Make it easy for your audience to buy

I was speaking today at the All Nations Toastmasters Club and one of the announcements I made at the end of the meeting was my upcoming Strategic Life Planning conference call, on March 25th 2013 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Reviewing my sales pitch to the audience in attendance at the meeting, I realized that I did not make it easy for them to buy into my product, in this case, participating in the free conference call.

Make it easy for your audience to buy

I could definitely have done better, and I will do better next time. The largest room in the world is the room for (self-) improvement, and  here are a few lessons I drew from the experience:

  • Prepare to sell. That is a very good lesson. There is a difference between speaking and speaking to sell. Even though you are always selling yourself when you are speaking, it is important to prepare for speaking to sell. I had prepared to speak, but not to sell. Speaking to sell aims at driving the prospective buyers to buy, or make them promise to buy.
  • Always have a free valuable gift for your prospective buyers. The keywords here are “free” and “valuable”. It does not help to give something of no value for free. Next time, I will give something, maybe a printed sheet with a list of valuable resources about life planning, or a link to an online resource I authored on life planning. Do the same. Your audience will be more likely to buy into you when they receive a free valuable gift.
  • Give information on “how” to buy during the sales pitch, not after. I told the audience what, why, when, where, but I did not tell the audience how. If you don’t tell your audience how, the processes and options available for them to buy what you sell, they won’t buy. Nobody is going to follow you around to give you their money, or buy whatever you sell. I learned that today.

Selling, just like any other skill is learnable. I am happy I had the opportunity to reflect on how I could have done this better, and I hope you have learned (or re-learned) from my bits of information above.