Selling Skills Training | How to Position Your Message Persuasively?
Positioning, one of the six critical skills, allows you to relate your capabilities to your customers’ needs. The way to position is to tell your story—but it must be more than a product story. It is the opposite of a generic product pitch.
Product knowledge is just the foundation here. Having a strong message and knowing how to customize it to incorporate your customer’s needs is critical in winning business.
The first level of positioning is developing a core message that is clear, customer-focused, and graphic. You must know what you want to communicate and use words and images that the customer can understand and relate to.
The second level of positioning is to integrate customer needs into a message tailored for a specific customer. You use your critical and creative skills to understand the customer’s needs, language, and perspective and to create the link to your offerings.
To position your message:
Integrate and begin with a concise recap of the needs (“We’ve discussed your objective to ...”)
Concisely and graphically position the tailored features and benefits of your recommendation (“Based on our discussion to ... we can ... so you can ...”)
Finally, ask a checking question to get feedback (“How does that sound?”)
There is a third level to positioning. As you learn more during the sales process, incorporate into your message what you’ve learned and what is happening as you move through the sales cycle. For example, if you present a proposal to key influencers, you should then incorporate what you learn there and reposition your message when you present to the expanded group of influencers and decision makers.
You can use positioning throughout the dialogue, whenever you want to be persuasive. Here are a couple of examples:
When asking a question to gain access—“You’ve been very helpful in our understanding .... When I was speaking with our specialist...... We’d like to meet with the head of IT and you so we can build your strategy into our presentation” (vs. “We’d like to meet with your head of IT”)
When discussing your capabilities—“Our ... will enable you to get your data to your 30 division heads globally before the ... so you can ...” (vs. “Our.....let us deliver ... by ...”).
The value of positioning is that it shows customer focus and customer knowledge.
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