Those of you who know me, are already aware that I am not a sales person or sales specialist of any kind. However, i do believe that everybody is selling something at every moment; to others or to themselves e.g.
If you receive a sales phone call, tele-sales person is selling you “YES” and you on the other hand are most probably trying to sell “NO” to him. Better sales person usually wins.
When you are to buy something, a similar clash happens within your mind i.e. between your logical mind and emotional mind. My emotional mind has been telling me to purchase “Microsoft Surface Pro 3” for a long time now where as my logical mind had an upper hand so far which kept on suggesting that I already have so many devices of that kind (iPAD, Macbook Air and several laptops of various shapes and sizes…) and it will not add any value. But, finally my logical mind lost the battle today and I ended up buying the machine which my emotional mind has been yearning for weeks now.
After the purchase, I asked myself why did i buy it (No doubts, its an amazing machine and I love it)? After thinking for a while, I came to a conclusion that my emotional mind could not win over my logical mind by just looking at features of MS Surface; it’s awesome screen resolution, it is small size or amazing speed didn’t matter at all. The only thing that made my logical mind to loose was the “Use Case” of MS Surface in my personal life i.e. how I can use it to be more productive at home, work or in other areas. The exact use case that my my emotional mind suggested to my logical mind is irrelevant to this post and I will probably talk about that somewhere else. But, the point I am trying to make is:
“If I would have come up with this use case few weeks ago, i would have bought the device there and then”.
Upon realizing this theory, I looked at few of the advertisements from big brands and found that most advertisement campaigns are already using the “Use Case Sales Process” to capture the attention of the prospects. The advertisement of MS Onenote on youtube is a perfect example of this. No more talking about ppmhc.org Bactroban what cool features it has, the only thing that is shown/discussed is “How it will improve your life?”.
If you want to know why this works, then here it is…
When we talk about features of a product or services, it is up to the prospect to come up with a use case for himself/herself and sometimes prospects are not even bothered to go through the process of coming up with a powerful use case for their logical brain to agree to the purchase. Hence, by talking about “Use Cases” instead of features we directly touch the logical side of the brain by shortening the thinking process and relating the product directly to improving the life of the prospects. This dramatically increases the chances of sale to go through in much shorter time.
So sales guys, here is your new sales process which will help you close more sales…
1. Ask Questions to Know about Your Customer
2. Focus on the Use Cases that Relate Directly to Customer (Features are only important when customer asks about it)
3. Close the deal and take money..
and Entrepreneurs, think about use cases while building the products and not just features.
In the mean time, i will keep playing with my cute, little and yet powerful MS Surface. It’s amazing 🙂
Good Luck!