What if someone offered to teach you one thing that could improve your average sales, would you be interested?
What if you could start using it immediately – on the next client that walks through your doors, even if that’s just five minutes away? Who wouldn’t want that?
And what if this one little secret made your clients love you so much, they started referring their friends and family to you over and over again. That’s pretty powerful stuff, isn’t it?
By now you’re probably asking, what is it, what is it? And that’s the point. The point is in the questions.
Within sales, there is a simple technique called sales tie downs. They help you improve your sales process by getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way. You begin getting them to understand and resonate with you long before you whip out the contract and have them sign on the dotted lines. There is less friction, less questions, because they already understand what you are doing. Are you following me?
Sales tie downs are short questions you add periodically throughout your sales presentations to get your customers to start saying yes along the way. When they are used to saying yes, the final yes is that much easier.
Too often, sales becomes an automated process where you walk through your presentation without focusing in on what the prospect is thinking or doing. You have your set sales pitch and you plod along no matter what, just trying to get everything in order. It doesn’t work. If you lose your prospect and they don’t engage, they tune out. They begin thinking of other things – other photographers that may be doing things better.
So the way to remedy that is to ask little questions along the way and monitor the feedback they give you.
Make sense?
Okay, I’ve given you quite a few examples here within this post. Need even more? Try some of these questions periodically throughout your presentation:
Do you agree with that?
That’s powerful, isn’t it?
Does this help?
Do we have an agreement?
Are you with me?
Are you ready to get started?
Do you see what I mean?
Do you understand?
I can’t think of a better way, can you?
Right?
Agreed?
Sound reasonable?
Got it?
Tie downs are something that should come naturally in your conversation. Practice them over and over again. You don’t want to add too many and have them come off sounding threatening or negative. You don’t want them to think you are trying to coerce them into something they don’t want. Yet the more you practice your tie downs, the more natural they will become. Develop a natural rhythm for them. Put them in where they feel natural and when you begin seeing your client has a connection with you.
Then as you work your way through your presentation, you’ll quickly see your customer is following you along the way. Your questions will lead to confirmation because they understand and accept what you have to say. And you won’t need a big close at the end, because you’ll already have them where they need to be.
So let me ask you one last question. If you knew one simple technique could rapidly increase the amount of sales you bring into your studio, you’d use it, wouldn’t you?
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