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LET'S GET AHEAD! Make Money, Save Money, Live Better!
Don't Be A Dud! Sell It With FUD! … by neil smith
Posted on 2008-Feb-6 at 05:37 - Post Comment
2/6/08
You see it everywhere - health products seem to discover new ailments you never knew existed. The guy with the twisty ladder tells you all about the hazards of dust mites that will kill you if you don’t clean the hard-to-reach areas of your vaulted ceilings! The alarming rhetoric seems to be never-ending and you wonder how advertising got this way.
This annoying sales tactic unfortunately happens to be a highly effective sales strategy called SELLING WITH FUD! FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt and while the thought may provoke images of a used car salesman in a bad plaid suit and may be very unappealing to you as an entrepreneur who actually cares about your customers, presented and packaged correctly and used in an honest, straightforward and ethical manner, selling with FUD can be an invaluable tool in your sales arsenal!
An example to sample:
A colleague of mine whom I used to work with at a tech firm in the late 90’s (yes, right before the bust!) explained how within a few short months he became the top salesman in the entire corporation. Early on in his employment with this company, he was given the task of selling switches for network routers. Now just about everyone in the firm’s install base already had these switches as did most of the potential new clients he was expected to approach, yet selling these same switches, he still managed to become a top-grossing salesman!
He had never sold this product in his life, but he was a pretty smart guy so he took on this task by starting at square one. He sat down with the product literature and learned every last detail about the product, no matter how small. He then researched product feedback, especially the negatives and found one little problem with these switches that he turned into his top selling point.
Apparently these switches used some sort of liquid in their main internal connection (please forgive me for not personally knowing all the details of this particular product, but you’ll get the idea in a second I promise!) which over time, had a propensity to leak and cause the switch to fail. If you are a large company relying on the uptime of your computing systems, any downtime at all is absolutely not an option and if you already have a large investment in a certain equipment setup, often you are stuck with this setup until your corporate budgeting process approves upgrades.
This colleague of mine went in to IT directors of the entire install base and presented this finding and merely asked, "What is going to happen if your switches fail?" Then sat back and watched the eyebrows raise and the minds run wild with horrible scenarios of IT staffs pulling all-nighters to get the system back online instead of getting home at a decent hour and drinking themselves blind. He then presented a way to install additional switches as backups in case of a failure and quickly became his company's top-grossing salesperson.
This is just one example of solving a problem or just presenting a problem lying under the surface and then offering a solution. If you can figure out a true problem that people could be protecting themselves against and then present a solution in the right manner, you could have a winning sales strategy on your hands. If you already have a business and a client base, stop and think for a moment about problems they may potentially have in areas of their business that might be a common thread amongst them. You may get some great ideas for additional products of services to offer clients you already have. Your current client base is always an invaluable prospect field and often the most lucrative of all.
NOW GO SELL WITH FUD!
Please visit my website at http://www.letsgetahead.com for more great articles like this one!
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