Selling on a napkin: the persuasion power of participation
The napkin persuasion selling power
If you sit down with a potential client over a dinner, a coffee or having a drink, drawing some simple images, icons, or words with arrows representing flows in between, you can do miracles.
Your intentional words and images on the napkin accompanied by your verbal explication are probably one of the best sales methods there is.
By visually breaking down the problem and solution people will understand better and easier by participating in your thinking.
Moreover the process of verbal explication and sketching the problem and solution is staged step by step, as it takes time to draw and write the few words on the napkin.
Involvement leads to participation selling
The build up and the moderate advancement of the explication due to drawing, writing and telling, makes persuasion power much higher than if you would use the exact same icons and wording in a (PowerPoint) presentation.
This is probably due to the high involvement of the person you are explaining to.
He or she feels being much more related to what you are explaining or expressing as it is created immediately and originally in front of him/her.
He or she experiences and gets involved in the creation of something unique, specially drawn for him/her: participation selling.
After your sales pitch, the potential customer can take the napkin with him as a trophy, having your effort, sweat and creation on a handcrafted document in which she/he has participated.
Do cheat by rehearsing:
Try out or exercise your napkin creations in advance in order to make your napkin selling successful. They won’t know you have rehearsed.
Use Napkins instead of presentations
Thus the next time you sit down with your potential customer or existing customer don’t show a presentation on your portable or printed presentations, just use napkins.
Be creative, be original, and let him grasp the uniqueness of the creation and the moment with you.
How good are your experiences with napkin selling?
How many sales did you already do on napkins?
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To Whom It May Concern:
I just ran across an article you wrote for LEADSExplorer entitled Selling on a Napkin: the persuasion power of participation, posted on September 3, 2008, http://www.leadsexplorer.com/blog/135/selling-on-a-napkin-the-persuasion-power-of-participation/, and I would like to raise an issue that is of concern to Selling Power magazine, which is the use of our trademark.
The word “Selling Power” is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for sales effectiveness. For example, your article states: The napkin persuasion selling power.” We do not condone such uses of our trademark.
As a practical matter, when you describe sales effectiveness, there are a wide range of terms available such as: sales excellence, sales savvy, sales mastery, sales acumen, sales efficiency, and many more.
The reason for this letter is to educate writers like yourself that we want to protect our trademark, since we don’t want to risk Selling Power being declared by the courts a generic word. Therefore we ask you not to use Selling Power as a phrase since it is our legal trademark.
We would like to receive a written acknowledgment of this letter stating that you will in the future identify Selling Power as a trademark if you should write about our magazine, and not use Selling Power as a phrase. If we do not hear from you, we will need to take further action.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
All the best,
Gerhard Gschwandtner
Founder and Publisher
Selling Power
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Fredericksburg VA 22406
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GG:ts