How would you explain what a dog is to someone who has never seen a dog? You could say it has fur, sharp teeth, four legs, and a tail, but so does a cat, and hundreds of other mammals. You could say a dog has a sharp sense of smell, but moths have better olfactory powers. A dog barks-but so does a seal. A dog growls-but so does a Komodo dragon.
It can get even more confusing if we’re questioned. Is a dog large or tiny, tall or short, has a thick or thin coat of fur? The answer is yes. Is a dog smart or dumb, nice or mean, hard or soft? Again, the answer is yes. Is the dog long-lasting or only for a few years? The answer is yes, some kinds of dogs live longer than others and you may want to look at an orthopedic dog bed sale to protect their joints in their senior years.
It can be difficult to get another person to understand what a dog is-much less make them want to buy a dog by only talking about the features of a dog. Instead, you need to explain the benefits of buying the dog. Selling benefits, not features, is included in Selling 101, but that’s only part of the message. The other part is that you need to speak in sound bites to increase the odds of selling the dog. Once you know someone wants a dog, there are a million more factors to consider, such as which breed to get and what to feed them. Fortunately, there are websites like Waggel.co.uk that could answer any of your dog-related queries.
If you were a dog seller and a dogless person came in complaining about neighborhood burglaries, you would tell the prospect that a dog protects property by barking, which alerts its owner to danger and scares away the thief. If the person said he was lonely and had no friends or family nearby, you would say a dog is a companion that will even keep its owner’s feet warm on cold nights. A biologist would surely describe the dog in terms of fur coats and keen eyesight, and a philosopher might bloviate about the pack instinct in humankind. But neither is trying to sell dogs.
An insurance agent sells solutions to many problems. Many consumers need a solution to one problem. If you show that you have the solution to that one problem, you may well get the sale. If the agent starts talking about the many solutions dogs provide, the consumer will not buy the dog.
The standard response of a salesman to “what do you do?” is “what do you need?” Since that might sound a bit flippant, the real response would be something very broad, as in “I help people lower their financial risk” or “I save retirements” or “I keep families together.” If the response is “what do you mean?” or “how do you do that?” the answer isn’t “with annuities, did you know the ancient Egyptians first used annuities…” The response is to highlight a feature as a benefit of the product. “I save retirement by guaranteeing you can take 6 percent from your IRA and never run out of income.” Or, to describe life insurance, you might say “I help keep families together by promising that if the breadwinner dies, for every dollar placed with me the family will get one thousand dollars back.”
An agent needs to create 10- to 30-second sound bites on the important benefits provided by features of the products they offer. This does a couple of things. First, it focuses on the key features most likely to become benefits of interest to the consumer. Second, speaking in sound bites forces the agent to pause, and this gives the consumer the opportunity to say whether the benefit is of interest. Too many sales are lost because the agent kept talking about a solution the buyer didn’t want and the agent didn’t cover what the buyer did want.
Selling benefits is old school, and it still works because people buy benefits, not features. The only modification I’m suggesting is to cut your benefit comments down into short sound bites, because that gives the prospect more opportunities to talk, which increases the odds you’ll find a problem that needs solving. If the consumer is looking for a gift for their kid’s 10th birthday, commenting that “this dog loves to play and will make your child happy” is probably all you need to say.
