How To Sell Accessories With Passion And Conviction?

Accessories can be tough to sell because they are not really considered as necessities. With the right strategies though, you can have customers reach out for them. Sam Wakefield talks about selling and promoting these emotionally driven purchases with passion and conviction. He lets us in on some techniques that will help with our conversations and posture our sales towards success.

This is going to be a great episode. We’re talking about how to sell and promote more emotionally driven purchases like accessories, system enhancements, those types of things that don’t have a necessity attached to them. They’re not a requirement to the system. They’re nice to have. Good examples are extended labor warranties or air quality items, things that there’s not necessarily tangible associated with them. How do you promote them? How do we tap into the emotional connection to sell these types of products? How do we price them? How does that structure work? Where does it need to fall in the way you price it along with the rest of your project?

That is our topic. Stick around because it’s going to be a good one. Also, I want to give a big welcome, we have a brand new country that came online listening to the Close It Now podcast, country number twelve. Welcome, Zambia. Obviously, there are lots of heating and air conditioning that needs the people to serve in Africa that need to be sold. Thank you for listening. I hope this podcast serves you well. Reach out to me, I’d love to if you’re in any country, of course United States, because that’s where I’m at but any country, feel free to find me on CloseItNow.com. Reach out to me, shoot me a message. I’d love to get in contact with you, and learn about your market. What is it like?

Let’s dive into our topic. How do you promote items that are less necessary? By necessity, I mean the equipment itself. You’ve got your heating and air conditioning system. It heats, it cools, it does its thing and obviously, there are lots of techniques and skills and verbiage or surroundings, upselling and equipment and selling the more efficient and more comfortable equipment. This is something else. This is talking about your system enhancement items, your accessories. A great example that I mentioned is your extended labor warranty. Another example would be air purifiers. Are you using an air scrubber idea of a REME HALO? What are you promoting? Is that an air purifier? Is that the IQAir? Is it the electronic air cleaners, all these things?

First of all, it has to come from a place of asking questions. You’ve got to ask the questions. This is where the deeper questions come in, “Who at home is experiencing allergy issues or asthma issues?” It’s about phrasing. Don’t ask questions like, “Do you have any allergy issues or asthma issues?” This is one of those assumed sales. The question needs to be phrased like, “Who at home experiences asthma issues or allergy issues or both?” You’re assuming somebody has because in our society, somebody usually has allergy problems. When they say, “Aunt Ethel who lives over there or my son or I do.” Whatever the answer is, just say, “Tell me more about that.”

That bad answer is usually that bad, “Is it bad enough? Do they need medication?” Ask several follow–up questions. Get them talking about it, get them talking about what it’s like for them. Obviously, if that person is there, and they’re the one talking about with their own experience, that’s even better. Get them to talk about that. You’ve got to uncover the emotional drivers. At this point, you’re not even offering again. We don’t offer solutions until we encode. Ask all the questions. We’ve evaluated the whole project but we’re just uncovering. We’ve got to uncover those emotional items and what their driver is, what their hot button is.

A great example is, and I’m going to use the extended labor warranty because that’s one of those items that is totally undersold maybe, and definitely never sold for the right amount of money. Items that cost just because an accessory or system enhancement costs you like your material cost is maybe $300 as an example or pounds or whatever your currency is. Just because it costs you that, this is a totally different margin. You’ve got your set margins on your equipment for your system. Your condenser, for your furnace, for your air handler, whatever it is, you’ve got your set margins for that. This is a system enhancement because the beautiful part of any of these items is your day is covered with your overhead. It is covered by your system.

This is where we get into blended margins, because all of the margin on your accessory, on your system enhancement, falls to the bottom line. Once you’ve covered the installation of it, each thing you have to mark up. You’ve also got to mark up to cover your labor and all that built into that. This boosts the margin in your bottom line. These items, you can absolutely sell at a better margin. A good example is the labor warranty. For most systems, their hard cost is $300, $400, somewhere in that range, $300 to $450, $300 to $500. I’ve got a question, “If I’m applying my typical margin that I do on my accessories to this, here’s what it comes up to be.” My question back to this coaching student was, “What do you think you’re selling when someone buys a labor warranty from you?”

His answer is, “Because he’s my client,” which is a good one. It’s like, “I guess I’m selling the confidence that it’s going to get taken care of.” When you’re selling a labor warranty, you’re selling peace of mind that has nothing to do with the piece of paper has nothing to do with the rest. You’re selling peace of mind. What is peace of mind worth to you? An example is we sell orous for $1,250. Our labor warranties are $1,250. That’s what we sell him for. The value of someone having the peace of mind to know that for a decade. If anything goes wrong with their system, it’s not going to cost them another dime. It’s amazing. It’s all about your phrasing, interchange a ten–year labor warranty with a complete warranty for a full decade. It’s the same amount of time, a decade and ten years. You’re saying the same thing. Decade, that hits the threshold of, “That’s a long time.” Psychologically, that’s a long time.

When you say for only $1,250 or whatever it is you sell yours for, make it some fun price. Make it $997. It doesn’t matter whatever you’re selling it for, but have a big margin on it. You’re selling the value. You’re selling peace of mind. To be able to say, “For $1,250, for an entire decade, if anything happens to this system, you don’t even have to think about it. Just pick up the phone and call us. It won’t cost you another dime and will instantly get it taken care of.” That is a big value proposition. That’s how you posture things like labor warranties. That’s how you posture an air purifier.

When you’re installing and upgrading all the different models out, “We’ve got REME HALO. We’ve got the air scrubber. We’ve got Guardian Air. We’ve got all the different ones. I know each brand has their kind of proprietary UV lights and those kinds of things, the honey wells or whatever. When you’re positioning that, when you’re posturing that into your presentation, the way you present that is crucial. This is not a required part of the project. This is an additional emotionally driven purchase. Could they go to Walmart and buy a bunch of little air purifiers for each room at a fraction of the cost? Absolutely. I just left a house where we were talking about air purification, asking about allergies, describe in depth what this thing does.