Episode 061 - How To Sell a Product In The Present Day

can have a higher price product over your competition if the experience is better than what they get somewhere else. All right, so we've been talking a lot about sales objections, we've been talking about education in your products and your marketing, um, and today we're going to be talking about how do you sell a product, okay? So if you've got a, you know, you've got a service, okay, this is not necessarily fully focused towards you. While you may be able to take some, some takeaways from this, but we're talking about a physical product. That's what we want to talk about, right? So something that you can touch, you can, can go in and see, and you can hold, and all that kind of stuff. How do you sell a product in today's world? And, um, you know, I think it's a little bit different.

Yeah, it's definitely a lot different, especially, um, when it comes to the tangible things that you actually have to show and demonstrate or upsell and really have that face-to-face, whereas a lot of the service offerings now have not been face-to-face, it's been over Zoom and it's— COVID has kind of completely changed that.

Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, the need for having reviews on your products, especially if you're selling them online, hard to do if you're doing it just in store, but you know, most products are online now too, but having those reviews having that social proof, people be able to see what did that person think of this product, what kind of results did they get, is extremely important now where it may not have been 10, 15 years ago.

Yeah, and I think something that's very, very basic that a lot of people would be like, well, obviously, but I've seen a lot of companies selling a physical product, especially local businesses, who don't have a website because they sell stuff in person. So they'll just have a Facebook page or just be listed in in Google, in Google My Business, but no actual website. And I think that that is crucial. Um, there's product knowledge, there's research that people need to see, reviews. They need to know what you are, who you are, all about your team, all those sorts of things. So I think just crossing off having a website when you're a physical location, I don't think it's as simple as that.

Yeah, and I think that's a big void and a huge opportunity for people because Everybody's doing their research online before they even come out to a store, right? They're trying to figure out what they want to buy. And there's a lot of businesses over the years where we've built, you know, what we would consider an e-commerce platform, but they weren't actually buying online, they weren't selling online. It was an online catalog. They'd still have to come in to get it, right?

Yeah.

But even having that functionality to say on there that, hey, this is the product that I want, and maybe just submitting an order for pickup, right, is another function of it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, like you mentioned, social proof is huge. And the minute that somebody sees that you don't have a website, that's a lot of credibility gone just right off the bat, because people know now how easy it is to have a website. You know, people know that it's, it's kind of the standard now that you have to have a website and you need to be on social media. So those businesses who don't, I think, should really consider taking that step and getting a website for sure.

And one of the things that I find that I think should be more of a focus is those product images. You know, in the world of the Wish world, right, where you've been buying products online and you get them and they're like a quarter of the size of what the image was. A lot of times if you're buying, you know, let's say a coffee maker or anything like that, You know, sure, you can see the product that's there and maybe you'll read down, but a lot of times taking those photos, you know, in an actual setting that you can actually see, okay, I can see the size of it, is one way to do that. Or, you know, in our case, we're on the East Coast, very scenic areas. There's some iconic areas that people would recognize. And if you've got a product line, maybe go out to that location and shoot your products like, you know, on the rocks on a beach, right? Or something like that, just to kind of give it the the flair and the feel that you want to have in there versus, you know, in a light box on a black background or white background.

Absolutely, and that just adds more character and personality to the photos themselves. And in addition to that, I think anything that you can do to make the in-person selling easier, so the more content and the more information you can provide people before they actually come into the physical location, the better. So providing those product details, you know, like when you look on Amazon, there's like a whole bottom, you can scroll down and down and down on information just about it, the size, you know, what the package contains, if it's a certain product it includes the ingredients, you know, like I just think providing as much information as possible so customers are informed when they go on your website or your social media or do that research.

Yeah, and I, you know, one of the things that really kind of stands out to me is having people who are, um, wanting to promote their product or have a sale or anything like that, you know, they tend to look at it as, okay, you need to run ads, or I need to reduce my price to kind of make it appealing at the time of sale. But rarely do people immediately think, what if I was to give some of my product to the ideal person? So now the control is into you. And a story that I'm going to share with this was There was a homemade pizza shop in the US. I don't know what state it was. I heard this story probably about 10 years ago, and they were, they were a family-run business, and they were always competing against like the Domino's and like kind of those big box stores, which they knew that their product was far superior. It was all fresh and everything, but they were considerably higher price. So what they did was they went to these higher-end offices, and they, they picked them out, people that would appreciate paying for a quality product. And they went in and they gave out sample slices to employees there on certain days with a coupon for 75% off your first pizza.

