How Speed Beats a Better Priced Competitor…
No two products and services are ever identical. Whenever I talk to hotels about selling, price always comes up. Listen, there will always be somebody charging less than you for what seems like the same product or service. It isn’t the same. It cannot be. That’s because every product or service that you sell has at least one thing that your competitor doesn’t have: you.
But that is not the only difference. There are a bunch of other things to consider, like:
- Your response time; - Your price; - Your guarentees; - Your financial terms and conditions (deposit, refunds and balance payments and so on); - Your payment methods (allowing your client to pay by credit card, for instance); - Whats included in your package; - Your freshness; - Your reviews ie your track record; - Your location; - Your experience offered; - How much this problem is costing your prospect already (hours, money, embarrassment, ...); - How much any delays will cost your prospect; ... I could go on. But you get the point.
The moment you bump into what seems like a lower price, for what seems the same product, consider these other facets that add costs to your prospects. Then ask your prospect questions to clarify what the opposition really is offering. Extrapolating the problem shows your knowledge and expertise, and that you care. Don’t expect your client to do this for you. They don’t yet know the perils you can see.
Highlight each difference before you consider changing your price. Its vital that you do not undervalue your hotel offering.
Improve hotel bookings by understating your hotel value
This is about closing more bednight sales. And about closing those sales more profitably. Your tourism business sells perceived experiences.
Even if you think you sell only a bed, remember the experience & the package are the services you are selling.
Mike McDerment, (the co-founder of FreshBooks Cloud Accounting), wrote a profound book called Breaking the Time Barrier – How to Unlock Your True Earning Potential. Download it for free.
The book is about how much YOU are worth, Andrew. It’s written like a story. It is 70 pages long, but is very easy to read. You will recognise yourself. 😃. Try reading ten pages each day, if you don’t have time to read it in one session.
When we sell, we forget how much we really know. We take for granted our thousands of hours of experience, skills, and training.
We always know much more about the problem than the prospect does. What we don’t yet know is how much they know, how scared they are, and what it’s costing them now.
But there is a disconnect because we assume the issue the client cares about most is price. The book shows you why this is wrong, and how to fix it.
The low hanging fruit
The easiest sales come from your existing clients. Why not connect with them? Instead of cold calling, call each guest who you have hosted already and ask how they are doing. If you’re reading this at midnight, try sending an email along these lines… (Try to personalise with their name, if you have one.)
SUBJECT: May I ask for some feedback, please?
BODY:
Good morning.
A few months ago you stayed with us here at _________.
We’re trying harder to get better. Could you please reply to this email and share a few words about your side of the experience?
Your feedback would help us to support you better in the future.
Warm regards
YOUR NAME
YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE
Ask about how your their stay was. Start with folk who last bought three months ago, and work towards your earliest clients. Offer a discount for their next booking
- The chances are huge that you will get good feedback, which is great for the soul. (And great for a few testimonials/stories.)
- The chances are just as great that they will tell you when they will be returning.
- If the feedback isn’t good, take a deep breath and suck it up, because if enough people tell you the same thing, it’s worth fixing.
Every Sale has at least Two Competitors
Your competitors in any sale are:
- Status quo or inertia: the prospect does not see any advantage to changing what they have.
- The prospect choosing to do it themselves, the most common scenario with a small business where money is scarce and hours seem plentiful.
- Other suppliers selling different solutions to the problem your prospect faces.
Most of us try to compete against other suppliers. But we lose most of the sales “opportunities” to the status quo and DIY.
Let’s look at the prospect for a moment. This is a real, live human being. The most important thing we can offer any prospect is our time to listen to the words they say and to ask probing questions to uncover what they really mean and need.
We overestimate how much a prospect knows. We assume our benefits are obvious. We assume that the person we are talking to can mentally work out how much extra profit they will make or how much cost they will save. Most prospects can’t.
We know much, much more than they do about our sphere of expertise. We need to show them the potholes, the hidden costs, if we see they want to go with the status quo, or go it alone.
Most of us do not put our price into perspective. We look at percentage savings, rather than real numbers.
It’s our job to understand where we fit in the flow of our prospect’s business.
Then, to show how much value we are delivering. Our prospect has a whole range of other stuff happening and will not make the connections himself. (Or herself.)
The One Step Path to More Sales
When you set up a daily sales target, you’re setting the lagging indicator. That’s the result of what you do. It happens after you do the things you must do to actually get the sales in.
The leading indicator is “how much time you invest to reach the sales result you want.”
Time Invested becomes Sales Achieved.
Instead of aiming for R3000 sales each day, aim for four hours focussed on sales activities each day. The R3000 sales depend on the four hours, not the other way round.
At first, you won’t know how many hours you need to reach your target. That’s part of the process. As you go through that first chaotic stage, working out what to do, in what sequence, you’ll learn what really needs to be done.
As you see trends – like…
- how many calls you need to make to close one sale or,
- what combination of e-mails and calls close a sale,
- or which prospects turn out better than others,
you can draft processes to do it a little better each day.
There are no guarantees that any specific sale will happen.
But, the more you practise, the more sales will happen.
The only guarantee is that nothing will happen if you don’t try.
