How to Make Your Prospects believe in You and Your Product?

As I said in my last article on “How to get initial sales” that ‘sales are directly proportional to trust”, but the problem is how to win the trust of your prospects so that they can be converted into clients or customers?

In the process of making a sale you need to understand 2 things clearly, i.e. first you sell yourself and then you sell your product. Second, if you reverse the process then nothing will work out and you will lose your sale.

So I divided this article into two parts. In the 1^st part, you will understand how to sell yourself or you could say it as building rapport with customers and in the 2^nd part, how to sell the product. In other words, the 1^st part is learning how to make your client trust you and 2^nd part is about learning how the client will trust your product so that you can make a win-win sale.

Make the Prospect believe in You

There is no rocket science in making prospect believe in you but it is really easy if everything is done properly. Let’s begin with a weird example.

Have you ever dated someone?

If you are not like me then you surely have dated.

So now the tricky question is? Do you ask for “love making” within the first few minutes of your meeting or start talking about it as you meet your prospective partner?

As per stories read and listened, that can only result in a disagreement and sometimes embarrassment in the form of a slap.

Here “lovemaking” is like asking your client to buy the product within few minutes of the meeting (exceptions excluded). So what should be your process to follow? Probably first you will tell something about yourself, then ask about her/him and will move ahead slowly.

In case of sales this can be done in the following manner:

1. Make your 2^nd Impression the Best One

Everyone talks about making the 1^st impression. Some even say you never get a 2^nd chance for your 1^st impression. Yeah, that’s correct but it is equally correct that you never get a second chance for 2^nd impression, you never get the 2^nd chance for your 3^rd impression and so on.

I am not denying the importance of 1^st impression but most of the people undervalue the

Importance of 2^nd impression.
Let me clarify this with a question:

After 1^st impression made by someone we always say, that the person is a true gem, a great speaker, handsome, can hypnotize you and many such phrases. But have you ever said after the 1^st meeting that you can trust this person?

Probably you have never said that.

And here comes the role of the 2^nd impression. As per our phycology, we always consider that even the worst person can look good in the 1^st impression. So to judge him we especially look at him in 2^nd impression. In the 2^nd impression, if you can present yourself in a better way than the 1^st one, they will start trusting you.

Now you might ask why to move on to the 2^nd chance when the sale can be made in 1^st attempt. Then I would simply say that the sales can be made in 1^st attempt also but 80% of sales get converted after the 5^th visit so let’s talk about majority and start considering 2^nd chances.”

2. Never be Cheesy

Your mother trusts you but have you ever been cheesy to her? Or to your father or friends, just to gain their trust? No. Then why you think that to gain the trust of your clients you need to be cheesy? It is one of the biggest misconceptions while building a relationship with the client.

Trust is about remaining clear and straightforward irrespective of the fact whom you are building your relationship with. The more transparent you will remain to the client, the more he will trust you.

I have seen people who become YES MAN to clients and say yes on every condition of the client whether it is legitimate or not and it ends with losing the client.

Always say the truth even if you think that the client will not be able to accept it. If you do so, you can see the magic of a true relation like when we share our dark side with our close ones and the relationship becomes stronger.

Make the Prospect Believe in Your Product

Now let’s move towards ‘how to make your client believe that this product is the right product and not the one which the competitors are offering’. This is also very simple if the process is followed systematically because you have already cleared 60% of the task by making the client believe in you. This can be done by the following ways:

1. Offer Relation instead of Product

If you always talk like, “Sir this is the best product in the market and you can never get such a product”, chances are that he won’t trust you. But if you would say something like, “Sir this is just the first step, once you start working with us you will learn how smooth and fruitful is it. If you join us, it would really be our pleasure to work with you”, then there are great chances that you will gain his trust. Well, the statements may vary according to the product but you can understand which lines are going to be more impactful on the client.

2. Tell about Values instead of Features

If I have to sell a washing machine to a lady and I talk about its basic features like it can rinse and dry clothes, obviously it won’t leave an impact on her cause every washing machine does that.

But if I convert that into value addition to trigger the emotion of the client, then that will surely give some fruitful results. I can give statements like, “Mam why don’t you just buy this machine, it would be really helpful to you, you can just put your clothes into it while you prepare your food. The rest would be done by this tiny machine. Isn’t it amazing if you could save your time and invest it with your family.”

By saying so we are just triggering the emotions of the lady and there is nothing wrong we said in the sales pitch. The best part is we also told the features and convinced them to buy the product. Basically, it is necessary to understand that sales are not created by the intellectual part of the mind. They are created by the emotional part of our mind. So no matter how many facts you present, you won’t be able to make a sale unless you trigger the right emotions.

3. Presentation Tells, Story Sells

Storytelling is a great art and you can take numerous stories from strangers if you’re good at observing people. Could not believe?

“Haven’t you seen spiritual leaders?

What do they do?”

They are the experts of storytelling and thousands of people donate their money to them without giving a second thought. Though you don’t have to be like that but you can include stories for citations, references and explaining your presentation. By doing so, you force your prospect to remain more engaged in the meeting. You can easily trigger the emotions and most importantly if the citation is done correctly, it brings trust.

Even NASA has found in its research that if we include a story in a presentation, it can increase the chance of converting a prospect into the client by 10 times.

Could you believe that?

Well, this is the power of citation, as I added the word NASA your trust got built up because you trust NASA more than me. But sorry to say NASA has never done any such research, I just used this phrase to explain how citations work.

But take care, you don’t need to lie otherwise it can even put you behind the bars.