As I pointed out in the post “10 Things Every Customer Wants,” customers can be incredibly demanding. However, there is one thing that customers definitely don’t want: more information.
For the past 40 years, every sales trainer and guru in the world has been teaching some variation on “solution selling.”
As you’re probably already aware, solution selling consists of solving a customer’s problem rather than selling the customer a product. You ask questions to find out what’s really needed and then propose a solution to satisfy those needs.
The opposite of solution selling is “spray-and-pray” selling, which consists of dumping information on the customer and expecting the customer to figure out what’s useful or important.
Given that solution selling has been around so long, you’d think that spray-and-pray selling would be a thing of the past. You’d think wrong, though. Spray-and-pray is alive and well inside many companies.
For example, I recently called an online conferencing vendor and asked a simple question: “How can I give a webinar where attendees pay to attend?”
What I wanted to hear was: “Here’s how simple it is (demo), and here’s how much it costs (price quote).” Instead, I was asked to provide my phone number so a salesperson could call me back. Then, when he did call me later that day, he:
Read more at INC.
