How Your Small Business Can Benefit From 'Keep it Simple' Selling

Albert Einstein once said, “Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I agree. These words certainly apply to selling. Here’s how to keep it simple.

Simplify your number of offerings

Some salespeople have to write proposals to make their sales, and others don’t ever write proposals. Whether you write proposals or not, you need to decide how many choices to present to your customers. Some salespeople think that offering a lot of choices is better to make more sales. They’re wrong. Salespeople should offer fewer choices to simplify their selling.

Here’s why. If you offer too many choices, you overload your customers--it makes it harder for them to make buying decisions. This may have happened to you when you were trying to make a purchase. It recently happened to me.

I was shopping online. I was looking at cameras. I started out by learning about the products. I learned about the different features and benefits that impact performance. But there were so many choices, it made it difficult for me to decide. Even limiting it to a price point had too many options. What did I do? I simply shut down. I didn’t buy.

Here’s what a study found out about offering too many choices. Researchers set up two displays of exotic jams in an upscale grocery store in California. On one table, passersby could view a table with 30 varieties of jams and jellies; on another table, only six jars were displayed. The researchers then watched the shoppers. They found that nearly 60 percent of the shoppers congregated around the table with the 30 varieties and only 40 percent went to the table with six. You therefore might expect more sales from the 30-variety table.

Wrong.

When the time came to make an actual buying decision, only 3 percent of the people who went to the table with the 30 choices made a purchase, while 30 percent of those who viewed the more limited six choices bought the product. Fewer choices produced a 10-fold increase in purchasing. The customers avoided choice overload when they were given fewer offerings.

How many choices do you put in your proposals? More than three? That’s a bad idea. How many choices do you offer your customers when you sell? If you’re trying to present 10 products, you should simplify the number of choices so you can sell more.

Simplify why they should buy

There are some salespeople who come to a sales presentation with a laundry list of selling strategies. They have many ideas in their mind of the reasons why a customer should buy. So what is their sales strategy?

They’re going to start with the first reason to buy and end with the last. The only problem with that strategy is that there are too many ideas in between. This confuses customers.

Dr. Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist who wrote the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics. He cites research that shows when you present too many facts, figures, features, and benefits it impedes the sale, not fosters it.

People were asked for reasons to buy a BMW. Those who were asked to generate fewer reasons were more persuaded to buy than those who had to come up with many more reasons. Why do you think this happened? The theory is if you can easily come up with three reasons, you are probably pretty confident a BMW is an excellent car. However, you might find it difficult to generate 12 ideas--that's when doubt creeps in. More thinking causes more doubts, and that results in fewer sales.

I knew a salesman who was wonderful in his ability to deliver a concise sales presentation. His work consistently made customers want to buy. What he did wrong, though, was he continued to sell. He presented too much and made the sale too complicated for his customers to buy.

Think like Einstein when you are selling. His theories work in physics and they certainly work for sales.