Need to Boost Sales? Use This Secret Sales Tactic Right Now
There’s an old cliché in the selling world that goes something like this: “You should always under-promise and over-deliver.” But is this good advice? Is this the whole picture? Or are we missing something fundamental here?
The short answer is: yes. This is bad advice. Yes, something is missing.
Read on to find out what the real secret is and how you can use it to instantly boost your reputation—and consequently, your sales.
Under-Promise & Over-Deliver: Does It work?
Most salespeople have heard the oft-used phrase, “Under-promise and over-deliver,” but what does it actually mean? And is it a good idea?
First, let’s define it. Under-promise, over-deliver is a service strategy—it’s a tactic that some salespeople use to enhance the service they provide. Basically, it requires a salesperson or business to do more than they say they will.
In other words, it’s a strategy to improve customer satisfaction by exceeding customer expectations.
So, does it work?
The quick answer to this is: sometimes.
On the surface, the idea has a lot of merit. What could go wrong by under-promising and over-delivering? Well, potentially, a lot.
Let me give you a simple example.
Let’s say you order pizza from one of the big pizza chains.
You notice on their advert that they guarantee delivery within 45 minutes. You’re pleasantly surprised, then, when the pizza delivery guy actually gets there in 30 minutes.
So what happens when you order next time and, again, the pizza gets there in 30 minutes instead of 45? You’re pleasantly surprised, but you don’t care as much as you did the first time, right?
But when it happens the third time, you barely notice.
I bet you can guess where we’re going with this.
You will notice when the pizza inevitably arrives in 45 minutes instead of 30. You might even be a little annoyed even though they only guarantee 45-minute delivery.
See?
By over-delivering, the pizza chain is creating an expectation that might not necessarily work out in their favor.
So what happens when the pizza takes an hour and a half to arrive instead of 30 minutes? Now you’re really steamed, even if you don’t have to pay for the pie.
Bottom line: customer expectations are ever-shifting, and you can do a lot to influence this.
Keep in mind that in order to under-promise and over-deliver, you first have to under-promise. By definition, this means you’re signaling that you are capable of less than your best.
Your advertising mix will reflect low product benefits.
What happens, then, if your competitors advertise a higher level of product benefits?
So by under-promising, all you’re doing is reducing the number of customers you attract.
This, in turn, will increase your customer acquisition costs.
Conclusion: under-promising and over-delivering produces only short-term customer satisfaction benefits. And if you are not careful, you can sabotage your mid and long term growth.
How to Do It Right
In order to utilize a strategy that hinges on over-delivering effectively, you have to keep the customer’s shifting expectations in mind.
This means delivering consistent value. It does not mean delivering more than promised on each transaction.
Instead of setting a tone of under-promising and over-delivering, simply focus on delivering quality consistently. Never, ever make a promise you can’t keep, and always keep the promises you make.
The Power of the Over-promise
So now that you know why ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ isn’t a viable long-term strategy, let’s talk about how you can make it work.
But before we go on, commit this to memory: in a crowded marketplace, under-promising is a sure-fire way to lose the game. Consumers don’t have time to analyze each and every deal anymore. You are competing with social media, news, etc. Consumers simply won’t understand or even notice your under-promise, so you won’t receive value from it.
With that out of the way, let’s look at how you can use over-promising strategically.
By ‘over-promise,’ we aren’t suggesting that you make promises you can’t keep. Only dummies do that.
What we are suggesting is that you make a bold claim—a claim that exceeds customer expectations. But crucially, this must be a claim that you are absolutely confident you can deliver on.
Think about it: if you don’t tell your potential customers why they should buy from you, and your competitors do, who are they going to go to?
Let’s look at an example. When Google came out on the scene, Yahoo! Search was the big player. But Google offered, promised, something better: a search engine that depended less on pre-indexed sites and more on back links.
The creators of Google realized that when one site linked to another, a search engine could take that as a vote of confidence. As we all know, Google became the number one search engine in the world more or less overnight.