You dont have to be the best
You offer a tourism service to people who are looking for that service. Your service does not need to be the best. Or the cheapest. Or the fastest. Or any other “‘-est”.
Best is defined as of the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality.
There is no one “best” in any situation. A lot of other places that are also not the best get booked each day. Why?
Whatever you offer needs to solve a problem your prospect faces right now. That’s it.
When someone calls you to solve a looming problem, they hope you can help. They think you are their best resource, right now.
You can show best by answering the call fast. Or phoning back within 5 minutes. I know this has nothing to do with your technical prowess. But you are first in their queue.
When they ask “what’s the best way to solve this”, they’re not asking what the world’s best solution is, as voted by the editors of some random site or magazine.
They’re saying, I have a problem right now. Can you help me?
Depending on the problem, “best” might mean:
- fastest, as in I need accommodation tonight
- cheapest, as in I don’t have much cash right now, or
- most space, as in I need to fit in my wife, our four children, a suitcase each, and the St Bernard dog into this room, or …
You get the point.
To put this another way: If two people are diving and they see a shark coming up, the one who survives does not need to be the fastest in the world. Just a little faster than the other dude.
In sales-speak, if two people get the same enquiry, the one who gets the sale does not have be the best in the world. Just a little bit faster than the other dude.
Silence is Golden – Listen More to Sell More
Dale Carnegie once went to dinner, long after he had become famous as a speaker and motivator. He found himself sitting next to a young lady. She told him she was overawed at sitting next to such a famous person
I don’t know about you, but the temptation at that point to regale her with stories of his life must have been quite intense. He didn’t do that.
He said, “Thank you. Our hostess mentioned earlier that you had just visited Egypt. I have never been there. What was it like?”
And then he sat and listened the whole evening as she described her experiences. Every now and then he would prompt her with another question.
The next morning the hostess of the dinner sent him a note, as they did back then, telling him that the young lady thought he was such a fine conversationalist.
We build relationships when we listen. Listening carefully. Especially now, when the single most important thing you can give anybody is your undivided attention.
Prospects don’t need to know everything about us. They don’t need to know our qualifications. The fact that we care enough to listen is enough to nurture the relationship.
The more we know about them, just by listening, the more we understand what they need, not just what they want. And that’s the problem they really want us to solve.
I usually make notes as we go along. I find it helps me remember. I find that people appreciate it. But most importantly, I find that it enables me to see things that they cannot see for themselves. Try it at your next meeting (or phone call).
Asking questions is simple. Try not to aim for a simple yes/no. Instead use words that invite deeper answers. Deeper questions display our knowledge and competence. Use questions which start with…
- Why
- Where
- Who
- What
- When
- How much
Remember, it’s not an interrogation. It’s gentle discussion about the challenges they face, and how they see those challenges, and how important they are to them. Our role is to listen and understand. And only then can we consider showing them our path to solve the problem.
The more you listen, the more stories you will hear. Each story is worth gold when you talk to others with similar problems.
If people understand we want to help, they will tell us everything. They will trust us. That trust is the crucial element to getting more sales.
I used to talk a lot. Now I listen a lot. It’s easier. More fun. And I get a lot more sales.
The Question Nobody Else Asks
“What would make this the best experience you’ve ever had?” It’s an interesting question loaded with meaning. It will take your prospects by surprise. But it will show your true colours; that you care about their side of the deal.
In my experience, most people do not have massive expectations, and it is often easy to exceed them. But if you know what they regard as important, it is a lot easier to offer something magical. This is also something you want to add to your sales presentation.
What can you do to build those “personal touches” into the way you relate to your prospects and clients? How can you turn your clients experience into something they want to write about because they will remember it for a long time?
Your Emotions Are Not Reliable
This email assumes you operate your own business, as 99% of my business i help do.
One joy of working as one cog in a big company is that you don’t take the numbers personally. You get paid no matter what the monthly change in the numbers is. There is a long-term impact, but that’s not your problem.
When you run your own show, you’re responsible for turning every cog. It’s easy to assign emotion to the numbers.
- Anger when you feel it is not your fault, like COVID.
- Guilt when you know you did not invest enough time.
- Frustration when you invest the time, but the results don’t match your effort.
- And elusive elation when things go your way.
Wouldn’t it be more useful to accept what happened as just another learning curve in this business process? Time lost in guilt, anger, or frustration is compounding the time lost before. That’s not a good way to proceed.
- We cannot change what happened yesterday. It’s gone. It cannot come back.
- But we can start fresh today, no matter what happened in the past. Time lost in guilt, anger, or frustration is compounding the time lost before. That’s not a good way to proceed.
If you’re not elated your sales numbers, why not take 10 minutes to write a report to your boss (you) explaining what led to those numbers?
I know this sounds crazy. If you formalise what happens by writing it, you often see more clearly the actions you didn’t take and the sales that didn’t happen.
Most of my clients work alone. As solopreneurs, we have three roles.
- The entrepreneur, dreaming about becoming the next Elon Musk.
- Then there is the manager, doing the planning, coordinating efforts and following up on the results. (In this hypothetical scenario, this is the role that wrote the letter to Mrs Carruthers.)
