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How can you make the communication around selling golf carts simpler and more manageable? There was a study done several years ago about how chess masters become so good at their game. Those conducting the research simply expected that masters would see many more moves than novices. What they found surprised them. Novices saw the most moves. As players gained experience, they saw fewer and fewer.
Their brains highlighted what they knew to be useful while casting out what wasn’t. They prioritized certain patterns and progressions. As they gained experience, masters didn’t forget the full range of moves – but they did only consider the ones that were most applicable to the situation before them. They blocked out anything extraneous or inapplicable, even if the move was still a possibility.
Selling Golf Carts Efficiently
What the heck does this have to do with selling golf carts? Novices in any skill see all the moves – they just don’t have the experience to know which ones apply best. You may look at sales as a competition against your fellow salespeople. Or you may look at sales as a way of helping your customers. There are dozens of ways to approach sales effectively depending on your dealership and your personality.
What doesn’t change is the fact that you’re trying to juggle hundreds of possible options at a given time. You need to be able to assess every customer’s needs and offer an option that appeals to fulfilling that need.
Knowledge on Options Must be Current
You might choose something proven, but out of production. That makes you look like you aren’t the expert they should be talking to. That makes them think they’ll get more knowledgeable service elsewhere.
You might choose an option their friends got on their golf cart, but that’s out of stock. It would have been better to upsell them on the next level which is in stock. “Will your friends be a little jealous because you got the next level up?”
Any skill is difficult enough to keep track of before the moves themselves change.
The Pitfalls of Too Many Options
The other half of this is that you don’t want to offer customers every option on the planet. This can overwhelm them and lead them to saying they need more time. You need to have access to all the options yourself, and then you want to select the best few options for their needs and circumstances. This makes their choice simple and appealing.
The more you give customers that doesn’t apply to their needs or ability to pay, the more they’ll feel like you aren’t listening and engaging them. It may even make some customers think a golf cart is something somebody else owns, but not something they’re meant to own.
Customers will walk out if you can’t narrow down their choices in a way that addresses what they’ve told you their needs are. This means that as a salesman you need to know all the options, and have a tool that helps you narrow them down quickly.
Technology Enables Stronger Sales
What does this all mean for golf cart customization? It means that you need to utilize tools and technology that are available. You need a way to narrow 30 choices for an option down to 3 choices in a way that’s easy for customers to understand.
An app for customizing golf carts can do this, but not all apps are equally capable. Apps that are sold as products are often locked to the time frame in which they’re published. That’s good for the next few months, but without reliable updating, the app you bought in December 2016 is still featuring parts from December 2016. That’s not good for you.
Get Good, Continuing Service
An app for customizing golf carts should be oriented around golf cart customization as a service. This will involve a reasonable monthly fee, and what you get out of it is a constantly updated service. New options are entered every month as they hit the market, and stock numbers are updated regularly. This allows you to narrow down your choices on any customization simply and effectively, with full knowledge of what the best choices are for that circumstance.
You become a master by simplifying the options before you and by making decisions efficiently. Today, that means taking advantage of constantly updated technology that helps you refine those options easily and quickly.