Do you know that 3 billion content creators are jostling for your prospects’ eyeballs? Millions of these creators are selling something to your prospects.
Here is something even more alarming. Statistics reveal that the average American is drenched with 10,000 ads daily!
This explains why selling is becoming harder as your prospects’ social media feeds and TV sets are flooded with ads.
The implication for door-to-door sales
Thanks to such an overload of content, today’s buyer has formidably grown immune to selling.
This problem is more prominent in the door-to-door sales space. You knock on a prospect’s door, and once they open it, they quickly transit to defensive mode, arming themselves with a million and one objections why they will never buy from you.
Does this necessarily mean the death of door-to-door sales?
No, it more specifically means the death of traditional sales techniques where you optimistically throw your product at customers and expect them to buy it miraculously.
In this podcast, Jeremy Miner, teaches us his cutting-edge NEPQ (Neuro-Emotional Persuasion Questioning) formula for selling just anyone.
Jeremy chairs the 7th Level, a trailblazing global sales training INC Magazine ranked #1,232 on their list of fastest-growing companies in America.
What is even more exciting about Jeremy is that he is one of the pioneers of modern door-to-door selling, knocking on doors since 2020.
The Direct Selling Association ranked him the 45th highest earning producer among over 100 million salespeople.
Alright, let us dive into some of the nuggets Jeremy shares in this podcast.
Why product pushing doesn’t work anymore today
As Jeremy rightly points out in this podcast, people don’t want to buy anymore. The 21st-century consumer is aggressively protective of his dollars.
This means they will surely turn you down if you throw your product right off the bat at them. Unfortunately, many door-to-door sales reps engage in what Jeremy tags “product pushing”.
Product pushing is a highly pressurized sales approach where sellers attempt to shove their product through the buyer’s throat.
Here, the seller keeps rambling about the project up and down, hoping to exhaust the buyer’s resistance.
Mistaken for positive persistence, these reps feel the more they hold on and stay in front of their prospects, the more their chances of selling.
But no, the best you can get from a homeowner who allows you to stay on his porch for so long is courtesy – not his dollars.
In the end, the rep is dejectedly washed with a barrage of NOs, ending in zero sales.
Jeremy proposes a far more practical solution: helping the buyer solve his problem.
Ahhh, we can hear you screaming this is a commonly recycled formula in door-to-door sales. But Jeremy adds a new spice to his: helping the buyers identify his problem.
Let us talk more about this.
Showing your prospective buyer his problem
The interesting thing about the 21st-century door-to-door sales industry: you rarely meet a homeowner with a problem he has already discovered and wants to solve immediately.
Homeowners with pressing needs are likely to have solved them before you come around. They must have bought from your competitors or gone to the local store to satiate such need.
This is why the most reliable way to sell today is to help the homeowner identify a critical problem and intelligently establish that sense of urgency regarding why your prospect needs to solve that problem ASAP.
You don’t create that sense of urgency by directly pressing the homeowner to buy NOW NOW NOW.
No, using Jeremy’s NEPQ method, you ask a systematic set of questions that enable the homeowner to make a discovery “oh shoot, I really have a problem here!”.
This can only be achieved when you have patiently established credibility with that prospect. Behavioral science in sales has firmly established that no one will contemplate buying from you when your legitimacy is yet in doubt.
NEPQ Questions to ask your prospects
The first phase of the NEPQ method is to systematically disarm the buyer to make them relaxed and comfortable enough with you to open up.
Remember, you want to assist them in DISCOVERING their problem. As typical of a discovery process, there is some digging in to do.
Jeremy espouses starting the conversation with a mix of genuine curiosity and empathy. Then comes the connecting question.
The essence of the connecting question is to establish you are interested in your prospect’s unique situation.
If you establish your concern about them successfully, they are likely to open up and spread their situation right before you for a diagnosis.
The connecting question is often tailed with the situational question. The situational question establishes the homeowner’s (in door-to-door sales) current situation, followed by the objective question.
The objective question is a projection of where your prospect wants to be. Specifically, these are the results they aim to make.
Between the situational question and the objective question is the vacuum you want your solution to fill. There is likely your prospect’s problem.
Rounding things up
Admittedly, as Jeremy envisages in the podcast, this NEPQ (Neuro-Emotional Persuasion Questioning) system doesn’t always happen in one day.
As you would understand, you don’t gain someone’s trust in one day. This methodology is reliably built around persuasiveness and establishing trust.
But in the long run, it is a far more effective system than “hoping” you could just jump on doors and probably sell your prospects.
Listen to the podcast to get the full sauce!
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