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If you sell cars for a living, your customers get to see what their buying, inside and out, and they can even take the product for a spin to experience exactly how well it operates. If you sell stereos, you crank up the volume and show your customers just what they're paying for. If you sell property, you give your customers maps, pictures and aerial photos of your product, and you take them to the site and let them stroll around. These things don't exactly sell themselves (there's still plenty of salesmanship involved), but they certainly make the job easier. They can be seen, touched and test-driven. They are tangible.

But what if you're a stock broker, or an account manager? What if you sell insurance? What if you're an analyst or a consultant? What if you don't sell a product at all, but a service? Services are intangible. They are abstract and exist not as an object but as a concept.

The trick to selling services, then, is to make the abstract concept of your service into a concrete image in the mind of your customer. Create an identity for your service, a "premium plan" or "executive care package." Illustrate the specific benefits you offer, the advantages your service has over others. Turn your service into a something quantifiable, with a name or theme or logo that's linked in the mind's eye to an image of quality, value, expediency, etc.

You must also realize that there is already a fuzzy image in the minds of customers of what they need and what they want. When you turn this fuzzy image into a crystal-clear one, you must make sure that you meet their expectations and fulfill their needs. The image you create must mesh with the image they already have. Not all your services are right for all your customers.

Selling intangible services definitely involves challenges not present in marketing tangible products, but if you know what customers need, offer them what they want, create an concrete image of what you're selling and make this image coincide with the image in the minds of your customers, then you will succeed.