Why She Buys (30 page)

Allow customers to recontact a specific representative, so they don’t have to start over every time they contact your company about an unresolved issue.

Allow outbound calling from the call center, so that representatives can call back customers with answers to their questions.

Consider welcoming customers with a greeting from your CEO, thanking people for their business.

Identify your best customers and create a customer-care service line and program especially for them.

Make call center training and scripting more flexible, to allow representatives to ask and respond to open-ended questions, and to make judgment calls without putting the caller on hold to check with a supervisor.

Don’t charge people for making a transaction through a human being. Last time I checked, we are all still human.

6

THE LAST

THREE FEET

Fundamentals of Selling to Women

N
o matter how many times a woman sees an ad, or how much research she’s conducted online, the critical purchasing moment often comes down to that “last three feet of the sale.” This is when she’s standing in front of a product or talking directly to a salesperson with her hands on her hips, trying to decide whether to buy. At this juncture, all bets are off. It’s here, in this moment, that mistakes are frequently made and sales are lost—simply because women have different expectations of the sales process than men do.

Understanding these differences can have a major impact on your closing rates. As a bonus, it’s a skill your competitors probably haven’t mastered. Freudian jokes aside, learning what women want—from a salesperson, at least—is a straightforward exercise based on understanding female culture. Whatever you’re selling, the sex of the person
you’re selling it to makes an enormous difference in how your pitch is received. Even if you aren’t formally in sales, everyone is selling something. And no amount of automation can replace the fundamentals of good selling techniques.

In business, selling usually occurs in one of three ways: face-to-face situations, brick-and-mortar retail establishments, and the online environment. This chapter tackles all three, starting with the most traditional sales technique of all: face-to-face selling.

There is no shortage of sales experts in this world, but most sales training programs don’t address the issue of gender. Sales coaches and seminars overlook the simple question of whether the buyer is a man or a woman, and how that factor impacts the purchasing process. This is a huge oversight, because there is quite possibly nothing more significant. Sales is simply a form of communication, after all, and communication is where men’s and women’s styles differ most.

In my sales training seminars, I coach companies on how to increase sales by making women feel great about the experience. It all boils down to the following principles.

Principles of Face-to-Face Selling to Women

Women are evaluating the salesperson as much as the product

The first principle to remember is that women will try to determine if a sales representative is a “good person” before doing business with him or her. This is especially true when
it comes to big-ticket purchases like cars, appliances, and home furnishings, as well as almost any kind of financial service. The higher the price, the more she has at stake, and consequently she wants to buy from someone she feels she can trust. During the consideration process, women will fast-forward to a worst-case scenario of something going wrong after the sale, and they’ll try to imagine whether they could count on the salesperson if it does. All things being equal, women will buy from someone who they feel “deserves” their sale. They are often willing to pay more for better service and the peace of mind that comes from it. A bad sales experience can kill a woman’s intention to buy, no matter how much she wants the product.

“I was in an appliance store once, and this salesperson started talking about himself as we were walking down the aisle to the refrigerator section,” said Katie, a fifty-something Texan in need of a new fridge. “He asked me about my business, and I told him I was in real estate. I could tell he was just trying to make conversation, but he started rambling about how he used to be in real estate and didn’t make any money at it, and now he was working in this particular store, where making money was ‘like shooting fish in a barrel.’ All I could think of was, ‘Does he really think he’s impressing me by talking this way?’

“He didn’t ask me any questions about what I wanted, and just started opening a bunch of refrigerator doors and talking about the products and the prices. A few minutes later his name was called over the loudspeaker, and he went to take a phone call. I seized the opportunity and practically ran out the front door, saying to one of his colleagues, ‘Tell him that this fish is leaving.’ The sad part was that I really needed a refrigerator and would have preferred to buy one
at that store, since I had already driven there, but there was no way I was going to give that guy my business. I haven’t been back to the store since, and that was two years ago.”

Katie’s story illustrates that since women’s and men’s communications styles are different, what might work well in male culture—bravado and assertive displays of competence—can be off-putting for women. It’s incumbent upon salespeople to learn the cultural norms of female conversational styles, or risk turning off their customers without ever understanding why.

Women factor in the needs of people who aren’t there

When women shop, they constantly evaluate how their purchases might impact the people they care about most. They automatically factor in the needs and opinions of these friends, family members, and colleagues, even if they are the sole decision maker in a transaction. It’s important to address these absent influencers during the sales process by asking your prospect if there are other people who will be using the product or involved with it in some way. By doing so, you may be able to surface unspoken barriers to sale. Think of these absent people as a woman’s mental version of a Broadway cast. It’s up to you to find out who else is in her play.

“When my husband and I bought a family car, we wanted an SUV, but we made sure to buy one with a handle inside the door so that my elderly mother could get in and out of it easily,” said Jill, a thirty-something mother of three. “Some of the SUVs have a really high step-up. And even though my
mom lives in Iowa and only visits three or four times a year, I still felt that it was important that she be able to get in and out of our car with no trouble, and that was a big factor in our purchasing decision.” Jill’s elderly mother didn’t accompany her on her new-car search, and doesn’t even live in her state, but she was there as an invisible part of Jill’s decision-making process.

Women are more interested in product benefits than specs

As we learned in the last chapter, women are far more interested in the
what
than in the
why
. It’s more powerful to say, “This side-by-side refrigerator/freezer can hold sixteen frozen pizzas,” than to say, “This side-by-side refrigerator/freezer is thirty cubic feet.” Cubic feet and other commonly used measurements that describe size just aren’t meaningful to most people. The same thing goes for acronyms, the scourge of business-to-business selling experiences. Forget them. Instead, speak in practical terms and paint pictures with stories.

I once called Allstate to check on pricing for auto insurance, and instead of leaping right into a complicated discussion of premiums, deductibles, and liabilities, the salesperson painted pictures of how I would use the service, through stories like this: “Imagine if you got caught in a snowstorm on the side of the road on Thanksgiving Day and you had family coming over for dinner. If you got an Allstate plan, we’d make sure you got home quickly and safely.” Wow. Painting such a vivid picture had a more powerful effect on me than any discussion of policy terms ever could. The
policy discussions would come later, but capturing my imagination at the beginning of the sales process was the most important part.