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Package selling is the act of putting multiple items together to pitch during a presentation. Where before you might have only sold one copy machine, you now sell the ‘copier/fax/12 month maintenance combo.’ Where before you used to list the person’s house, you now become the selling agent AND the client’s buyer’s agent. Where before you sold a life insurance policy, you now sell the ‘cradle to grave combo’ encompassing life insurance for the parents, kids, and additional products to invest for college, even to help with retirement!
To be able to package sell, you need a couple things: 1) you need to have multiple products to offer, and 2) you need to know WHOM to pitch WHICH package. You obviously wouldn’t try to sell a senior citizen life insurance AND a retirement
package!
It can really help you to mentally get into the habit of selling a few basic packages at first. Maybe you sell A,B,C,D, and E. So start small with an AB package, a BC package and a ‘combo’ package encompassing all the items. Then, all you have to do is identify the prospect’s needs in order to know which package to offer. Also, by only have a couple packages to understand at first, you’ll know the total pricing, and all the elements. If you rush in trying to sell a million combinations, you’ll become confused (a confused customer never buys either!)
How to sell the package
Once you’ve designed and understand your packages, you simply keep mental notes on which prospects are ideal for which package. Let’s look at insurance sales as a quick example. Say before you read this, you used to only pitch life insurance, primarily to middle-aged people (even though your company offers all kinds of insurance products.) After learning to package sell, you decided on three packages. First you have your ‘single policy package’ which you’ve been selling. Second, you have a ‘life insurance/financial planning package’ that you’re going to target to the middle-age crowd, and finally, you have a combo package for families with kids (especially college-minded families.) To these ‘combo families’ you’re going to pitch the life insurance for each member, a retirement plan to the parents, and a college investment vehicle for each of the kids. (I’m not an insurance agent, but I’m sure there are probably a zillion other products you could include in your ‘combo package.’)
For this example, we’re going to talk primarily about the ‘combo package’ prospect Once you’ve identified a ‘combo package’ prospect, you sell the same way as you used to sell your single product. But instead of only focusing on the single product, you say something like, “I’m going to show you my cradle to grave program. It literally protects and sets you up from infancy to college to retirement! If you like it, great! We can get you started on it soon. But if you don’t like parts of it, that’s o.k. too. Some people go with the whole program, and some only do one or two parts of it. Whatever you decide is fine with me!”
You then proceed to ‘pitch’ the whole thing. You’ll quickly find that you only have to get detailed on the most specific needs being covered. In other words, don’t bore your prospects to death by spending an hour going over EACH product. You can quickly summarize the highlight of each product. If you have great rapport with your prospect, you’ll find that they trust you!
Price Build-up- the key to selling the whole thing!
Even though your overall demo will be very similar to your smaller package sales, the big key to pull-off an entire package is by knowing how to summarize and building
a GREAT price build-up when getting ready to close the deal. This is why it’s imperative that you know your packages inside and out. You can’t stumble at the end of the demo by having to stop and figure out prices and features. You need to build the entire thing up with a HUGE summary of all the benefits and features they’re going to get, then building up each individual product’s price, adding the whole thing together to make a HUGE price relativity point, then dropping it down to what the payments actually would be!
Say you’re trying to sell five life insurance packages, two college funds, and two retirement plans. That’s a total of nine products. When summarizing, you’d go back over the highlights, then tie a huge price build-up to each product. For example, you could say, “A lot of my clients thought they’d be paying about $100 per item each month. And most of my clients didn’t think that would be unreasonable. But that would be close to a thousand dollars per month! But what they were amazed at is that for the 5 life insurance policies, the 2 college funds, AND the retirement plans, they could start as low as $455 per month! Isn’t that great!
Now again, I’m not an insurance agent, I’m just using this example to give you an idea how you summarize and build up the price. But I guarantee that if you set the relativity point at $1000 per month, then DROP it down to $455, you have a MUCH better chance at making the sale verses not saying anything!
Breaking-down the package
One of the biggest benefits to package selling besides the increase you’ll get from your dollar per sale is the psychological advantage of ‘allowing’ your customer to say ‘no’ to one or two or many of the items of the package while still saying ‘yes’ to one or many of the items! You’ll start having fun with the fact that you presented the whole package and the client ended-up “ONLY” buying two or three of the items!
Breaking down the package is easy. Here’s how you do it. After doing your package summary and package price build-up, you start to close for the whole package. As you’re closing, you’ll know if they’re sold on the whole thing or if there’s any resistance by the type of temperature questions you ask. The best way to find out at the close is buying saying, “Can you guys see why so many families are going with our cradle to grave package?” If they say ‘yes,’ write them up! You just sold a big one! If you receive some blank stares or negative tones, then quickly ask, “Which part of the package did you guys like the most” and get their response, then say, “which part do you guys want me to take off?” Psychologically, you’ll have fun ‘bumping the few things’ they aren’t interested in while writing up the products they want. Back when I sold books door-to-door, I’d present an entire package of books to a family with kids from kindergarten to high school. When my parents showed disinterest in certain parts of the package, I’d jokingly ‘throw’ those book sample into my bag! I really ‘tossed’ them as a joke, but it took a lot of pressure off. Then, when I was leaving the house having just sold 15 or 20 books, I’d think back when I’d first sold and used to only pitch 1 or 2 books at each house! I literally left money on the table.
With our fundraising company, we used to sell a school a single fundraising program. Now, we often sign a school two, three or four successive programs at one demo! Now we’re basically setting up a school groups’ entire fundraising program for the year instead of just pitching one program. Our sales people are having two to three times larger sales numbers this way. In the past, a good week was for a sales person to sign 4 or 5 accounts. With the package selling, we had one rep sign 13 accounts in one week!
But probably the most exciting part about package selling is when you have your best week EVER after selling several ‘combo packages’ in addition to your regular size packages. I’ve been in situations before where I’d already had my best week EVER by Tuesday night after having sold two or three ‘combo packages.’ And with time being everyone’s ultimate limiter, the only way (at some point) you can increase your dollars is by selling bigger packages! We highly recommend it!s
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