The essence of selling
The essence of selling is trust. The customer must come to trust the salesman and the company that he represents. That is because buying is an irrational act, regardless of the technology or the customer. Consider the following.
The customer can never fully understand the technology that he is buying. It takes all of his energy to understand his own business and perhaps the business of his customers; he does not have the bandwidth to learn the business of his vendors too.
The customer can never achieve perfect knowledge of the market. Knowledge of the market is especially hard in new technology. The customer will always have the suspicion that he missed something. There might be another small company that sells a better product that he just did not see. There might be another technology that solves his problem differently. There might be a bigger breakthrough tomorrow.
The customer can never conduct full due diligence of the vendors. The company may close tomorrow because the CEO is embezzling. The product may be so full of bugs that it eats whole networks. The customer may make all sorts of justifications for his decision to buy, but in the end the deciding factor is trust.
The customer must trust that:
- The product does what you claim
- The competing products do what you claim
- No replacing technology is superior
- The investment in your product will not be made irrelevant tomorrow
- You will stay in business
Selling is irrational because buying is irrational. Start ups led by engineers have a very hard time with marketing and selling their product because the leadership projects rationality onto the selling process. Sometimes the engineers are successful at selling, but they attribute their success to the wrong reason. They believe that their superior knowledge has convinced the buyer in a rational decision making process. The truth is the customer came to trust that the engineer because of the engineer’s display of self confidence.
When engineers finally realize that buying and selling are irrational, they try to change it. They invest a lot of wasted effort in trying to make buyers or the market rational. As the saying goes, there is always some jerk who thinks he can ice skate uphill.
Do not fight it; use it to your advantage. Embrace the irrationality of the buying process. Infuse your product with emotion. Build a corporate image. Exude competence, self confidence and passion. Focus your sales force on establishing and maintaining trust between your company and your customers.