In the video you can find the answer of one-million-dollar question that every sales guy always asks himself “How can I make a successful sales ?”, “Why did I fail ?”, “What is the sales success factor ?”. We get the deal simply because we give the customer offer he can’t refuse. Don Corleone said it well when he promised the other guy that he would bring the deal to him because “I am going to give him an offer he can’t refuse”.

This powerful statement is applicable not only in sales, but also in every aspect of our life where making an irresistible offer will lead us to getting the deal. Be it the effort to recruit a potential staff, to buy a company, to gather popular votes, and also to take a girl for a date. Every part of our life obviously always involves making an offer and negotiate for a win-win deal.

As simple as it sounds, “making an offer he can’t refuse” is a big challenge. This can be overcome by going through these following steps.

Do your best to understand your customer’s wish list. Get to a face-to-face meeting and get yourself ready with a list of questions. Do it in a such a way that you won’t sound like you are from statistic agency. Increase your customer intimacy level so that he is comfortable talking to you. He will be more open and more willing to share. This works well especially with Asian customer who tend to value quietness, humility and sensitivity. Be an advisory role rather than assertive one. Stop dominating the conversation, listen and ask questions.

Once you get the wish list, give each item the weight and priority it deserves. This, once again, requires your deep and well understanding of your customer’s requirements. Not all customers put the biggest weight on the commercial. Most of the time, they don’t like the features or quality of the service they are having now and wish for some improvements.

You get all the customer’s wish list plus the weight and priority, now it’s time to make an offer based on it. This is another big challenge as you and your company may not have all resources to tick off each item in the list. You will come up with an offer anyway, it may not be ideal, but somehow close to it. The gap between your offer and your customer’s wish list is something that you need to negotiate. You may reduce the weight in one item, but you have a stronger position in others. If you are skillful enough in this art, your customer may want to change his wish list to suit what you can offer.

In my sales experience, lack of understanding of what the customer wants is the major contributor to failure. Second is the ability to meet their expectation and to negotiate to close the gap between what we can offer and their wishes.

As I mentioned, the same methods are applicable for non-sales activity. When you apply for a job, do your homework before you step in for the interview. Find out about the company and its business and try to get to know their expectation in candidate’s qualifications. If you can meet that and some other factors and the recruiter is convinced, then you are good to go. Same thing can be applied if you are in the recruiter’s side. Find out what the candidate’s career aspirations are and see if your company can match it. Just for your info, not all candidates put the remuneration as his top of the list.

Now, are we ready to give him an offer he can’t refuse ?