Wow.

Okay, so I think the story was that they lost about $4 per pizza on everyone that cashed in that coupon. But when they came in with the coupon and they gave them the pizza, they then gave them a coupon for 50% off their second pizza. You can see where this is going, right? They came in with that, then they got a 15% off. While they did the 50%, they think they were making a couple bucks, but by the time they were consumed, you know, consuming, you know, 3 or 4 of these pizzas, they by far knew that that product was far superior, right? And they gained so much growth and loyalty from that versus trying to sell to the masses through advertising, right? They knew that this office building had, you know, higher salaries, and they went in and they gave them the product to try.

Yeah, absolutely. And that kind of perfectly leads into the whole concept of trust-based and, you know, making it more about the actual relationship than, than the product and focusing on the emotions involved. So, you know, these, again, like you mentioned Domino's, these big, big box stores they're never going to give everyone a 75% off coupon, because they don't have to, right? But when you're talking about trying to kick off selling a product, just showing them that you care, showing, you know, taking that extra step to provide them really good service and take things kind of beyond just the surface level of selling them a product, talking to them, developing a relationship, building trust, all those things are going to help you in the long run immensely.

Yeah, and getting, you know, getting that, that customer experience to be far superior, right? You can have a higher priced product over your competition if the experience is better than what they get somewhere else. And if you're in a commodity type product business, people are going to come into it with preconceived or past experience knowledge that they have of what that product should be, right? And if you go go above and beyond it, they're gonna stop in their tracks and be like, wow, like, this is not what I expected, right? This is so much better.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah, and I think touching on that emotion-based sales process as well, as opposed to the product, it just takes it back to that very, very basic concept that we learn in marketing of feature versus benefit. You know, so talking about the actual feature of something is just plainly explaining, you know, what it does. What is, you know, what is the feature of this that makes it different or stand out or makes it usable or good to the customer? Versus talking about the benefit that touches on the emotion, which is always going to result in better sales than talking about simply utilitarian purposes.

Yeah, I mean, your features are the means to what it is what they're buying, right? Now I've used this, I think, in other episodes that, you know, a hardware store sells a drill not because people want to buy a drill, but they need a hole, right? That's what they're doing, is, right? So, um, you know, if you're trying to sell that, we use that as— we'll use that as an example here. I mean, if you're talking about, you know, the fact that you can, uh, you know, drill twice as many holes and, you know, in half the amount of time, um, you know, with 4 times the amount of power that's there, it doesn't matter that you're telling them it's a drill. You're telling them how more efficient they can be with it, right?

Absolutely. And I remember learning this way back when I was first hired in a sales position. It was all new to me, and I thought, how ridiculous is it that I have to explain to somebody that, you know, this expensive jacket isn't waterproof, it will keep you dry. You know, like, it— not focusing on the fact that it's waterproof, but saying that it will keep you dry, because there's this huge difference. And I remember thinking how ridiculous it seemed to me at the time. So, you know, when customers would come in, I would hesitantly talk about how, you know, it keeps you warm and dry, and just seeing the difference that that had, it really kind of made me open my eyes to the whole psychology of selling and how a lot of these kind of these old and very traditional advice, I guess, is actually quite accurate and it is completely based off the science of the way that people think and the way that people make that buying decision.

Well, look at their past experience in that example. I mean, if they're coming in for a jacket, they're going to think of, you know, what was it I didn't like about previous jackets? And they're going to remember that time that they got caught in the rain and how damp and cold and wet they were, right? They're never going to say, 'Oh, this jacket sucks because it's not waterproof,' they're just going to be like, 'I just— I hate that I always get wet,' right? Which is— you would think is the same thing, but it is not.