Today, Google over-promises by offering consumers the ability to find any piece of information they could possibly need, while providing free online document creation, cloud storage and email services. They over-deliver by maintaining an average search time of .2 seconds and excellent up-time on all of their services—most of this for free.
Drumming up Inspiration for Great Promise
Let’s look at how you can utilize this strategy for your own business.
#1. Go back to your vision. What is your vision for your company? Why did you get into sales in the first place? What was missing in the marketplace or niche that you felt you could fix? If you haven’t put this into words, now is the time. Get it down on paper.
Now, what promises can you make based on this refined vision? Are you sure you can keep those promises?
#2. What is your product’s most significant, attribute? What sets you apart from your competition? What makes you unique?
What one word does your ideal customer think when they hear your brand name? What do they feel? Google means Internet. Elon Musk means innovation. Samsung means exploding batter—excellence in mobile devices.
What does your product or service mean?
#3. Look to your customers for inspiration. Why do they buy from you? Ask them. What pain points did you address to get the sale, and how could you address them even better?
Next, ask them why they didn’t buy from your competitors.
#4. By the same token, if you lose the sale, ask for a follow-up call. Ask why they chose to go with your competitors and what you could have done better. See our post on conducting sales autopsies for more info on how to do this.
This is essential work. You need to know why you lost the sale.
#5. How do your customers feel when they use your product or service? What need are you meeting? What benefits are you delivering that go above and beyond what your competitors are providing?
Remember: premium brands get away with charging more because they make their customers feel good about themselves.
It’s our hope that once you’ve gone through these five steps you’ll have a better idea on where you can over-promise. But remember: your over-promise needs to be something you’re 110% sure you can deliver on.
Evaluating Your Over-Promise
Your over-promise must:
• Be an attention grabber
• Reflect your brand experience and ability
That is to say, it must stand out from what your competitors are offering, and it must be a true reflection of what you can deliver. This is how you stand head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd.
A quick litmus test of your over-promise is to run it by your employees or independent sales agents. If they don’t think it’s possible, definitely don’t proceed.
A good over-promise will deliver on three touch-points:
• The product. The product must function as advertised, and that means it must be designed superbly well.
• The usage. The product must be easy to use and store. If a service, the service must be efficient and customer service must be readily available.
• The people. Each employee must understand the role they play in delivering a stellar product. Team members need to be on the same page and need to be functioning at peak.
Sales Rocket Fuel
The last step to ensuring that your customers come back to you again and again is to bake the over-deliver into your over-promise.
How it’s done: leave out one critical benefit from your promise so that not only are you promising more than your competitors, you’re giving even more value than you promised!
This is how you become great. This is how you get customers to remember you.
Now, go out and over-promise and watch your profits increase!
How to Add Even More Value
Now that you’re well on your way to increasing revenue by over-promising and over-delivering, let’s talk about how you can add even more value to your product or service.
It’s easy to talk about ‘adding value,’ but what does that even mean? The problem is that value is subjective. There’s no universal way to define it.
We can get close by saying something like, “Value is whatever makes the customer happy.”
Okay, but we would add: “Value is whatever makes the customer happy, but doesn’t cost you much.” After all, value should be valuable to you as well.
So, obviously, when we say ‘value’ in this context, we’re really talking about extra value. We’re talking about the icing on the cake. What little extra can you give your customer that will keep them coming back for more?
Here are a few ways you can add substantial value.
#1. Keep up to date on what trends are impacting buyers. How is their industry doing? How is the economy overall? You should always be able to answer the following question without going to Google: “What are the top three challenges my prospective customers are dealing with right now?” Then think of ways you can help them out for no or low cost to them, and no or low cost to you. That’s a win-win.
If all you ever do is ensure that you can answer this question at any given time, you’ll set yourself apart from other salespeople.
Subscribe to industry blogs, set up Google Alerts, read trade magazines, read relevant product reviews, etc. That extra effort will pay off. If you’re well informed on the concerns of your customers, your customers will notice.
