LOUIS NICHOLE MUSIC

You keep that control in a very simple way: by alternating selling statements and questions with involvement demonstration so that your prospect is almost continuously busy with your machine and with becoming its owner.
Of course, you watch very closely for signs of boredom if the tasks done on your machine are repetitious and the person making the purchase decision is a few rungs above those who’ll operate it. Be on the alert for ways to keep your customers thinking and mentally active during your demonstration as well as physically involved. Use your ingenuity to devise involvement strategies to suit the varied personalities and positions of your clients. For example: you’re demonstrating a revolutionary new sandblasting system to the owner-operator of a small rust-removing shop. Your involvement technique has him using the equipment himself on some of the jobs that are in his shop to be processed. But if you’re demonstrating that same sandblasting system to an executive with a larger firm, your plan takes the difference into account. Hand the executive a stopwatch. Have him time his plant’s regular sandblasting workers, and let him measure for himself how much faster your system is than his present method. This example is an extreme one. With your product, the graduations are probably more subtle—but they’re still vital. The best involvement strategem in any given situation harmonizes the buyer’s attitude and circumstancewith the product’s qualities.
The first step in preparing the organized involvement interview is to go over your present demonstration sequence and list everything that you can reasonably have the client do while it’s going on. Remember that the more your prospective owner handles your product and the more things he does with it—that is, the more impact it has on his present consciousness—the more likely it is that your product will become part of his immediate future.
Next, list the questions you’re usually asked in a sales interview.
Third, list all of your product’s strong sales features.
Fourth, sit down with these three lists and outline a demonstration sequence that will cover all these points in a smooth flow from start to finish.
Fifth, go through that outline with this book in hand, and work in as many of the selling techniques given on these pages as possible. As you do this, always keep in mind that your attitude must always be courteously flexible when you demonstrate. Prepare yourself to speed up for the impatient, to slow down for the detail-minded—and to cope with the flitter- brained—without losing control of your selling sequence.
Sixth, practice your new selling sequence until you have a mental lock on it that can’t be broken.
Seventh, go out and make a lot of money with it.

Begin with a brief statement along these lines:
“To get the most out of the time you can give me this morning, I’ve planned my demonstration to answer the questions I’m most often asked about this machine in a natural sequence. If I don’t cover something that interests you, the chances are I’ll get to it in a moment.
“I’ve found that if I give a quick overview of the complete process first, and then come back to the detailed questions later, a lot of my customer’s valuable time is saved. Okay? — now, Mr. Marzano, if you’ll be good enough to feed another blank in here like I’m doing —“
Involve them all the way. Show them how it’s done, then have them do it. Do it with great tact and courtesy because they aren’t familiar with your machine, so they may be a little awkward and unsure of themselves. Ever notice how you have to concentrate when you first get in to drive a make of automobile that’s new to you? All the little things you do automatically in your own car take thought, and maybe you don’t do them smoothly at first. But if you’re a passenger in that same strange car, you just flop into the seat and think about something else while the driver is doing what has to be done to get moving. Let your prospects drive instead of making them be just passengers during your demonstration.

While your prospect is working his way through this benefit calculation folder of yours, have another copy in front of you so that you can guide him every inch of the way. Where do you wind up at? The close. And your prospect is ready to make a favorable decision because he understands what he’ll be getting for his money, and he’s grateful to you for making him feel smart and Keogh seem simple.
Earlier in this chapter we talked about salespeople who try to overwhelm their prospects with amazing demonstrations—and succeed only in boring them. You may not worry about that because you’re troubled by the opposite problem: the prospects you demonstrate to aren’t amazed at the show you put on, and they’re too active, not too passive. They elbow you aside to get at the machine, pester you with questions, and demand instant answers. Your demonstrations remind you of a flock of seagulls scrapping over one fish. If you can hold your temper, you can make enough sales to keep going.
If that’s a rough description of your usual demonstration, rejoice:
you’re only a few easy jumps from perfecting a very successful mode of demonstrating. All you need do is organize the steps so that you keep control and they keep the machine you’re selling. In the next section I’ll tell you how to do that.

It poses a worthy challenge to your determination and willingness to grow. Overcome that challenge and you’ll reap the rewards that go only to those who rise above the competition.
Of course, I can’t tell you exactly how to do this with your offering because I don’t have your expert knowledge of it. But the principle is simple and can readily be adapted to selling anything—services or products. One example will indicate the direction you should take.
Let’s suppose that you sell life insurance and annuities to self- employed people by helping them set up Keogh retirement plans to fund the insurance and other investments. When you call on a prospect, you could sit there and blow tax and insurance technicalities at him until his eyes glaze over and he’s desperate to be rid of you. You could load his desk down with charts and visual selling aids that you flip, point at, and are generally active with while he sits there watching. (As long as this approach isn’t your main thrust, it’s effective. I urge you to incorporate all the visual aids you can to support, but not make, your main arguments). You could do either of those two things, or you could show him how to calculate the advantages that you’re offering. When he does that, he’s actively learning why he should invest in your plan and your insurance. You’ll lose control if you try to do this by talking while he’s supposed to work it all out on a blank pad of paper. (If you’re working on large transactions, prepare a prospectus for each client that clarifies all the formulas and simplifies all questions.) In the repetitive sales situations that most of us work with, have a packet of forms typed and run off on a copying machine. Keep them simple. Triple-spaced. Wide margins all around. Limit yourself to ten lines of information on each page, with no more than three blank spaces for the prospect to fill in.
Don’t slow the process down with details. You can get things like social security numbers during the close or after the sale is made. For now, stick to the bare essentials, and urge the prospect to use the estimates and round numbers.

