Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
When attempting to close sales most salespeople have a tendency to use either a good/better/best, option A/option B, or price 1/price 2 method of proposing and/or presenting. Everyone likes options, right? Yes, people love options. The only problem is that options prevent most people from being able to make decisions. In their new book, Switch - How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Dan and Chip Heath provide statistical evidence that people, when presented with options, go into paralysis. And the paralysis gets worse as the number of options increase.
Baseline Selling - How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball (2005), points to the importance of identifying the compelling reasons why someone, or some group, or some company would buy and buy from you. It points to the importance of demonstrating your expertise and differentiating yourself from your competition by asking good, tough, timely questions. It points to the importance of identifying whether the prospect is able to spend the money that solving their problem requires. Those accomplishments provide the information for you to present a single, ideal, needs and cost appropriate solution. If you are indeed an expert and you did ask the right questions and listened effectively, then there is only one possible ideal solution. Present more than one and you cause a prospect to question your expertise. Worse, you provide them with something to think about.
Make your solution ideal, both in terms of it being needs and cost appropriate, with no options, and if you did what you were supposed to do throughout the sales process you will make it easy for your prospect to make a quick decision.
Speaking of books, Driven - A How to Strategy for Realizing Your Potential, written by my friend and the founder of Landslide, Razi Imam, was released today. I thought the book was really worth reading for some new perspectives on how you can improve performance and have a greater level of success.
