Mastering the World of Selling: The Ultimate Training Resource from the Biggest Names in Sales

Chapter 75. It's Not a Numbers Game, It's a Game of Numbers

Art Sobczak

Business by Phone

I've long refuted the old saying that "sales is just a numbers game." It's not. It's a quality game, in the sense that you can't just crank out calls and expect success if you're doing the wrong things.

But sales is a game of numbers. We use numbers to describe degrees of pain, pleasure, profits, losses, income, and time. And there are smart ways to use numbers on the phone in your sales. Let's look at 10 of them.

1. "Reduce it to the ridiculous." This old technique refers to minimizing your price or the difference in cost between you and a competitor. "Ridiculous" refers to how insignificant the amount really is when you put it in daily terms, for example, "Pat, we're really only talking about a difference of two dollars a day to have the suped-up model." (Or, ridiculous could mean how crazy someone could get with this technique: "Jim, it's only 30 cents per hour difference over the 10-year life of the machine.")

2. "Raise it to the outrageous." Conversely, this is taking a savings and extrapolating it over a longer period. It's useful in pointing out how much someone will save, over a greater period of time, by buying from you, for example, "You'll save the shipping cost on every order. On two orders per month at an average of $15 per order, we're looking at $360 for the year."

3. Can you say "dollars"? When you want to maximize the perception of a number, say the word "dollars." "With us, your savings ...