So What? Start Spelling Out What Prospects Want to Hear

In today's increasingly competitive environment business owners and managers are generally only interested in three things, i.e. increasing revenue, reducing costs or a combination of both. What they are decidedly uninterested in however, is a salesperson who insists on wasting their time by prattling on about every minute detail of their product without answering the only question they are interested in, i.e. how will this help my business?

A useful exercise to help you draw out the value added by your products or service is to apply the 'so what?' principle. To do this, select a product or service that you offer and write down the features and benefits you regularly use to sell it - then ask yourself 'so what?' until you uncover a selling point that is of real interest to your prospect. For example, telling someone about your large fleet of delivery vehicles does not in itself create any value in your proposition. Explaining that your ability to deliver at short notice can in turn allow the prospect to be more responsive to his or her own customers and so win more business does. Similarly, explaining that your ability to consistently deliver on time means the prospect can reduce their stockholding and minimise costly stock-outs also adds value.

As someone relatively new to selling, I used to be guilty of shooting off half-baked statements that I thought sounded great until someone suggested I use the 'so what' process on my own selling technique. The results were humbling! Suddenly I realised, much to my embarrassment, that I had been throwing out fairly meaningless lines that I just expected buyers to understand and be suitably impressed by. Fortunately, I was able to translate these into statements that would spell out the value of my offering in terms that prospects would appreciate. Let me demonstrate the simplicity of the concept with one of my old favourites:

'We have one of the most experienced engineers in the business on our team.'

So what?

'Our equipment is serviced and maintained to the highest standards.'

So what?

'Our equipment will always do the job it is designed to do and is unlikely to break down.'

So what?

'You can have confidence that the quality of our equipment will minimise the risk of costly downtime to your business.'

You can see how the statement evolves from one that would leave a prospect feeling decidedly unimpressed to one that grabs their attention by answering the question 'How does this help my business?' So stop waffling on about the ins and outs of your product/service and start talking in the language that prospects understand.

Stephen Weekes is an equipment hire professional with over a decade of management and business development experience in the plant, machinery and rental sectors in Northern Ireland.