Sell your worst feature early…

Sell Your Worst Feature Early

One effective rule of selling says, “Sell your worst feature early.” This may not make a lot of sense right off the bat. But think about it for a second. If you have a feature in your offering that is not attractive and could turn off a customer, you don’t want it to become apparent late in the sale and ruin the deal. You have to be careful to sell the worst feature, not just mention it. If you just mention it, it will turn off your prospect and kill the sale.

Sell it. For example, you are looking to buy a Hummer. The worst feature might be that it won’t fit in your garage. If the salesperson just told you this and left it at that, you would become annoyed and leave the dealership. If however, the sales person said something like, “You might have trouble getting it in your garage, but man are you going to look good riding around town in this! And since the heat and A/C produce comfortable temperatures in 2.6 seconds, you’ll never even miss your garage. Hop up and get behind the wheel and you’ll see how easy the control panel is to view.”

If you were looking at a health insurance plan with high co-pays, the salesperson would have to find another feature to off-set the displeasure high co-pays costs. It might go like this: “Now the co-pays at our company are generally higher than you are used to, but our company has one of the fastest turnaround times for payments in the industry. You won’t be waiting for months and wondering if your provider has been paid. Also our telephone support reps have one of the best speed-to-answer rates in the industry, which means you will not be on hold half the day waiting for an answer. We are responsive to our customers. Did you want to just cover yourself or are there any dependents you would like to add?”

Selling a worst feature can apply to something as unglamourous as self-storage. What worst features are there in the industry? Some facilities are older and have not been updated. This can be sold by explaining how the basic needs of dry and secure are being met and the fact that the facility is older means you have less cost to run it and can keep rates down. So you take what could have been a discussion about your place being old and turn it into a discussion of your place offering the same safe and dry spaces as your competitor at less cost.

Some facilities are a little hard to find. You can sell “off the beaten” track by emphasizing that it is easier to keep a place secure that has less traffic and that it costs less to have a location off the main street, which translates to better rates.

Some facilities have walk-up units. These are easy to sell. “One of the nice things about our store is that you can save a bunch of money by storing upstairs. Now we don’t have an elevator, but a lot of people are glad to go up a few stairs to save the money. If you prefer we have some convenient first floor drive-up units, too. Which would you like to look at first?”

Some facilities don’t have 24 hour access. You can sell that by explaining how no one is on the property after 10PM, so everyone’s belongings are secure over night.

Some of you require that people insure their belongings while storing with you. You may think this is a worst feature for prospects, but people are actually glad to know that they can buy insurance for a few dollars a month to add an extra level of protection to their goods. “We do require that you insure your belongings when you store with us. You can buy the insurance through us for as little as $8 or $12 per month. This adds an extra level of protection. Not that we have ever had a problem here, but if anything ever did happen, we want you to be protected. Did you want to purchase the $2,000 value or the $4,000 value package?”

Some of you may have limited access to the road that runs by your property. In this case tell people that it is a pain to get in the drive-way from the east and tell them how easy it is to get in the driveway from the west. Blame it on the road planners or the mega store across the street. You might be shocked if you knew how many people tried to turn in from the east and kept going to rent with someone else.

Even if your store doesn’t have a worst feature, you may not offer a few things that your competitor does. So take away your competitors advantage by telling prospects, “We don’t have feature X, which most of our renters don’t miss, because we have feature Y, which our renters really like because…”). This takes the thunder away from your competitor. If your prospect goes to your competitor after talking to you, feature X will not be so impressive because you have planted a different view in the prospect’s head.

Now you have to be careful how you do this. You have to be realistic and sensitive to customers’ needs. If you live in South Florida, you can’t say, “We don’t have humidity controlled units like some of the other storage places because you really don’t need it and it drives your cost up. So we can offer you just as good a place to store for less money”. You could say though, “One nice thing about our place is that we don’t have climate controlled units. Since not everyone wants one, we keep our cost down by not offering them. So if you don’t think you want climate control, we can offer you a good price. Would you like to come down today to take a look at our site, or would tomorrow be better for you?” You might think this is a subtle difference. But if you tell people what they should want or need, they will usually take what you say as BS. If you tell them what other customers have said, they pay attention and consider their options.

Pay attention to the worst features at your facility and learn to sell them. You may find out those features aren’t so bad after all.

bye for now, Tron

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.