(1) List all the steps the uninitiated must go through to understand how badly they need your device’s capabilities. Then figure out as simple an exercise as you can to demonstrate each capability. Make each exercise distinctive, and give it a name that’s easy to remember. Use as much color as possible.
(2) List every question and objection that you’re likely to encounter during a demonstration.
(3) Arrange the capability demonstration and the question/objection answering into a smooth-flowing sequence.
(4) Practice your new technique on anyone you can pull off the street. Check and re-check your lines: discard those that don’t work well, and add new ones that do. The successful client-participation demonstration is organized so that each step is simple and leads smoothly to the next, yet the prospect feels a constant challenge and a growing sense of excitement. Keep the pace fast. Brush over minor details. And encourage, encourage, encourage:
“Terrific. You’re catching on unusually fast.”“She’s a whiz on this machine, Mrs. Lopez.”
“You’re learning the keyboard in about half the time it took me, Mr. Leach.”
“It only seems tough because it’s new, but you’ll be delighted at how easy this machine is to operate when you know it.”
“You’re a quick learner, Miss Ellison—it must have taken me nine tries before I got that move down as well as you already have it.”
“No—reaHy-—-you’re doing great. Everybody has a bit of a problem here at first.”
“That’s right—keep moving. We’re just taking a fast overview now. Later we’ll smooth out every detail.”
“Everybody does that at first. Don’t worry about it. This is a rugged little machine we’ve got here.”
“Okay now—before you switch it on—I want you to promise to make lots of mistakes. If you don’t, I’m going to feel very dumb because I sure goofed up a lot the first time I sat down with this machine.”
Take the frustration and pressure out, put the fun and relaxation in, and you’ll be successful with client-participation demonstration. When you’re confident of your new technique, go out and happily involve two, three, or four times as many people in owning your product as you ever did before. Do that and two more benefits will automatically come your way:
(1) you’ll spend less time making each sale because you will have solved the problem of involving people in your offering,
(2) you’ll get more referrals because you will be developing greater rapport with your clients.
But what if you don’t have a product to demonstrate? Perhaps you sell
something that’s built to order, or a service. Can you still use this advanced
demonstration technique? And will it increase your sales?
You can, and it will. In fact, the more intangible your offering is, the more you need your clients actively participating in learning how it will benefit them—and the more you need your imagination working to make that happen.

Operating their mouths at high speed, some salespeople put on amazing demonstrations. They flip levers, punch buttons, zip stuff around. And out of the machines they’re demonstrating come a flood of perfect parts, data, copies, or whatever. But they don’t sell much with these superb performances.
Why not?
Because apathy rushes in where involvement fails to tread. Buying is action. It can’t take place unless there are decisions, and decisions require a switched-on mind. Watching instead of doing is a switch-off. The longer your prospects are switched off, the harder it’ll be to switch them back on again when you want the paperwork approved at the end of your demonstration.
The Champion avoids the long switch-off’s low sales, and demonstrates by encouraging the client to enter the data, thread the needle, or feed the parts. Of course, the client won’t do these things as well or as fast as a practiced salesperson can, but if he’s doing them instead of watching, he’s thinking about your product instead of wondering why his gums hurt and his horse ran last. In fact, he’s doing more than merely thinking about your product—he’s experiencing it. That means he’s emotionally involved with what you’re selling.
However great or small this emotional involvement may be, it’s certainly going to be far greater than if your prospect just sits there while you sing your number. Owning is a very intimate form of involvement, don’t you agree? Then doesn’t it follow that the buying necessary for owning won’t take place unless there’s prior involvement?
If you accept that, you’ll want to find as many reasonable and positive ways as you can to involve your prospects in your product. One of the best methods I know of is the client-participation technique that we’ve been discussing. If you’ve been switching your prospects off with I’m-the-star performances, you’ll need to completely overhaul your demonstration to successfully convert it—and yourself—to the client-participation method. And you’ll find that giving up I’m-the-star technique is like giving up smoking: you can’t do it unless you really want to. Understand yourself here. Many of us—and I’m in this group—place a high value on applause, on appreciation, on being in the limelight. That’s good—unless it leads you into making bad business decisions like sticking with I’m-the-star demonstrations when you’re not selling.
But the truth is that you’re the star twice when you master the client participation demonstration: first when you have your prospects happily Z’IIIflg
involved in your demonstration and product, second when you walk out with the endorsed file copies of an order.
The difference is small but vital. You win your oh’s and ah’s by showing your prospects how to do amazing things on your demonstrator not by doing amazing things on it yourself. To fan their interest into a fire hot enough to melt their built-in sales resistance, you get them to chip rust, solve problems, or boil water with your device. That’s always more fun than watching you run the game. With good products, familiarity breeds confidence and scatters fear.
And fun sells better than frustration. Remember that your prospects aren’t used to your machine’s peculiarities; keep your steps simple and your attitude encouraging.