Find The Pain. Sell The Vision.
February 11, 2009 by admin
Filed under Basic Sales Strategy, Bill Caskey, Current Affairs
This whole bail out plan amuses me. The market tumbles today (Tuesday) because MSNBC says, “There weren’t enough details in the plan sold so investors unloaded stocks.”
Which reminds me of “how to sell a concept.”
When you a sell an idea or a concept (bail out package), you actually don’t need a lot of details. What you need are two things: PAIN and VISION.
Pain is easy in this case. Everyone’s feeling it. Vision is something else.
How to Sell The Vision
First, don’t confuse this with the network marketer’s mantra, “Sell the dream.” The vision is the picture of how things will work once the work has been done.
Most people are NOT visionary, so you have to spell it out (or draw it) for them.
In the government’s case, much work should be spent on “envisioning” what life will look like after the bailout program works (if it does work). But in fact, very little time is spent on communicating that vision.
So what you have is unrest, disbelief that it will work, and dashed hopes for certainty. What Obama (and Treasure Secy, Tim Geithner) should have said when talking to Wall Street is this:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve created this plan and I have a vision for it. (Sometimes you just have to tell people you have a vision.) I see a day in the not too distant future when credit markets will be freed up. Credit will be eased. People will be able to invest again. Small businesses will be able to expand. And the economy will be humming along like it was 10 years ago. This will take a lot of work on all of our parts. But we WILL make it happen. That’s what I see.”
But No, we didn’t get any of that. We always get from our bureaucrats the same old bureaucratese we’ve always gotten.
So this should be a lesson to sales people far and wide. Find the pain. And sell the vision. It makes life so much easier.
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