What is the right number of quotes to present?

How Many Options Should I Present?

Too few options can feel pushy. Too many options can overwhelm the customer.

In today’s Question of the Day, I walk through the sliding scale of option presentation—from approaches that feel overly salesy to ones that create analysis paralysis.

In this episode, we cover:

• The risks of presenting too few options
• The confusion created by presenting too many
• How customers actually process choices during a decision
• Why four options often hits the sweet spot between clarity and control

If you’ve ever struggled with how many solutions to show a homeowner, this episode will help you find the balance that keeps the customer engaged and confident in their decision.

Have a Question? - Submit your questions to chrish@nexstarnetwork.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the question of the day. Today's question is from Peter in Ohio. And Peter asks, How many options should I be presenting? Great question, Peter. So if we're talking about big ticket sales, I'm not talking uh specific to any industry, but generally in big ticket sales, the answer is four. Four options is what you want to present. Think of what we're trying to accomplish here. We're trying to accomplish, we want to help the customer buy. Everybody wants to buy. Everybody wants to be a consumer. We want to buy. It's fun. That's why people go onto Amazon so much, right? That's why why I spend so much time on Facebook Marketplace. We love to buy. And so we want to help the customer buy. That's what we're trying to accomplish here. What we're not trying to accomplish is we're not trying to sell or be salesy, especially in our culture. Like we've we've done such a bad job as salespeople over history of being salesy and aggressive sales tactics. And there's certain industries that have done a worse job than that than others, but but we don't want to sell. We don't even want to appear like we're trying to sell or being salesy. Our job is to help them buy, not to sell. Now, our other job is not to confuse them. We don't want to confuse them. And so we want to break things down and make them as simple as possible. We are purveyors of information. That's what we are. And our job is to break it down and make it digestible that the customer can understand it, that they can feel good about it, so that they can buy without being sold. And so four options is the sweet spot. And really, there's like there's a sliding scale of the sweet spot here. And so I'm gonna I'm gonna move through that sliding scale. So imagine in your heads, if you will, the scale, we're starting on the left side with one and we're working our way up to more options here. If you were to start on the left side with just one option, that is absolutely selling. That is the definition of selling. It's one option. The only answer is yes or no. And so that's that's selling. And like I said, we don't want to be selling. So one option is out. That's also a big risk. You're taking a big risk as a salesperson because there's nowhere to pivot to after that. If they say no, now what? What do we do? So I don't want to put myself in that position. Two options, so moving the sliding scale now, moving over to two options. Um, yeah, still selling. It's a little better because there's two options, but it's still a pretty good chance of yes or no, I'm selling. There's not a lot of buying, not a lot of options to look at. It's kind of like if you're at the grocery store and you're getting bananas and there's literally two bunches of bananas left and they both look brown. It's like, do I want the brown ones or the really brown ones? Like, I don't know. Neither of these is great options. And so I'm just not going to buy bananas. Um, so two is better, but still not great. Still selling. So now let's now let's move that sliding scale to three. Three. This is the classic good, better, best, right? This is what so many sales professionals hang their hat on. And it's not bad. It's it's okay. I think it's pretty good. There's a reason it's so popular in sales. Um, but if we slide it one more, slide, slide our scale to four. Four is where I see the most success. Four is is that sweet spot of now there's options to buy. Okay. And I want to come back, I want to come back to four, but let's keep moving down our scale here. So if I slide it to five now, now I got a lot of options, but now there's almost too many options. And and especially if I keep sliding, I go to six, six options, or even more options than that. Now it's way too many options. And so customers get analysis paralysis. Too many options give us analysis paralysis. So when you get analysis paralysis, it's too much information and you can't make a decision. We all know a confused mind says no. And so this is where objections would creep in of like, well, maybe I need a second opinion or somebody to simplify it, or man, this is more complicated than I thought it was. Maybe I need to ask my dad or my spouse or bring in some other party. Like that's where we run into a wall with too many options. So now let's let's slide our scale back to four. Back to four, the sweet spot. Okay, four. Why is four the best? Well, this is where I see the best success because it's not too many options that we get analysis paralysis, but it's enough options that customers are buying. They're making a decision. And your option should be set up like this. There should be a top option. Now, that top option should be the best option. It's the Cadillac option. It's whatever your best thing is with all the accessories, like all the things. This should be like if somebody was gonna say, hey, what's everything I can buy from you? It's that thing, right? So it's the Cadillac option. And your customer deserves this. They they deserve to know what all of what all they can buy, right? Because if if I went to two customers, next door neighbors, and one of them I presented all the the all the things, and they made that decision and bought that. And the next customer, I made the decision of like, well, their house isn't very nice. They don't look like they have a lot of money. They didn't seem very interested in that stuff. I'm not even gonna show them that option. And now those two customers are talking to each other, and one goes, yeah, we got all this stuff, and the other guy's going the way, they didn't even show me that stuff. That's bad on you. That makes you look bad. My job is not to make the decision for them, my job is to be that purveyor of information and give them all of their options. One of those being the top option, all the things, the best option. Okay, so we owe it to them. Now, on the complete opposite end of that, there should also be a bottom option, a bottom option, which is the most basic thing. None of the accessories on it. This is like the cheapest we're gonna solve the problem for right here, is that option. So we need to have that price leader option as well. But in between those, in between those, you have two middle options. These are customized options. So based on the the questions that you ask the customer and the wants and the needs you discovered, you're customizing those two options in