Think about how you interact with your prospects. Are you going from the outside in, or are you going from the inside out? In my experience, most people go from the outside in. They just bombard people with information – technical cut sheets, charts and statistics, and so forth. “Here are all the data. What do you think?” And of course, people are going to say (most often to themselves), “Good grief! I don’t even know what to do with all of this information.”
In most cases, purchasing decisions are emotionally driven. People are not always convinced by the facts and figures. Think about what happens when you buy a car. Do they give you the manual and say, “Here, if you like the specs on this car, come in and see it”? When you buy a house, do they give you the technical specifications of the house – the construction drawings and the appliance specifications? Or do they work with you to help you build a connection with the house? Think about it. When a real estate broker takes you around and shows you the houses they think you’ll like, do they show you the blueprints and appliance specs? Or do they show you the nicely manicured lawn and the beautiful interior and crow about how wonderful the schools are in the neighborhood?
I read a story about a particularly successful new home developer who had a unique approach to getting his prospects to fall in love with his houses – before they were even fully built! He would literally take his prospects out to the site, where the “model home” was nothing more than a dirt lot. He would then put a few chairs in the direction of the best view from that lot. He would invite the prospect(s) to sit down and imagine how good it would feel to be sitting in the living room and enjoying that view every night after a hard day at the office. How many prospects signed on the dotted line after that exercise in visualization? Let me put it this way… There’s a reason he was written up as being a particularly successful new home developer!
The same principal applies when selling energy, which for most folks is a wild and wooly intangible anyway. Your product or service needs to have an emotional appeal before you bring any technical discussion to the table. Focus on the “why” before you focus on the “what.”