- And then there is the technician, you in your salesperson role, making calls, making visits, listening, taking the order. And if you are a solopreneur, delivering the item, installing it, et cetera. We do everything. The interruptions at this level are often overwhelming.
Your business exists to create customers. That’s how it makes enough money to operate and pay you.
When you’re selling, lock yourself away from interruptions.
The only failure in selling
In selling, the only failure is not to try. While you’re selling, you’re learning and/or earning. Either is a great outcome.
- Learning is your investment in your future. You know, those cringeworthy f-ups that taught you to stay on-focus now. Included in that learning is your perseverance in overcoming your fears and doubts. Even if each sales effort did not result in income, you gained confidence that the sky would not fall on your head.
- Earning is the reward you get from wielding all your learning, experience, knowledge, and perseverance.
All the work you do to create the solution your business sells depends on this single point of contact – selling it.
No matter how perfect your raw material sourcing, your production process, your offices, your staff, your technical prowess… None of it is worth a lick of spit until somebody buys what you SELL. Someone must sell it. If not you, who?
Sell what you have
Selling is more important to your income than perfecting your product.
I raise this because “best” isn’t often a feature of a product. It is an assemblage of
- product,
- service,
- convenience,
- price,
- and relationship.
And it is what the client experiences, not what your product is.
While a product might win hands down on features or functionality or durability, it is only as good as the service that backs it, and even then only if you can afford it.
We obsess about one tiny facet of the many facets that lead to our success.
Why not ask clients what they want, instead of assuming that we know?
A while ago, I asked one of my clients to visit five prospects and ask them about the biggest challenges they faced in their work. This was after he shared his assumptions with me.
People buy from us for many reasons. The quality of the actual product is just one.
Some people will complain so expect it.
Each thing that marketing action we create reaches people who fall into three groups.
- People who don’t like it.
- People who like it.
- People who don’t care either way.
The people who don’t like it make more noise than the other two groups. They are the first to put finger to keyboard to share their feelings.
We are programmed to treat their bad “reviews” as more important than the (much) fewer folk who write to tell us how good our thing is.
This makes us think that our product or service is much worse than it really is.
This causes us to fix problems that do not really exist. And the fear of another “complaint” makes us timid.
So my standard approach to negative feedback is to ignore it until there is enough of it to reflect a trend rather than a few outliers.
This means I do not worry about it until I have to. This makes sense because that angst stops us from getting real work done.
That’s how I recommend you to approach this issue as well.
You are not your business!
You are not your business. You “own” a business. We confuse the roles.
Imagine working for someone else. Your role is to find people who face the problems their firm solves and then to present the solutions they offer. Would you approach that job with less angst than you do when you present yourself, selling what you sell now?
We face a real challenge if our ego is at stake in each sales effort. This is even more true when we sell a service. With this level of exposure, it does not take long before we give up. Often, after that first morning call.
How about working for yourself today, as if you worked for someone else?
Park your ego while you make those calls. Focus on learning and selling. And lose the emotion. As long as you’re trying, you’re learning or earning. Both are great outcomes.
Instead of “I” offer, try saying “My business offers”…
Sell what your business offers now. Don’t wait for it to reach perfection.
Speed, Speed, Speed
how fast you respond to the initial enquiry is key to converting the sale. Within 5 minutes should be your goal but not later than 30 minutes.
The point of email marketing is to get more enquiries. We assume more enquiries will lead to more sales. We are wrong. This explains why.
We’ve looked at sending regular newsletters. These send readers to sales pages for lead magnets, digital products, or physical products. Your sales pages should be enough to “close” sales of these.
We’ve looked at automated email sequences after a prospect has downloaded a lead magnet to guide them to buy something.
Buy the digital product and pay online.
Place an order online for a physical product to be delivered offline.
What should you do when someone emails you to ask for your help?
This needs personal intervention.
The subsequent sales depended on just one factor: how fast you respond to the initial enquiry.
(There is a lesson here for us. We do not need to be perfect, or even OK on the phone. We simply need to respond ⚡ FAST.)
Sell like a doctor
When you visit your doctor, it’s usually for a specific reason.
When you enter her domain, she will ask you a general question along the lines of, “So what seems to be the problem today?
She will not start by telling you all about her qualifications. Nor will she outline every pharmacological solution she has in back. Nor will she tell you about any of her recent successes.
All her attention is focused on you and your problem.
She will ask a single leading question and then she will wait for you to tell her why you are there.
Her next question will be based on your first answer. The clinical method that she spent years learning asks a series of increasingly relevant questions to drill deeper into today’s problem.
At the end, she might run some tests to confirm her diagnosis. Then she prescribes a solution. She won’t tell you about all the other reasons this specific solution is good. She will focus only on the fact that it solves your current challenge.
Very few of us ask for a second opinion. Very few of us ask a doctor for a proposal to compare with another doctor.
She has this authority because we trust her. Not because of her qualifications, but because of the way she deals with us each time we see her.
We won’t choose another doctor because her qualifications are inadequate. We will choose another doctor because her “bedside manner” sucks.
This is how we should be selling.