Selling The Invisible: Four Keys To Selling Services

ladies and gentlemen please welcome the best-selling author award-winning international speaker industry leading salesperson and a remarkable survivor Kristine Clifford Beckwith I want you all to go back in time to the year 1971 and try to imagine the dwelling in which you were living at the time that had a television set a commercial came on the air this commercial the single most significant sales and marketing event of your lifetime because it is from this commercial that can teach you or remind you 3/4 of what you need to know to market and sell donor services I'm going to play the role of the narrator of this commercial and one of you is going to play the other role but don't worry when the time comes you'll know exactly what to say ladies and gentlemen tonight we are at the fabulous New York dining spot loot s where the diners have just finished their meal and they're now having a cup of coffee but what the diners don't realize is that the coffee they are drinking is Folgers crystals I see one of the diner's finishing their meal right now let me go over and ask him about his experience hi and your name is Julio Julio and Julio where are you from New Jersey Julio is from New Jersey and Julio welcome to Lata's thank you and and Julio I see that you have just finished your coffee yes and how was it Julio good oh we oh the answers fabulous Oh fabulous yes man fabulous now why would Julio from New Jersey believe that freeze-dried coffee tastes fabulous and by the way for those of you who don't know this already it doesn't but why would Julio from New Jersey believe that it does there are three reasons of enormous significance as to why people will choose your services so what is the reason let's imagine that tonight Julio and Steve and Chris Fisher and Dell and Jeffrey and I decide to go out after dinner to the most expensive restaurant in Minneapolis for coffee and dessert so tonight we go to LaBelle V and they bring the menus and we soon see that we can have either the coffee or the dessert but at these prices unless we take out a second mortgage we're going to have to choose so we choose the coffee and they bring it to us and it tastes fabulous well of course it tastes fabulous show of hands here have any of you ever experienced a bad 13 dollar cup of coffee your prices and fees are not just your prices and fees they are the communicators and conveyors as to the quality of your service and the higher the price the higher the perceived quality what is the second reason why Julio believes that freeze-dried coffee tastes fabulous even though it doesn't well I think you can get a clue just by looking at Julio he's a ball vivant a Gorn a lover of great things he subscribes to Gourmet magazine and bone Appetit and Town and Country and for years Julio has only read about brand name restaurants like glue tests and he has only dreamed about eating there one day and here he finds himself at loot s and he had read that the restaurant was fabulous and so they bring the coffee and it tastes fabulous even though it doesn't why because it's not the coffee that Julio is experiencing it's what the brand has convinced him he will experience brands change people's perceptions about you brands attract people but they do even more than that they change your experience and they allow people to become long-term customers and for the power of the story of brand we need to look no further than extra strength Rogaine my husband was in San Francisco it was reading the San Francisco Chronicle and he came across an ad that simply stated hair loss my husband has an ego just like most of us so he pushed the hair back off his forehead looked in the mirror and thought yeah I could use some so he wandered the down the street to the clinic it was just down the street from his hotel and he walked through the door and the woman behind the counter said are you here today responding to the ad in today's Chronicle yes I am Harry Beckwith he said well mr. Beckwith you're in luck we just happen to be one of the only clinics doing the market testing for a brand soon to be called extra strength Rogaine mr. Beckwith here's what we'd like you to do we'd like you to take this vial of liquid home with you rub it into your scalp every night 45 minutes before you go to bed do that for 21 days and then on the 21st day call us and tell us about your hair gain some my husband brought this stuff home and he rubbed it into his head and on the 21st day I will never get over the commotion coming out of our bathroom I've grown more hair honey this is amazing no what's amazing is what happens next my husband decides he's gonna call the clinic out in California and order more bottles of this stuff so he dials the number he gets on the phone he goes hi this is mr. Beckwith from Minneapolis and it's my 21st day and I've actually grown more hair this is fantastic and and what oh okay the woman on the other end of the phone asked him for his a case study number so he gets back on the phone he goes yeah my number five zero seven six five yeah and this is just so fun I can't wait I want to order some for all my friends it and the woman on the phone says mr. Beckwith yeah I've got some news for you yeah you're in the control group now I mentioned all of you that my husband