I had to rent a car for my business trip. Rental car salesmen are just like Guitar Center salesmen. You just feel slimy after dealing with them. They try to sell you everything. Do you want to upgrade the car? Do you want the extra insurance even though your company covers everything for you? How about a GPS system? Do you want to prepay for a full tank of gas up front so you don’t have to fill it up?
The reality is if you don’t bring your own GPS, it might be quite useful to get one. You won’t like the price, but it’s better than getting lost in an unfamiliar town. Because everything so spaced apart in the Midwest, there don’t have lights everywhere. It’s so hard to find intersections in the middle of the night. On top of that, their street signs are about 1/8th the size of the street signs in California.
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I spend a lot of time on the phone with customers, and I’ve learned a few things about sales.
Sound confident and people don’t question what you’re telling them. You can sell more stuff that way. There is no need to lie to people in doing this. You are presenting them with products they can use at a price they are willing to pay. You are just convincing them to do it now, rather than later.
The other thing I realized is that people are not comfortable with silence and talk way more than they should, giving out needless information. Sometimes this lets me know exactly where I need to price myself, but most of the time it’s people just rambling on with additional information after they’ve told me everything I need to know. From my own experience I know they are just to try to elicit a confirmation of what they’re already saying, because they’re not positive about what they’re doing.
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