4 Simple Sales Techniques to Help Your Customer Feel Important

​There is nothing worse than walking into a sales encounter and experiencing a one-sided “conversation.”

These dreadful experiences are better known as monologues.

Here are four simple sales techniques to personalize your conversation and help your customer feel the love.

1. Remember – and Use – Your Customer’s Name

I know – duh! And I know you already know that. But knowing and doing are not the same thing.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “But I am terrible at remembering people’s names.”

Okay, I gotta stop you right there. Your brain works to prove that your dominant beliefs are true. In other words, stop telling yourself you are bad at this!

Instead, start telling yourself you remember names easily.

When you meet a new customer, repeat his or her name three times while talking and choose a mental image to attach to their name. For example, if I meet someone named Richard, I picture him holding a huge stack of cash.

Get it? RICHard. Okay, I’ll stop with the comedy already but I think you get the point.

2. Ask Interesting – and Interested – Questions

The root word in “personalize” is “personal”.

If you want to personalize the sales conversation, you have to get personal. That means taking a genuine interest in the person standing in front of you.

In order to do that, you need to take your focus off of selling and telling. Get interested in their life.

Who are they? Where are they from originally? Why are they out looking in the first place? How will this home truly change their life?

3. Create Anticipated Memories

Fairly often, when salespeople walk customers through model homes, they say things that are self-evident: “And here is the kitchen.” Uhhhh… really? Never would have guessed.

Instead of stating the obvious, get customers talking about what they imagine their life will look like in this new home.

Converse with them about their future life in the home, painting pictures of specific future moments and experiences.

Dr. Daniel Kahneman refers to these future moments as “anticipated memories.” For more insight on the psychology of Anticipated Memories, you can watch Dr. Kahneman’s amazing TED talk on “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory”.

4. Take Down the Velvet Ropes

In a typical home demonstration, sales counselors stop at the edge of a room as if there was a velvet rope keeping them out.

When was the last time you stood at the edge of your family room or kitchen? Probably never.

Take down the imaginary velvet ropes and put customers in the spaces you are showing them. Move and act as if the home was already their home.

Guide them to sit on the couch or at the dinner table.

Taking down the velvet ropes transforms a model home into their home.

Get personal, be interested, be real… change someone’s world!