What NOT to Do When Selling

I was on a conference call the other day for what you might call a hot new niche in selling.

And frankly, I was pretty excited. True, the person doing the call was having a bit of trouble getting to the offer. And when he finally got to the proposal, he spent an awful lot of time telling the listeners how great it was.

Maybe TOO much time.

Have you ever been “over-sold?” It’s when the person doing the selling winds up selling too much, and you decide not to buy a product you had fully intended to buy.

Like maybe you want to buy a car. You’re ready to buy. You’ve given the salesperson all the buy signals you can provide. But they keep going on and on and on and on about how freakin’ gosh darn amazingly GREAT the car is, and finally you give up and walk away instead of buying.

This is what happened to me. I liked the information on the call. I wanted to buy the offer, whatever it was. Just tell me what it is and give me the order page.

But the seller kept exciting it up and hyping it up, and by the time he finally got to the part where he said what it cost and where the sales page was, I had changed my mind.

I figured if he thought he needed THAT MUCH HYPE to sell it, then it couldn’t be very good.

Two weeks prior, something similar happened. The guy on the call must have said 20 times, “It’s as easy as taking candy from a baby.”

Well, if it’s so gosh darn easy, why isn’t everyone doing it? There was a bit of reality on the call when he briefly let one of his assistants talk for a bit, saying how excited she got when someone was struggling with this business but then started making sales.

Ah-hah! Finally, a bit of truth. I wanted to hear more from her. I wanted to BUY from her because I knew that she was being honest and would tell it like it is. But he immediately took her off the call and went back to his “candy from a baby” nonsense.

I didn’t buy that product, either.

So here are my take-aways from these two calls:

First, don’t oversell and don’t over hype. People hate that. And you will lose sales.

Second, be honest. Tell me it’s going to take some work. Tell me there’s a learning curve. Tell me that you’ll be there to answer my questions when I get stumped because I will get stumped.

It’s great to get excited and be enthusiastic. But give your listeners some credit for intelligence, and they’ll be much more likely to believe you and buy from you.