It is ironic, but in my sales career I was surprised when I heard a buyer recite this phrase. It should be complete roll out of the welcome mat. But, it just seems to fly in the face of what buyers want. They don’t want to be sold. They want to be the ones who decide what solution works for them.
And here is where I see the danger in this phrase. Given that the phrase is action oriented, and comes from the lips of the buyer, it has the powerful psychological effect of focusing on “the order”. That is after all, what we get when we complete the sale. We get the order. But the order is the end result. It specifies the product/service, price and delivery. It is a complete focus on what the seller provides. And it risks focusing too strongly on why the product or service is so great. I find that if we think in this manner, it takes away our focus from what the buyer wants.
It reminds me of this situations where you are invited to present your solution to a new potential buyer. If the buyer reveals only a superficial level of information about why they are interested in having a look at your offering, marching forward with a normal instinctive response to a “Sell Me” request, can really go astray. It would drive me nuts in the early part of my sales career, when at the end of this type of presentation, the buyer would simply say “Thank You”, and scurry off to another meeting. This would leave me in the dark as to where things were going. And then to try to forecast my chances of getting an order would just end up as a statistical guess.
Before you can successfully execute on the “Sell Me” command, you need to qualify the buyer and the situation that they are in. That means learning about the problem that the buyer wants to address, and how important it is for them to resolve. So when I hear the request “Sell Me”, I now instinctively reframe it as, “Help me solve my problem”. And this gets things going in the right direction. Naturally, you need to know what the problem is before you can proceed. And as your depth of understanding improves, your ability to address the buyer’s pain points continues to improve. If you understand the problem, and understand how well you can address it, you are then in a position to forecast your chances of getting an order.
With today’s buying cycle initiating in an incognito online world, it is important ensure that our demand-driving tactics have a level of embedded intelligence gathering. We cannot just proceed blindly with an imaginary “Sell Me” response. The marketing content that is put out there, must be with the goal of addressing buyers’ problems, and embedding ways to garner insights and striving to make inferences. By incorporating this thinking throughout all phases of the buying cycle, it will be possible to refine and improve our model. And this will help to ensure that we are presenting our solutions to the problems we are best suited to solve. That is the ideal: the buyer has a problem, you have the solution, and the whole buying scenario is created and driven by the demand generation model.