The art of selling sound sales training: multi-room audio


This month, in his regular sales training column, Paul Laville of T21 Training examines how best to sell multi-room audio, offering pointers on how to engage your customer and come away with the sale.


D


o you ever feel that selling multi-room audio can either be


as straight-forward as selling flour to a baker or as difficult as trying to explain gravity to a flat-Earther? That you’re either selling to someone who immediately gets it because they have experience and knowledge of its benefits and how it works, or you’re trying to explain technology to a blank face? I’ve heard some bizarre conversations on the shop floor around multi-room audio, many of them involving sellers using words like ‘mesh network’, ‘bluetooth’ and ‘streaming’. Two of those are much more commonplace than the other but even so, I see many customers staring vacantly into space as enthusiastic sellers wax lyrical on the differences between various Bluetooth codecs.


“So they’re less likely to drop out when all Push people to dig


deeper and think about what constitutes a feature benefit


There’s a game we play in our retail sales training called ‘The So What? Game’ and it works like this: you pick a product and you tell the rest of the group about the benefits of a feature you’ve chosen to present. If the group doesn’t feel you’ve really found the benefit of that feature they’ll challenge you with a brutally heartstopping “So what?”. It’s fun! And yes there is a point to it. What it does is it pushes people to dig a little deeper and really think about what constitutes a feature benefit. A typical round might go something like this: “These multi-room speakers use their own ad-hoc mesh wi-fi network so they’re ultra- resilient and there’s no need to add them to your existing wi-fi set-up.” “So what?” “Well it’s easy to set them up and they’re not


affected by all the other devices using your wi-fi.” “So what?”


your devices hog bandwidth or if your wi-fi goes down.” “So what?” “So you can relax and enjoy uninterrupted


playback of your favourite music in any room your speakers are in, no matter how crowded or unstable your home wi-fi is.” You get the idea. We often hear the words Feature, Advantage


and Benefit being thrown around in sales, and of course we all know what these words mean and relate to, yet it’s surprising how little we hear or see of benefits being shown to customers on the shop floor, particularly when the product being demonstrated is quite techy or new.


It’s surprising how little


we hear or see of benefits being shown to customers on the shop floor


In the example above the benefit is: relax and


enjoy uninterrupted playback of your favourite music. Everything before this statement is an explanation of the advantages of the ‘mesh network’ feature. It’s not uncommon to hear a lot of words regarding features and advantages


30 | www.innovativeelectricalretailing.co.uk


on the sales floor. However, it’s benefits that sell products and services. I could have the most resiliant multi-room speaker on the market in my hands, but if I just keep going on about the technology that drives it, chances are I’d lose my customer to the unicorns. So what if, after learning that my customer is in the market for multi-room hi-fi, the first thing I say to them when I recommend a product is something like, “This speaker gives you uninterrupted playback of your favourite music whatever room it’s in no matter how many devices are crowding your wi-fi.”


Unless you discover


what is important to your customer, you won’t know what benefits them the most.


Would you agree that my customer is more


likely to be interested and more likely to buy it from me than if I start mansplaining the ins- and-outs of an ad-hoc mesh wi-fi network? Of course they would! Particularly if they’re


having problems with their current wi-fi (and who knows, you might even be able to sell them a better broadband package while you’re at it!). If wi-fi wasn’t an issue then maybe I’d want to try something else, because a benefit is only a benefit if it’s relevant to what my customer actually needs. Perhaps what they actually want is top quality sound, or convenience, or something else. I’ve written here before about the importance


of asking questions so I won’t repeat it except to say that unless you discover what is important to your customer, what they actually want their new thing to do, you won’t know what benefits them the most. So ask the questions and once you know what benefits will wow them, lead your recommendations with those rather than the feature or even its advantages. If they really want to know how the technology works and what all the big words mean, tell them later, but always lead with benefits.


July / August 2019


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