Removing Barriers

I learned a valuable lesson today on the art of selling.  As this came on a Sunday it’s not surprising that it didn’t come from my main job or from my side business, but rather from selling our house.  I won’t go into the details of how or why, but the underlying lesson is the key.

One of the big things that’s talked about in sales is Overcoming Objections.  That’s all well and good because objections are always going to come up in the sales process, and it’s just a matter of how many there are and how significant they are.  There are a lot of objections that are really just clarifications and some simple explanation on the front end will go a long way towards clearing things up.  Some are more major though and will need to be “overcome” in order to advance the sale.

The lesson I learned today with the house is a reinforcement of submitting an acceptable offer the first time.  We got an offer on the house that was on the lower end of our acceptable price range, but all of the other terms associated with it were rock solid.  Timing of close, down payment amount (which for me is an indicator of commitment), and most importantly lack of contingencies.  In real estate a lot of times people sell their house “contingent” on the sale of their existing house.  That’s all fine and good if you need to, but what these folks did was take all of my objections other than price away by submitting an offer that was absolutely stellar.  The certainty of their offer overcame my one slight objection to price (which was borderline anyhow), in turn making the overall offer very palatable.

This is an important thing to keep in mind for anyone who’s selling their products or services, whether in a consultancy, e-commerce, or product sales.  Price is always the one thing that people key in on as a major point of contention, but a lot of times price is secondary to other aspects of a sale.  So as a seller you can do a lot of things to add value to a proposal that will allow you to sell at a higher price than normal.  Or as a buyer you can remove all of the guessing from a sale by making yourself seem like a “sure thing” and often times you’ll end up purchasing at a discount because of it.

Don’t always focus on just the price of something, but consider the big picture and make sure everything you’re presenting removes as many barriers as possible.  Then in a lot of cases price is a non-issue.