New industries, such as solar, often have a difficult time in the sales world: You’re trying to convince people to buy a product that has been tested and proven, but may not have been around long enough to help them form an opinion that’s positive.
Creating Urgency
In an economy where energy prices are low in most areas, too many homeowners and businesspeople still view solar power as “nice to have” rather than “must have.”
That makes it hard for potential solar buyers to see the urgency of getting solar now. Why not wait till next year when prices come down or when Tesla’s cool new batteries/solar shingles/solar personal-hovercraft-and-time-machine is ready to buy?
In addition, in the Age of the Internet, consumers don’t need salespeople anymore to get product information. Instead, consumers can learn a lot about solar on their own through a Google search.
This means that solar salespeople have a lot more hills to climb in order to connect with potential customers.
How to Break Through
That may convince you that there’s only one type of salesperson — hard charging, hard headed — who can sell this new product. But you’d be wrong.
In fact, to achieve success in selling solar, it’s less important what the salesperson’s personality is like. It’s more important that the salesperson figures out how to fit their sales pitch into the way that the potential sale views them. What that means is figuring out the personality type at the end of the sale — not the personality type of the salesperson.
Figure out the customer’s type and then you can adapt your approach to what’s most likely to work for that type of customer.
Want to learn more? Check out this graphic from the software company Salesforce, a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
(By the way, as a company, Salesforce has committed to using 100% clean energy in its operations. Kudos!)
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