July 2011
“You haven’t, have you Paul?” “Yes we have” I replied. “We’ve 8 puppies and we’re planning on selling 7 of them over the next month”
“You’ll never sell them Paul, we had puppies last year and are still stuck with them all. Mark my words” was the warning.
I developed a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. How are we going to persuade 7 people to buy our puppies, there’s no demand, we’re in the middle of a recession. How would we cope with 8 puppies at home?
The next day we registered the puppies with the Kennel Club as they were pedigrees and you have to go through a strict process to adhere to their rules. As part of the agreement, you had to ensure that the puppies went to good homes, with fine owners who were going to treat them well, walk them daily and care for all their needs. We had a Kennel Club responsibility and had to prove that we’d done our due diligence on all the new owners.
This changed everything overnight. From wanting to sell the puppies keenly, we now wanted to find good owners for them all. From there on my wife started to interview prospective owners to see if they passed her “test of good ownership” and people became very enthusiastic to pass her test and become an owner of a Spinone puppy.
From being quite keen to sell, we became detached from the sale, the pressure had fallen away. This made the product more appealing to prospective owners and sure enough, in the first weekend, we sold 4 and the last 3 quickly followed the following week.
What about you in selling? Are you too attached to your product or service? Are you too intense about selling, do you get a little too keen sometimes? Can you unattach yourself a tad, take the pressure off and make your proposition more desirable.
Detaching yourself is the key to increasing the desirability of your product. Just ask Brodie’s 8 puppies who all found gorgeous homes thanks to the Kennel Club rules.