the middle. So that's what those four options should look like. A top with all the things, a bottom with none of the things, and in the middle of those, two customize options that naturally scale down to that bottom option. So scale down. There should be a variety of price in these as well. And I'm gonna give some examples, but this this is just an example. Adapt this to your industry, right? So if we're talking about like HVAC, commonly like that top option is gonna be like$28,000. Okay. And that bottom option, the very bottom, is gonna be something like$12, so if I were to scale these down appropriately, it should probably be like option number one would be like$28,000, option number two should be like$22,000, option number three should be like$17,000, and then that bottom option should be like$12,000, right? So there's there's kind of an even jump in price as you go down. And these should be, they should be scaled down where the the top option is like the main option, and everything else is just that option with things taken away, right? So you have all the things in option one, and then we take away a few things, that's what equals option two, and we take away a little bit more, that's option three, and we take away a little more, that's what equals option four, and gives you those those jumps in price. I worked with a company one time, and their salesperson and I met, and he was like, Yeah, I'm given four options. These were his four options, though. One was$14,000, one was$13.7, one was$13.5, and one was$13.2. That's not a lot of variety in pricing there. And so obviously he struggled in getting sales on those, right? And so we had to spread those options out a little more. So so we want them scaled down, we want them spread out evenly in terms of price. And the other thing I want to do with these four options, I want to present them one at a time. Just one at a time. They should each be on their own individual sheet of paper because I'm handwriting, right? They should be handwritten options. Uh studies show handwritten options give you a higher close rate by about 7%. And so handwritten options, but should be one, one at a time. And and when I'm showing that one at a time, I'm introducing them separately. And I start with the top one. So I show that top one first. And if I'm following a process, I probably should have done some price conditioning up to this point. So I shouldn't get sticker shock with that big first option. It doesn't mean they're gonna go with that option. In fact, if customers are commonly going with your big option, it's not big enough. If they're picking the top option more than 10% of the time, it's not big enough. You need to make that top option bigger. But I start with that top one and then I keep working my way to the bottom option. And the reason I do that is because then I'm taking away things. Because remember, between option one and option two, I took some things out to get to that next price. Okay. And that psychologically, that creates more of a reaction in customers. When people take things away from us, we it creates a reaction. We don't want that to happen. When you add things in, there's not as much of a reaction. And that reaction, that emotion that we feel is what causes us to take action. In this case, selecting a product. So if we go down to option two, and now option two doesn't have that thing that I wanted, well, I'm pretty incentivized to take option one now. I'm gonna say, wait, wait, wait, wait, bring that option one back. I want to see that one. Okay. And so I want to start at the top and be taking things away as I go, but presenting these one option at a time. The other thing I do now, four options. That's the sweet spot, but I never tell the customer four options. I never once say how many options we're going to look at. I always say we're going to look at a number of options or we're going to look at a variety of options. I want them to know that they're buying. We are going to look at a number, but I never want to corner myself into the exact number of options that we're going to look at here. And so I always say a number of options. And even when I'm presenting these, if I have these handwritten, I got four individual sheets of paper, I keep it, I keep it close to me. Like you never actually see that I'm holding four options. You just see that I'm holding a notebook with some papers on top of it, but you don't even know how many options there are. Now there's four, but I never said four. I said we're going to look at a number of options. And this gives me some flexibility because let's say I get to option one and they say, nope, not that one. Uh too much. Okay, so I get rid of that one. Now I go to option two. If they go option two, yeah, that's the one. That's the one that has all the things that I wanted. So if they're telling me, yeah, I like this option, I love everything about this option, and they're telling me there's nothing I don't like about this option, well, why would I introduce further confusion by throwing more options out there? At this point, I'm just gonna hold on to my notebook and I'm gonna point at option two and I'm gonna say, well, is this the one that we want to move forward with today? I'm gonna go for the close. I'm gonna ask for the sale right there. Because they just said this is the one is perfect, this is everything we wanted, and it there's nothing I don't like about it. I'm doing everything right by the customer. They are completely satisfied by that option right there. It makes no sense to introduce further options at that point. And so there, because I never said, hey, we're gonna look at all four options, I said we're gonna look at a number of options. We went through one, and on the second one, they said it was perfect, nothing they didn't like. Great. Is this the one that we want to move forward with? And then just move on from there. That's it. Customer is happy, you're happy, company's happy. That's the win-win-win situation that we shoot for. And so don't say how many options that you have. So the answer to your question, four four options for those reasons right there. But then I added in a little more information to maximize those four options. And so, uh, four options. That's the sweet spot right there. And I guess the only other thing I would add in is commonly I have people push back and say, like, well, we couldn't do this situation, couldn't do four options. You can. You can absolutely do four options. You just got to get creative. I have companies that are using the exact same system, just with a variety of different accessories, to create four options. You can absolutely create four options almost every single time, 99% of the time. So that's today's question of the day. If you're enjoying question of the day, follow, share, and give a rating. Question of the day is on major streaming platforms. If you have a question, reach out to me either on social media or email. Both are going to be listed in the show description below. Let's get your question answered. And if you're a next star member, schedule a call with me and let's address this one on one. Let's get very specific to your situation. I'm Coach Chris. We'll see you tomorrow.