9: Utilize Email & Text
1. Know Your Products
Regardless of what you sell, you should be an expert on what you’re offering. If you sell used cars you should know every feature of the vehicles on your lot. It’s not enough to know what products you have — you need to know the subtle differences between them.
Being an expert on the products you sell will lessen the mental strain of working with your customer. Introverts may not thrive in a social situation like face-to-face sales. If you lack the knowledge and keep needing to refer to paperwork for things like price and options, the conversation will struggle. There’s nothing worse for an introvert than lacking conversation topics.
2. Practice Potential Questions
The more time you spend in a sales position the FAQ’s list will grow. It’s important to keep track of the questions that come up frequently. This might involve “sell sheets,” paperwork given by a manufacturer to help boost attractiveness by highlighting key product features. Write down as many questions as you can think of and practice answering them using what you know.
An introvert might struggle in conversation with customers. Lacking the ability to answer questions about a product will lead to struggling conversation. You want to be able to handle a sale by yourself — asking for help from a manager can be useful at times, but customers take notice that you might not be very knowledgeable and the sale may suffer. Practicing conversations will lead to easier sales experiences.
3. Be Personable
This comes easy to extroverts in sales positions. Especially if the product is a major purchase for a customer, being personable helps to make the customer feel comfortable not only with what they’re buying but also who they are buying from. Getting to know a customer may feel like a huge undertaking, but building a relationship with a customer can help them feel like they are buying from the right person.
Introverts can have trouble opening up to new people at first. Unfortunately, you don’t always get a long time to work through that. Asking a few questions unrelated to a sale will help make the conversation feel less robotic. Let the customer feel like your on their side and not trying to make a few bucks. Let them into who you are.
4. Sell the Need, Not the Product
This applies to a salesman who sells things that have become a need for customers. There’s a reason grocery stores don’t have salesmen — you walk into a store looking for bread and milk, you leave with bread and milk. Things ramp up when you walk into a car dealership looking for a new ride. If you’re an expert on your products, and can answer nearly every question, then find out their needs early. Ask questions early, and sell the product after. A mom of 5 might be a tough sell on a sports car, but if you learned about her needs early, you can spend more time looking into SUV’s and vehicles with plenty of seats and space.
Introverts may focus on selling a product more than selling the need because they have trouble asking questions. It’s less likely for an introvert to try to dig into someone’s life trying to find a need. Things become easier and less stressful when you can offer a product that meets all of the customer’s needs rather than trying to force a product that doesn’t offer any utility. Finding a need will save you time rather than explaining a product that doesn’t work.
5. Get Customers in Person
The new age has us selling more online than we did 20 years ago. Still, most people buy their larger purchases at a physical location. I work at a car dealership specializing in handicapped vehicles. These vans have a conversion that cost upwards of $30,000. Add that to the vehicle cost and you have a $65,000 purchase on your hands. We get many inquiries online about very expensive vehicles. People ask tons of questions about financing and how the product will fit their needs in their budget. Since vehicles can be very expensive many people are hesitant to buy them quickly. They know they need the vehicle but struggle to pull the trigger.
One thing I have learned is that the quicker I can get someone to the dealership, and in a vehicle, the easier the sale becomes. People see the vehicle and understand its utility for them and things start to shape up. They develop an attachment to the vehicle and it gets the wheels turning on making a decision.
Introverts may have a tough time calling a potential customer even if the customer reached out first. It may be a daunting task to come up with selling points over the phone. Get the customer to get the product in their hands and let them sell the product to themselves.
6. Write Down What Works
It can be difficult to remember every little thing about what helped you sell a product. A good strategy to use is keeping a journal of the product you sold, the type of person you sold it to, and key points that led you to complete the sale. Let’s take car sales again: if you’re selling a vehicle to a college student, and you’ve had success offering longer terms on financing to young buyers, then write that down and use it with new college-aged customers. Eventually, you will be able to come up with them on the fly, but writing down questions to ask can also be useful.
Introverts need key points to help them keep the conversation going. It can be more difficult to improvise. Extroverts find this much easier because they don’t mind throwing things out to see what sticks. Introverts are much more calculated and it will help to have a reference point rather than being creative.
7. Pre-screen Customers
This can be difficult for walk-in customers, but many times businesses receive inquiries online first. Many businesses gather information before reaching out to the customer. Having the customer’s name, address, and the product they have an interest in is more useful than you might imagine. If they’ve inquired about a product, and they live in a city, it may help to learn how that product is used by others in the city. If you’re selling to someone that lives in northern Maine, the sales points will differ from somebody in Florida.
Introverts might have difficulty trying to learn about people quickly or having to ask personal questions. Having information on hand will help streamline the process of learning about the potential customer. You won’t have to ask a lot of questions, and you can run through some hypothetical situations before you even pick up the phone and call for the first time.
8. Script Out Calls
The worst two words an introvert can hear: cold call. Whether you’re making a cold call or responding to an online inquiry, it can be very useful to script out what you want to say. Write down what you plan to open the conversation with and put some bullet points down on paper. If you received an online inquiry for a pair of skis on your website, write down some important features and have the listing up on your computer. It will also be useful to keep their information on hand. If you’re cold calling, I would strongly suggest learning more about the person that you’re calling. Understand who it is, what you’re trying to offer them, and what they currently use, if anything. Put some things down on paper that you should be talking about. Having these ready will help organize your thoughts and prevent yourself from having to improvise.
9. Utilize Email & Text
People think you need to pick up the phone and dial a new customer. That can be useful, but nowadays it’s hard to find someone without an active email address or who doesn’t text. This can be a good idea for introverts and extroverts. Customers don’t always feel like picking up the phone from a random number and having a conversation on the spot. Customers like to answer on their own time and do the research beforehand. If you send someone a text or email, it gives them time to check out your company or Google the product you’re selling.
Introverts tend to prefer non-face-to-face sales. Having an extensive conversation through text can be a great solution if you have trouble expressing your expertise. Text and email will also help you prepare for a response rather than having to come up with something on the spot. You can be much more calculated.
10. Get Your Customers Talking
The hardest thing about selling most products is trying to sell when you know nothing about the customer or what they’re looking for. If they send you an inquiry online about a particular product things can be easier, but if they don’t it’s important to prompt the customer to find out what they need or are looking for. Asking questions is your biggest tool when beginning the process of a sale. There are reasons why a therapist would ask you questions about how you feel. They want to get you talking so that they can help you find a solution. More importantly, they want to get you talking so that you can come up with a solution on your own. If you ask them several questions about what they’re trying to get out of a new computer, it will be easier to offer them specific products when you know how much use or power they are looking for. Better yet, you’ll be listening more than talking.
The stereotypical introvert finds new conversion difficult. They like to be in familiar territory with people they know and trust. Asking a handful of questions can help you get to know someone much quicker than if you try to force a product on them. Have a few preloaded questions ready to go for new situations. It might only take a few questions for them to tell you exactly what they’re looking for. This will make the sale easier and you won’t need to spend as much time talking yourself.
