Enhance Your Sales With the AIDA Formula – Part 1

In business few things are as important as sales. It doesn’t matter if you like to sell or not, without sales there’s no business. So here’s the bad news if you don’t like to sell, everything in life is a sale. Absolutely every human interaction implies a transaction similar to a sale.

The unemployed person who is looking for a job is selling himself. The high school teacher has to learn how to “sell” his knowledge to his students in order for them to learn. In a couple’s relationships there’s a constant process of negotiation

Society in general works under a constant exchange model. You give me something I need and in return I give you something you want.

But don’t despair. The good news is that selling is for everyone! While not everyone is a born skilled sales professional, anyone can learn and develop the necessary skills to sell. And it’s easier than you think.

To learn how to sell involves many areas. Besides, every sale is different. It’s not the same to sell an insurance policy than to sell a pizza. Each prospect will make you change your selling strategies.

But no matter how different each sale can be, they all follow the same sequence. Sometimes it takes time for the sequence to show, other times it’s quick and spontaneous, but it’s present every time.

This pattern is known as the AIDA formula. It has various applications in many areas including personal relations, advertising, marketing, negotiation, design, etc.

It’s so amazingly simple and obvious that many of us fail to notice it. This is the structure of the formula in a nutshell:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

To sell anything, the first step is to call your prospect’s attention. If your prospect doesn’t even know you exist your probabilities of being successful are null. The primary objective of advertising campaigns is not to sell; it’s to call our attention.

Once you have your prospect’s attention you have to generate an interest in that which you want to sell. The interest is an intellectual and mental characteristic, and a quite fickle one. This implies to generate a certain degree of curiosity that will make your prospect want to know more about what you’re showing to him or her.

The next step is to wake the desire, which implies an emotional aspect. Desire is when your client wants to obtain or possess the product or service you’re selling. It represents a relation, a personal link to your offer. There’s a total conviction on the part of the consumer. The desire to enjoy the benefits of that what you’re offering.

And last, the action represents the closing on the sale. Could be anything from a buy, a contract, and even a hand shake. But the important thing to remember is that if you don’t generate this action all of the previous three steps will have been for nothing.