Business, Money, and Trading Blog

Because you’ve probed a bit more into the reason your customer believes it may be too expensive you’re in a better position to overcome their objection. But before you do that you need to know whether or not the holiday is within your customer’s budget. You do this by asking, `How much are you planning to spend on your holiday?’

Some salespeople will disagree with me when I tell them this saying that you’re going to insult your customer. However, in all the years I’ve been running my own businesses no one has been insulted by this question. In fact quite the opposite has happened and they’ve been pleased to be able to give me something that I can work on to come up with a package to suit their needs. Read the rest of this entry »

Before going any further you need to know:

• Is it too expensive because the customer can’t afford it?
• Have they found a cheaper deal elsewhere?
• It is just more than they thought it would cost?

You can ask anyone anything you want without them getting offended, provided you’re polite about it. So you ask them: `When you say it’s more than you expected to pay is that because you’re seen a cheaper deal elsewhere?’ Read the rest of this entry »

Some good questions to ask are:

• Who makes the furniture?
• Where is it made?
• When can you deliver it? Get specific here   ‘when’ as in morning? Afternoon? Mid-afternoon?
• Has anyone ever cancelled an order with your store?
• What happens if my furniture is late – will you phone me, or someone from your call centre? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the reasons that many otherwise professional salespeople fail to reach sales targets is that they don’t really believe in what they’re selling. It is often the problem when you work for someone else where the sales department has little control over the quality of the products or service they’re selling.

This is the problem with the large furniture stores I mentioned previously. My experiences have been that you walk in and are pounced on by an over-zealous salesperson who follows you around the store like a puppy saying how wonderful and nice everything that you look at is. Read the rest of this entry »

Uniqueness

Many businesses based around a hobby are successful because what they are offering is unique.

Large retailers, travel companies and the like steer clear of what is often referred to as niche markets. The last thing they want is a large amount of their store shelf space clogged up by products that relatively few customers will be interested in.

Therefore your unique selling point could be that you’re offering hard-to-find items such as books, memorabilia or even specialist holidays. Read the rest of this entry »