is not a quick learner but he did take psychology in sociology in college so he knew what a control group was and I could tell that at that very moment in time he was in total denial and so my husband said okay so what exactly does that mean and the woman says well mr. Beckwith what that means is that the stuff that was in your vial is Puritan vegetable oil and water now I can tell that the woman on the other end of the phone is used to dealing with people like my husband so she says Mr Beckwith if it's any consolation to you don't worry 40% of the people who were in the control group reported hair gain we always get these numbers when we do these studies and so then my husband has to ask the question well then what percent of the people who use the real stuff grew hair 60% she says so at this point in my program I'm going to stop and offer you the only unsolicited non marketing and sales piece of advice that I will offer all day and that is women or men interested in growing hair just go buy some Puritan vegetable oil and water see all we really want to do is feel better about ourselves we want to change our experience and besides if it doesn't work then you've got extra ingredients left over for salad dressing you've kind of amortized your costs so let's go back to Julio one last time and ask what's the third reason that Julio believes that freeze-dried coffee tastes fabulous even if it doesn't well it's amazing you can go anywhere in the world and if you are served freeze-dried coffee in fine bone china over Irish linens while listening to Bocelli playing a $350,000 stereo system an amazing thing happens to your perception of the coffee it tastes fabulous even if it doesn't why because we think with our eyes and for the power of packaging which becomes the third reason we need to go back to the city of Garland Texas eight years ago this past April a woman brought her seal point Siamese cat into her veterinarian for what she thought were going to be routine inoculations or what she hoped would be routine inoculations upon examination her veterinarian noticed that something was slightly off about the cat its balance fearing that the cat might have a tumor and that it might be malignant and that's might might be what was causing the lack of balance the veterinarian ran his fingers of each of the cats legs and then up its back and spine and then up its neck to a tiny place but behind each of its ears where behind the right ear he found a tiny pebble no bigger than a grain of sand on the shores of Lake Minnetonka he asked and received the woman's permission to Lance and biopsy the lump and it was malignant he had saved the cat's life it was an extraordinary act of professional skill and competency the kind of skill and competency we all aspire to every day in our own lives so on that day is the woman exited vet smart we interviewed her as we had done 400,000 other people and we asked that woman on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest level a professional skill and competency how would you rate your veterinarian for his performance that day she gave him a seven why because we think with our eyes that day her veterinarian was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt a pair of Levi's Dockers nicely pressed a pair of Bass Weejuns loafers all shined and clean and our exit surveys have showed us that if a veterinarian wears a blue lab coat to work that day his average rating will be six point six two if he wears a white lab coat today to work that day seven point three five and if he wears a white lab coat and a stethoscope to work that day his average rating eight point eight to almost two full points higher because it's all in what we wear in fact many of you especially the women may know this to be true handsome veterinarians score even better in fact I was telling this story once in Atlanta Georgia and a woman was sitting right about where you are and your name again was Gina and I could see this woman turn the brightest shade of Georgia red that I had ever seen and I could see her thinking to herself why why mrs. Clifford Beckwith is right you know when dr. Hamilton takes my fluffy into his big hands and brings her up to my chest Wow well I think I got the vapors it's all in how we see things because we think with our eyes and so now we come to the fourth key it's the Trump key that can over Trump them all I was a senior in high school back in San Marino California in Southern California and the hit singer of my day was a woman named Laura Nero she had an album that came out that year called Eli in the 13th confession and some of the songs on that album were bill wedding bell blues stone soul picnic and then as you might imagine from the name of her album Eli's coming I heard that Laura Nero was coming to Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium to play a concert so on the day of the concert my friends and I loaded ourselves into my family station wagon and up the coast we drove and that night we rushed into Memorial Auditorium and we took our place in the fourth row and the curtain opened and Laura Nero was sitting there behind a Steinway grand piano and she waited for about seven minutes until the applause and screaming and yelling died down and then this is what she said I'm gonna play a song off my album and some of