In today’s electronic era, there are now endless amounts of information at our fingertips. Have a question about something? Grab your smartphone and you have the answer in seconds. The problem is that you don’t just get one answer – you get several…several hundred thousand answers. The same thing happens every day with sales reps are offering products to a customer - just because you have fifty options doesn’t mean you have to offer all of them to your customer. Choice is a good thing, but given too many choices, customers tend to get overwhelmed…and when we’re overwhelmed, we tend to buy nothing.

So what can you do as a sales rep to help? Simplify your offering! Pick just a couple of your products and offer only those – maybe as an Option A and an Option B and let the customer decide.

But how do I know which product to offer?

Well, I have always said that the most important thing a sales rep can do is ask questions and listen. The more questions you ask, the more opportunity you have to learn about your customer which then makes your task of selecting the right option for your customer that much easier. Listen and learn.

But I am in retail sales – and I don’t really get an opportunity to ask my customers a lot of questions. What do I do?

Well let’s say you work in a golf retail store in the shoe department. Instead of waiting for me to ask you for a different size, ask me just three questions: Are you looking for anything in particular today? How are you going to use it? Did you have a budget in mind? If you had asked me these three questions, you might learned that I need new golf shoes for winter golf so while budget is a factor, the most important thing is that they are waterproof. Just knowing that much narrows the field considerably - out of the thirty pairs on display, there’s probably only a handful that would really meet my needs.

Any good sales rep will tell you that the more you know about your customer, the better positioned you are to be able to make a confident recommendation, whether that be a complex million dollar sale or a simple pair of golf shoes. Listen and learn…and then simplify so the customer can make a purchase decision easily.