do that?
1) Realize that there are always subconscious fears that lurk underneath the surface in a sales presentation. If you can bring those out, and eliminate them by giving information and asking questions, you can remove the risks.
a) You can’t tell someone that there are no risks. Instead, bring out the most commonly perceived risks and ask questions to impart information and the client will remove those risks. (If I tell you something, it might be a lie. If you tell me, it is always the truth, according to you. Let them be the truth teller here and have them eliminate the risks by answering your questions.)

Here is an example: By using a vacation club membership, you can save multiple thousands of dollars over the course of your membership. What are the perceived risks? It might be out of business in a year. State that it has had the same address and phone number for the last 30 years, and ask the client if they feel comfortable with a business that has kept the same phone number and address for 30 years? Is that an indication that they are stable? Does that indicate that they will be around for a long time, if they have been around for a long time already?

By giving a factual statement, and then asking the client to interpret that, you are having them validate the truth. If they say that they feel very comfortable with the fact that it has had the same address and phone number for 30 years, you have eliminated that nagging doubt. After all, they said it, so it must be true.

2) Ask if there are any other concerns? If you do this in a sympathetic manner, they will not feel that you are using high pressure tactics, but that you are trying to help them be an informed consumer. If there are no other concerns, try a trial close. “Are there any other concerns that would stop you from taking action today?” Then…shut up and listen. If you keep talking they will use your talking to stall. If you shut up, they will answer, hopefully with another objection. If they don’t have any objections, you will then need to discern if they are ready to proceed, or if your benefits are large enough to overcome their buying process objection (no one wants to be sold, but everyone wants to buy.)
3) If they raise an objection, simply do the backtrack, conditional close technique. Use their exact words of their objection, (“the price is too high”) and phrase it in the form of a question, “So, the price is too high? Assuming we can deal with that, are there any other objections?” Since most people have a processorial objection to any closing, they might have just thrown out an objection without thinking of it. By using their exact words, in the form of a question, they are hearing their own voice raise the objection. If it sounds silly to them, you can just go past it and move on. You haven’t lowered the price, you have handled the objection. If price really is the objection, raise the benefits, do not lower the price. This is a conditional close opportunity, and you can move forward with it.

By getting the risks taken care of first, you eliminate that fear, and allow the benefits to be larger than the costs. If you don’t manage the risks, they will be unsettling and cause a lost sale.