Sales Strategies: Money & Sales

Do you accept it when a prospect tells you they don't have the money to do business with you? Do you accept it when a prospect tells you their goal is more money? If you do you’re falling into a sales trap that means no sale for you in either case.

Both responses sound logical. You’re thinking that if they don’t have money to do business with you they aren’t a good fit, and you should just move on or wait until they do have money. But in most cases you’re missing a real opportunity, and you don’t even know it.

Lack of money is never a real objection. When a prospect tells you they don’t have money to do business with you what they’re really saying is that what your offering isn’t valuable enough to them to get them to part with their money. Zig Ziglar tells a story about when he was young selling cookware door-to-door. He visited a couple so poor they didn’t even have indoor plumbing and their cookware was in terrible condition. Now Zig felt guilty asking this couple to purchase the very expensive cookware he was selling and the couple wasn’t interested in the cookware even though they needed it more than anyone he’d ever seen, but Zig happened to mention that he sold china too and the wife’s eyes lit up and this apparently poor couple wouldn’t let Zig leave until they had bought the expensive china. The wife’s want was greater than their need for the money it cost even though it didn’t look like a good trade to Zig.

This is true no matter who you’re talking to and what you’re trying to sell them. Until or unless you figure out what they really want and why that’s important to them you have a “no sale”. And this is true when a prospect tells you they want more money too.

People don’t actually want more money they want what money can buy. Now when you hear a prospect say they want more money you’re looking at it from a logical perspective and your natural inclination is to try and sell more money. This is a dead wrong fatal mistake.

When you try to sell more money you’ll soon find yourself walking away without a sale. When a prospect tells you they want more money you have to find out why they want more money. What would it mean for them, allow them to do, allow them to have, or allow them to be?

The real driver is emotional. When you hear they don’t have enough money, or they want money you now know you have more work to do to get the insurance sales you want. Currently when you hear these words you either walk away, or you jump ahead trying to make the sale.

Instead you want to slow down and step back. Think of it as if you’re peeling away the useless outer skin of an onion to get to the part that’s living tissue. Peel away and discover what they really want, how having that would impact them, and then you can begin to help them to discover how your solution will help them to make what they want possible.