you may be familiar with it and I think George might help me write that bill I love you so I always will of course she sang it better than that but she finished the song and then when she was finished that's a song off my album and as I said I I think George helped me write that song well this concert went on like this for about 90 minutes it was a concert that we realized had been conducted entirely through the miracle of peripheral vision she never once looked us in the eye she never once made us feel grateful that we had come Laura Nero failed to recognize the difference between a product and a service we could buy her products we knew her albums were great but you feel about a service the way you feel about the person providing the service eyeball to eyeball heart to heart face to face you feel about a service the way you feel about the relationship and because Laura Nero failed to establish a relationship with us we didn't like the concert and we didn't like her music you can master all of this but there's one last thing that you need to do in order to be successful and I've learned this thing through very painful yet ultimately very powerful experience I learned it from being a metastatic breast cancer patient and living what will be 12 years next month to tell my story I have learned this from leaving a secure job with a salary benefits Commission's bonuses to no real job at all only a dream I had that I wanted to help cancer patients and their families I look at these and other critical moments in my life and I realize that I have come to a place where I feel totally fulfilled a place we all aspire to in our lives and for those of our children but I've learned that the path to pleasure has been through pain and that it's ultimately all in the risks that we have taken because it's not the ones that you have asked to dance that you will regret it's the ones that you haven't dr. Gail Shea he writes about this phenomenon in her book pathfinders when she described 13 people who she came across who have this quality about them that she coined a sense of high well-being dr. Shea he found these 13 people when she was doing the research for her award-winning groundbreaking book passages and you can only wonder as dr. Shea he might have what do these 13 people have in common at first dr. Shea thought that the only thing that they had in common was that they had nothing in common some were very well-educated with advanced degrees some had no education at all some were quite wealthy and others quite poor some were handsomer beautiful and others quite plain and some had no religious affiliation whatsoever which might surprise some of you but then a pattern started to emerge and it was there in the fourth and the fifth and then the sixth and the seventh and as an author I can only imagine dr. Shea's anxiety when she took all of the notes of a 13th person Gordon Mortensen and she said Buster's suffer an entire evening and she sat down and she was asking herself will it be there will it be here and it wasn't and it wasn't and it wasn't until she got to within three pages of the end of her notes and there it was Gordon Mortensen had told the interviewer tell dr. Shahi that when I was 23 years old I took an enormous risk in my life the risk was so personal dr. Shea he never revealed it and it's because of this risk that I took that I have come to this place where I feel totally fulfilled this place that dr. Shea he calls a sense of high well-being you play this game with courage dr. David Landis also addressed this question in his national award-winning book the wealth and poverty of Nations when he asked the question why do some nations thrive when others fail and dr. Landis did exhaustive research going back to every single culture back to ancient Mesopotamia to the current cultures of today and in his massive book you get very few hints as to the differences and you really wonder if he's going to answer the question and there on the last page of his book he does it's not Guns Germs or steel as one author has suggested that makes the difference between the rich and the poor it's not Natural Resources access to power sources education any of the things that you might have read about or believed to be true the difference in this world is in belief in this world the optimist have it in optimism is everything revival transformation art to renewal the optimist take the risks that others fail to see and then he goes on to add the pessimists only have the lone consolation of knowing that they were failed and that they could say they were right all along you play this game with courage so the next time you come to two paths in a road don't take the path of least resistance paths without obstacles rarely go anywhere instead take the road along the cliff the one without the guardrails because I can promise you this that the sheer exhilaration of the ride and the pride that you feel when you finish will fill you with even more pride and give you even more confidence to take even more risks and that one day will bring you more money but every day we'll leave you utterly more fulfilled thank you very much you

Channel: Christine Clifford

Views: 1,116,791

Rating: 4.8424006 out of 5

Keywords: Services, Selling

Id: 4HdA924aqbM

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2012