Category — Selling High Value Products

Today’s post was inspired by a newsletter I received via email from a company which I am not only a client of, but a big fan of. Because I truly care about their product and believe it to hold great value to many people all over the world, I shot them off a quick email to alert them to this so they could do even better. And at Optum Consulting, that just might be what we do best - take companies and products that are already great and make them that much better.

In the bigger picture what we are talking about in today’s post is something we call AVOIDING LEAKAGE. Look for past and future posts regarding this concept specifically. But in short, for the purposes of this post, “Leakage” is a term we coined at Optum Consulting that refers to that moment when your customers or potential customers “see through” one of your sales techniques or methods and it gives them a negative feeling instead of a positive one.

Oftentimes the consumer is not even aware of it. It is something that takes place subconsciously in the consumer’s mind and they aren’t even sure what it was exactly but something just turned them off. So instead of a sale, you get a “no sale” or a “walk away” or a “hang up” or a “delete” or even worse an “unsubscribe.” Now sometimes the customer IS aware of it. They know exactly what it was that turned them off. They notice something that just seems a bit “off” and it turned them off – such as when a company makes the mistake of advertising “the lowest price ever” for a product in one piece of sales literature but that customer also happened to notice that they offered an even lower price a few months back, or in another piece of literature that was sent to a different database and they just happen to be signed up to both databases. That’s leakage in a nutshell and you want to avoid it at all costs.

There are hundreds of mistakes a company can make in their sales literature and sales methods that can cause “Leakage.” Again, look for a more detailed examination of it in past and future posts. But you get the idea.

Today we will be discussing just one of those. And it can easily be summed up by the following words: STOP SELLING if you really want to SELL MORE of your product. Selling has always been a turn off to consumers. It is one of the enigmas of being in business. How to sell your product without actually SELLING. Or at least without letting your customer feel as though they are being SOLD TO.

One of the ways companies used to “sell” was to “threaten” their customers with “Supplies limited!” or “Act Now! Product Going Fast!” We call this technique “stressing urgency.” It used to work. And in some cases it can still work. But not very often anymore. Only in the lowest-value-product markets. Late night TV infomercials are good examples of products that still use this method. But even they are smartening up to the ever-smarter consumer and the new methods that are necessary to sell to them.

[Read more →]