In an earlier edition of Ray’s Rules, I discussed Move Toward/Move Away as it relates to human behavior. I said that everyone is motivated by desire for pleasure or avoidance of pain. I also said that pain avoidance was a stronger motivator. That is why I use deficit questions to uncover latent pain because the greater the headache, the more someone will pay for the aspirin.
We are seeing this theory being utilized by our President. He keeps telling us we are in a crisis and that if we don’t allow him to raise taxes, socialize many of our institutions, etc. that we will be in line at the soup kitchen. As I was listening to the radio today I heard him say that someone goes bankrupt every 30 seconds due to medical bills. Regardless of your political affiliation you have to admire his sales skills.
We now have a splitting headache and here comes the aspirin, the stimulas plan. It is working for him and it can work for you. Most of your prospects are afraid to make a decision to invest in their business, for fear of the unknown. You must make them more
fearful of NOT doing something, if you want to make sales in this economy. Custer did not win the battle by circling the wagons and neither will companies that go into survival mode instead of growth mode.
The measure of success today is not gross dollars, it is market share. If you are increasing market share but losing gross dollars you are on the right track. One of the problems in the past that is coming back to haunt businesses today is that their gross dollars wereincreasing due to increased demand, while their market share was decreasing.They became overconfident thinking that they were doing a great job and had great sales skills. When the market shrank, they found themselves woefully unprepared to compete in the new super competitive environment. To increase market share you must be better than you were last year. This is a great time to dramatically increase market share.