Yeah, exactly. And to touch on those, those sales programs as well that I, I went through, another thing is how much they didn't focus on the actual sale of the product, but rather, you know, 75% of that is building the relationship. So a lot of my time in retail was spent just having conversations and not, you know, spewing out product knowledge and trying to upsell and all those sorts of things. Those come naturally when you have that relationship built already. So the very first thing you do when people walk in is ask them a question, an open-ended question that starts a conversation, and just leading it from there, like The more comfortable you become with that concept of not focusing on the sales, the better your sales will get because everything just flows more naturally and the trust is automatically built and that relationship is much better than just a, you know, simple product-focused conversation.

Yeah, that leading question will give you, you know, if the person responds back, will give you probably their main primary trigger of what they, why they're there, right? And you hear a lot like, what brings you in today? Right, if you're in a retail kind of outlet, so let's just say you're selling mattresses in a bedding store, you come in and somebody says, oh, I'm just tired of having a sore back, right? If you, if you're tuned into what they're saying, you know that now when you start to talk about it, you can start to talk about, you know, that this has been rated for, you know, helping people with sore backs or whatever, because you know that that's the reason why they came in.

Exactly.

So, and you know, a lot of times Even looking at, you know, if you're looking at a husband and wife, I know I was working in real estate sales, more in the marketing side, but some of the training was if you've got two people sitting down, and I found this very interesting early on in my career, a husband and wife at a table or at a desk in a sales situation, and you put kind of like a feature sheet on the desk, the one that leads in the furthest is the one that's gonna make that buying decision. Yeah, right. So if the woman leans in more but the man's talking most, you know that you have to get her approval because she's the one that let— especially if there's any pricing or anything like that, right? There's little things around that.

So yeah, absolutely. And I think something that is very kind of cliché with the whole selling industry is that, um, people are annoyed, you know? Like, people don't like being sold to, even if they're walking into a store and that's their intention is to buy something. Sometimes people don't like being sold to. So opening with the natural and genuine conversation is the best way to lead into selling.

And I think you touched on something there that I think is a good ending with this is there is a distinct difference between selling and buying, right? And it's who is in control, right? So people come into a store because they want to buy something. The control is in their hands. You are there to help facilitate that. When you're being sold to, people just feel that something's being pushed on them that they're not ready for or they don't want, right? So that's— I think that's two different things.

Yep. And I think, like you just said, people feel like they're being— having something pushed onto them. We talked about this a lot in school as well, the pull strategy as opposed to the push. Don't push your sale, pull the sale in. Um, you You know, make them want to know more, make them want the product. Don't shove something on them. Handle objections casually and authentically. Like if the product doesn't solve that problem, don't lie to them. It doesn't, you know. You can provide additional advice for them. For example, like I used to have customers who would come in looking for a specific product and I would lead them somewhere else if we didn't have it. I'm not going to, you know, try and convince them that this will do if it won't. Just building again that trust, because the next time that they have— that they look for something that you do have, they're going to come back.

You know, one quick little tidbit when you kind of sparked me there about lying to those people when you're selling to them. You know, I would go in, you know, all the time in years past to like technology stores. Looking at computers and stuff like that. And what I found was when I first started going, you'd talk to a sales rep because they would come up and you say, I'm interested in this. They start talking about it like, you know, I have that exact same one, right? I was like, well, that was in my head. I'm like, that's cool. But this started happening over and over again. I'm like, is this part of their sales training where they have to relate and say that they have the same one to try to connect? And it became annoying. It was as soon as they said that, I lost all respect and trust in that, and I was basically out of it. So, yeah, right, I think people can, can smell through a lot of that.

Definitely, yeah, lying is the number one sales killer, I say.

Yeah, for sure. So if you got a product, think of ways to get what we talked about out online on your social media and talk about what it can do for people versus the features of it. Talk about all those benefits and just come up with unique ways to to showcase it.

And I think most importantly, the number one takeaway is just be genuine.

Running your own business is hard. Those long hours, the doubt, the challenge to meet demands. But you're resilient. Strong. Dedicated. You do all of this for more than profits, success, or money. You do it because you care. You care about the people who shop here, eat there, drink here. You care about your community. You care about your team. Despite all else, you care. No matter what life throws your way, you power through it. With grit and perseverance, you are the epitome of dedication. You are a small business owner. For this reason, Blue Cow Marketing salutes you.