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If you sell a product with no unique selling points, are one of the many sales professionals that sell a service or a simple product that sells on price, this page is for you.

Not all products can be sold by giving a long presentation that grabs the buyer’s emotions. Many products are day to day items, and many services are a basic offering with nothing to differentiate them from competitors.

Often all the buyer wants is basic information and the item sells on price.

A far cry from the sales training classroom

Wouldn’t it be great if sales prospects sat down and took the time to listen to the many unique features of your product.

If we all sold products that we could build dreams around and really get to the buyer’s emotions.

Think about all those sales courses you’ve attended where they showed you how to create a picture by questioning the buyer’s needs, and then presenting the unique selling points of your product or service.

Are you finding that all that training just doesn’t work in the real world for you.

Not all sales roles can use the same sort of sales strategy or sales pitch.

What if you sell sales products with no unique selling points, or if the only feature your customers are interested in is the price.

There are many people in a sales career where they sell products with no unique selling points, services that are just the same as the competition sell, and products that are so simple they don’t have many features to present.

In many cases the sales person can only sell on price and they are not always the cheapest.

So how do you achieve success, hit targets, or grow your business when you have the same product everyone else has? How do you keep your job, or run a business, when you sell a product on price?

How to be successful with no unique
selling points

When you sell in a competitive market and your product has no unique selling points, you need to pitch to more sales prospects than your competitors.

And if you are part of a sales team, you need the opportunity to close more sales than your colleagues.

You don’t have any main selling points. You will not always be the cheapest. Your product doesn’t grab the buyer’s emotions like some products such as vacations, houses, cars, and many more items.

I currently work with a sales team in the waste and recycling industry. You can't sell waste bins by building pictures and selling dreams...

The way to be successful is to close more sales. That means getting in front of more potential customers. It sounds easy. So how come so many sales people try it and fail. The truth is, they don’t know how to play the numbers game.

Well when you sell on price, or have a product with few features and benefits, then selling is a numbers game.

But don’t be fooled into thinking this numbers game means you just knock on more doors and you will make more sales.

It’s not that simple.

Knock on more doors and you will get more prospects going into your sales process, sometimes called a sales funnel.

Think of it like a funnel with you pushing prospects into the top. If all you do is poor them in at the top they either fall out of the bottom or get stuck half way down.

You have to manage the flow of your sales funnel.

Managing the numbers game

Think of the stages your customer may have to go through before you can close the sale.

Here’s a typical example:

• Prospect for potential customers
• Qualify the prospect and make first appointment
• First appointment
• Second or third appointments
• Close the sale

Common mistakes when
selling is a numbers game

The above may be stretched over a period of time and take several visits, especially if quotes, tenders, or contracts are involved.

If you spend all your time prospecting you will have a massive number of potential customers, but they could need qualifying.

This takes time and you could miss the month’s sales target because you are spending all your time trying to qualify all the prospects you have brought in.

What if you have plenty of qualified prospects and you spend too much time trying to make first sales appointments with them.

This is good sales work but do you close the sale on the first sales appointment.

At the end of the month you miss target because all your sales prospects are stuck in your sales funnel at the first appointment stage. They are not at the point where you close them.

So how do you get the numbers game working for you as many sales professionals do every month?

Follow the steps below and turn your sales funnel into a sales machine that helps you to hit target, keep your job, or grow your business.

What are your sales stages

Take a piece of paper, or a word document if you prefer.

Now write out the stages that your typical sales prospect goes through from your first contact to closing the sale.

What’s the first stage in your sales funnel. It could be a marketing lead, a company you pass and take the details, a recommendation, a calling list, or a door knock.

Now what is the typical next step.

Do you make appointment setting calls, cold call in person, or send marketing literature. It will be different for each market and type of sale. So write down your step 2.

Now do the same for the other stages of your sales funnel. Do it all the way to where you usually close the sale.

Know how many sales prospects you need at each of your sales stages

No you want to work out how any sales prospects you need at each stage of your sales funnel.

A common mistake sales people make is to think in terms of a 2 stage sales funnel.

They think that today they knock the door and tomorrow they close the sale. When in reality there sales stages are more like 5 or 6 stages from first contact to closing of the sale.

Start at closing the sale and work backwards.

For every sales you close how many sales prospects were you working on at the previous stage.

Using the simple sales funnel above here’s an example:

Collect the prospects

First appointment – 1 sales appointment for every 5 prospects called

Second or third appointment – 1 prospect reaches this stage for every 2 first appointments

Close the Sale – 1 sale closed for every 3 prospects at the second and third appointment stage.

In the above example you can work out how many sales prospects you need at each stage of the sales funnel in order to meet your sales target every month.

If the target was 10 sales per month you simply work backwards form closing the sale.

Here’s our example working back with a target of 10 sales:

10 closed sales

1 sale from every 3 prospects at the 2nd and 3rd appointment stage.
So you need 30 prospects at that stage.

For every prospect at the 2nd and 3rd appointment stage you need 2 at the first appointment stage.
So you need 60 prospects at this stage of the funnel.

For every prospect at the first appointment stage you need to call 5 prospects. That means you need a working prospect list of 300 sales prospects.

You can see from the above example that if you spent as much time on closing sales or making appointments as you did collecting prospects you would soon run out of prospects entering your sales funnel.

You know that you need 300 prospects, so once you hit 300 put your focus into turning those prospects into qualified sales appointments.

Once you understand the sales funnel you just need to keep it topped up and move all your prospects along the stages so you don’t get a backlog or a shortage at any stage.

Now you can be successful with
no unique selling point

Once you do the above exercise for your products or services you will hit target every month.

This sales strategy technique works great for sales products with no unique selling points, low number of features and benefits, when selling on price, selling a service, and all those products that don’t really grab the buyer’s emotions.

The above is a simple explanation and your sales target may be more complicated. One sale could have various elements that you are rewarded for. Maybe your business needs sales of different products to be profitable.