#2. Ask open-ended questions. Don’t be the sales rep who has a big mouth but small ears. Ask questions so that you can really understand their pain points.
Don’t just think about how you can get their money. Think about how you can solve their problem so that you both win.
The best way to do this is to ask open-ended questions. Let your customer talk. Then listen.
Open-ended questions help your prospects open up to you. Open-ended questions catch them off guard and lower their resistance. More importantly, they help you understand your potential customer’s point of view. Which leads us to the next step…
#3. Put yourself in their shoes. You want to be able to experience your customer’s pain points if you can—at least, as close as possible. If you focus on pain-based selling, then you’d better truly understand your prospect’s pain. We don’t just mean at surface level here, either.
Engage in conscious empathy.
Ask yourself how you can better come to understand their pain points. Do you have a friend who fits your ideal customer pretty closely? Ask if you can interview them. Do whatever it takes to truly understand your potential customer’s pain.
#4. Be the expert. Stand out from your competitors by being the thought-leader in your space. Write a blog. Create a podcast. Produce videos for YouTube. Then use those platforms to answer customer questions. If you do this, you will outperform your competitors who don’t bother. It’s as simple as that.
Think of it this way: if your prospects sees you bringing in other people to explain aspects of your product or service, they will wonder why they aren’t just dealing directly with that other person.
Be the expert.
#5. Be prepared for your sales calls, and personalize them. This means doing research ahead of time. You need to fit in at least 30-minutes of prep time between each call in your sequence:
• Discovery call, 30 minutes prep time
• Goal-setting call, 30 minutes prep time
• Demo call, 30-minutes prep time
• Closing call, 30-minutes prep time
This is essential. Don’t shoot from the hip. Information is power. Plus, the longer you prepare for the call, the more personalization you can apply. Customers don’t like feeling like they’re being sold to by a stranger.
#6. Focus on quality, not quantity. This can be hard to do if you only earn commission. But the fact remains, focusing on quality can save you time, and time is money. If you’re willing to sell to anyone with a credit card, that means you’ll spend a lot of time trying to sell to people who have intention of buying.
Be Able to Prove Value to the Buyer
If you can prove value to the buyer, that means you’re selling on value, which is stellar. But how do you prove value? One of the quickest ways is to demonstrate to the customer that you understand their business.
This fits nicely with our theme of over-promising and of going the extra mile to net more quality customers.
In order to prove value, you must put in effort to study your customer’s industry and business, but hey, you should be doing that anyway.
You should have a good idea of how your ideal customer operates. How do they run their business? What are their pain points? What frustrations do they deal with day in and day out?
What opportunity do you offer from the customer’s perspective?
In order to demonstrate your value, you must show that you provide benefits that far exceed the costs associated with your product. What are the tangible benefits of your offering? What are the intangible benefits?
Tangible benefits:
• Increased business growth
• Increased revenue and/or sales volume
• Increased market share
Intangible benefits:
• Increased productivity
• Reduced stress
• More free time
Once you have identified both tangible and intangible benefits of your offering, ask yourself, “How can I turn this into an over-promise and over-deliver situation?”
Caution: make sure you can deliver on your promise!
It's a Fine Line
So there we have it. It’s better to over-promise and over-deliver than it is to under-promise and over-deliver.
Simple enough, right?
But remember, it’s possible to go too far, and it’s very possible to slip up.
It’s important to be clear on what over-deliver is, and what it’s not.
Over-delivering is not hitting your client with a hard up sell. It doesn’t mean foisting unwanted add-ons. It isn’t telling your customer how to do their job or run their business, either.
Over-delivering means providing more value for no additional cost. This increases your value to the client and helps ensure they will come back to you. It’s a win-win.
We hope that this concise guide has shed light on the cliché of, “You should under-promise and over-deliver.” Now go forth and provide more value to your customers, and pad your own pockets at the same time.
Gus Torres
Executive VP of Sales - Team Unified
t: (866)668-6529 x 121
m: (786)525-8263
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