Guided Discovery Selling©
Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Selling Machine, says “You will attract more buyers if you are offering to teach them something of value to them than you will ever attract by simply trying to sell them your product or service.”
Put simply, selling is teaching.
Every profession masters certain techniques or best-practices proven to improve the end results for that profession.
Radio sellers can benefit from the inductive learning or ‘guided discovery’ teaching model developed by cognitive psychologist Jerome S. Bruner
His discovery teaching method is a proven effective technique that encourages students to take a more active role in their learning process by answering a series of questions or solving problems designed to help them uncover the answers for themselves.
In sales, mastering the technique of helping customers discover for themselves that your products or services are the solutions to their problems can be magic.
When you tell prospects about your benefits, they tend to be skeptical, or in a best case scenario, they will ‘give your solutions a try’.
When you guide prospects to discover your benefits for themselves they will take ownership of your solutions and become committed to making them work.
Here are just a few of the discovery teaching tools that sellers can adopt to guide prospects to buy their solutions.
1.) Tell Stories – Customize stories to fit your prospect’s situation and help them discover how your solutions make sense for them.
2) Engage them – Employ powerful graphics, let them hear and make changes to your spec spots, and ask meaningful thought-provoking questions. “What’s your budget?” or “Who’s your target demographic” are NOT thought-provoking questions!
3.) Get them Involved – Invite your prospects input to develop things like customer or staff focus groups that you can facilitate to help them discover answers to their marketing problems.
4.) Use Maps and Models – Use case studies, maps pinpointing all of their competitors, or models like Roy William’s Relational/Transactional Customers model to teach them how to use your stations more effectively.
5.) Questioning – Don’t ask all of the questions. Invite your prospects to ask you questions about their concerns or their ROI in advertising.
6.) Facilitate Marketing Seminars – Seminars can be one of the most effective ways to prove you care about your customers and for them to discover where your stations should fit in their marketing plans.
Click here to read my article in Radio Ink on ‘Selling by Seminar’.
© Guided Discovery Selling is the exclusive sales training system developed by ENS Media Inc.