Mike Michalowicz's Blog, page 100

Give It All Away, Increase Sales

Want an easy way to start increasing your sales figures? No problem. Start giving it all away. Of course, I don’t mean your product or service! I mean give away all your advice, tips and information. That’s right, you should just freely give it away. Now, before you click the X on the screen or stop reading, let me explain to you why you should be doing that.

Run and Return

You are probably thinking that, if you give all your advice away, you won’t be needed anymore. And on one level you are probably right. There will always be a few people who will take your advice, say adios, and not look back. They probably weren’t going to be your repeat customers anyway. Giving them a little advice for free wouldn’t keep them from needing you, if they were.

But there will always be a sector of the population that will take your advice and remember you when they need more, or when they need something else that you can help them with. And it doesn’t mean that they will just come back looking for more free advice. They are going to come back willing to pay, as well, because they are growing to trust you. After all, you have even helped them out for free.

Why Just Do It

There are many reasons why you should give away the advice and enable people to navigate doing something for themselves. Consider sites like AllExperts.com. Why do you think that professionals in a wide variety of categories sign onto that site to be the one who dishes out the advice to people who have questions? For starters, it establishes them as an expert in their field.

Additionally, people appreciate those who help others, and this makes them more willing to return to you in the future. Other reasons to do this include the way it helps you become known as the go-to person, helps you create a platform, helps you solidify what you know, and helps you remain current regarding what you know about your field. Plus, when you interact with your customers in order to give them advice, you will be getting to know them. And knowing more about your customer base is always helpful!

By taking the time to get to know your customers, you also help yourself learn more about what they want and need. This information may even steer your business in a new direction, one that has an audience waiting in the wings.

The Easy Route

After you give away tips and advice, you will find that your sales increase as a result. This is because people, by and large, would rather not have to do things that they can have done for them much more easily. That’s why companies such as landscaping and barbers even exist. We could do those things ourselves. We can easily learn how to care for our lawns (and many of us do), or use our own clippers to keep our hair buzzed, but we like the ease of having someone else do it for us.

Become An Authority

If you want to establish yourself as an expert and keep people coming back to you time and again, just give it away! Giving away what you know will help you get there and, in the end, will bring good things your way.

By giving it all away, you will feel like an expert, be seen as an expert and be treated like one. And experts are professionals in their field who are paid for their knowledge, in one way or another. So give freely, and flourish!

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What Is The Most Effective Closing Technique?

Of all the things I have done in my entrepreneurial career, selling has been the one constant. Ever since my first job out of college I had to sell to make a salary. And then, when I started my first business, I had to sell to survive. Even after I wrote a book, it was nothing without a huge selling effort. I’ve been a lifelong fan and student of great selling techniques.

My favorite technique used to be the 1-to-10 close. This is where you ask your customer, “On a scale of 1-to-10, where do you stand on deciding to proceed with us?” And when they answer you say, “What do I need to do to make it a 10.” It worked occasionally, despite the fact it is exactly what I should NOT be doing.

Here’s why—people resist suggestions. If you’re a smoker and I say “You need to stop smoking, it’s bad for you,” you’ll say, “Yeah, I know.” Then you’ll light up a smoke and blow it in my face. We automatically do the opposite of what people suggest. If you have kids, you know how true this is.

If you tell me you are a 5 on the scale, and I say I need to make you a 10, you’re naturally going to resist anything I do while trying to make you a 10. You might even drop your ranking to a 4 or 3, just to show me. And while you might not say it, you will feel the resistance and blow the proverbial smoke in my face. It didn’t work, but sales people, including me, kept doing it.

Then I stumbled across another 1-to-10 technique, which is the most effective closing method I have ever experienced. When asking people where they stand on a 1-to-10 scale with me, no matter what they say even if it’s a 3 or 4, I say something like “I didn’t expect you to pick a number so high. From our discussion and your body language I thought you were actually lower. Why do you pick a number that high?”

By suggesting a number lower than what they said, people naturally resist my remark and want to go higher. Now they argue about why the number they picked, say 5, is not that high, and they may even change their number to a 6 or 7. But no matter what, the conversation in their own head is arguing why they should go with you.

If you’re not convinced, think about how we all use this method in our lives. I mean, you can tell a kid to go mow the yard and they’ll never get off the couch, but if you tell them you’re going to go mow the yard because they’re not old enough to use the mower yet, they’ll fight you to prove you’re wrong. Play it right and you won’t be able to get them off of the mower and you’ll never mow the yard again.

Remember Tom Sawyer? He was punished and made to paint a fence all day. But, he got his friends to paint the fence for him using this same technique. His buddies were teasing and ridiculing him when they first came up and saw him painting the fence, but he didn’t care. He kept painting and said wisely and a bit snobbishly, “Not just anyone can paint a fence.” That shut them up. By the time he convinced them they weren’t capable of painting a fence, they began begging him to let them paint it. Only then did he let them while he relaxed in the shade. It’s called “reverse psychology,” by some, but whatever you call it, it works.

When you use the same technique with your customers, they will follow their natural resistance to suggestion and persuade themselves to work with you! Beautiful.

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