Yesterday in class we talked about how as a salesman you want to avoid adding seagulls to the customer’s picture. In other words, you want to avoid adding features to the sale that the customer neither wants nor intends to purchase. It is fairly easy to see how trying to force something on the customer that they don’t want could potentially harm your sale, but my question is- does it work the other way to? If their is a feature that the customer thinks he absolutely NEEDS to have, is it alright to down sell him and try to talk him out of that feature?
I encountered a situation this summer where taking away features from the customer actually helped me make the sale, and I was curious if this was just a lucky break, or if this was actually a recognized sales practice.
This customer drove to our lot one day and asked to look at a Traverse, one of our third row SUV models. I asked him a series of questions and managed to find a vehicle which he liked a lot. There was one problem though, during our test drive he explained to me that he really wanted to have All Wheel Drive on his next car, a
feature that this particular vehicle was not equipped with. He explained that all the other salesmen he had talked to had told him that he needed to get this feature on his car for inclement weather, but when I asked him what kind of inclement weather he drove in, he explained that he did most of his driving in Florida and Georgia. In this case, I was actually able to make the sale be convincing him that he didn’t need that feature on his car and that buying a vehicle equipped with it would simply end up costing him more money. He bought the two wheel drive model, and three weeks later called be back up to thank me for talking him out of it.
Like I said before, I’m not sure if this was simply a lucky break or if I unwittingly did something right, but in this instance at least, taking away the seagulls helped to make the sale. What do you guys think?
BoweryJE22