I hear scores of people calling themselves “internet marketer”. But an online sales person? This must be a very rare species!
Selling – Not Marketing Generates Cash
It is true: marketing activities support sales by researching markets, helping to design products which people want, helping to know here to look for prospects and how to talk to them.
Although marketing activities are useful and important, they incur expenses. On the other hand, sales generate cash. And without cash, ergo without sales, your business will die rather quickly.
It seems to me that many “marketers” don’t like to think of themselves as a salesperson because they feel shameful of selling. Many seem to think that selling is the same as playing with the minds of their prospects, misleading them and pushing them to buy things they do not need. They think of selling as just another way of picking money from people’s pockets.
This is unfortunate, because businesses need to sell their products and services to customers. They need to convince them that they are better off with the product, even if they have to pay hard cold cash for it. Unlike government and organized crime, as a businessman you cannot rely on force to peddleyour product or service.
Negative Emotions Kill Relationships and Trust
But if you think that selling involves misleading prospects, you probably will…
- just try to use deceptive practices when selling.
- and – if you are a decent person -you will feel shameful for that.
The bad news is: If you try to deceive somebody and feel shameful about it, your prospect will notice. He will dislike you, even to the point where he avoids to talk to you. If that happens in the context of sales, your closing rate – or in direct marketing terms you conbversion rate – will tend to be zero, and you will have a very hard time to generate the cash you need. Success will be elusive.
This suggests the conclusion that you have to be a hard nosed and cynical guy to be successful in sales. But this is not true. Although you will sell more if you are deceptive and cynical than somebody else who feels shameful about his actions, t the deceptive and cynical guy will be only mediocre sales man.”
“Know Your Trade” Applies to Sales, Too
The masters of sales use a step-by-step approach to selling. Here are the four most generic steps in a sales process. Obviously every step can be divided up into more sub-steps.
- Prospecting (Lead Generation): You look for people who migh be interested in your product, and for whom your solution makes sense.
- Qualifying: You seperate those leads who are likely to buy from those, who will probably not buy. Reasons could be that they have already a similar solution, they do not have money, they would not profit from your solution etc.
- Presenting: You open a two-way conversation with those who survived the qualification process. You discuss the problem at hand, and how your solution can help them to be much better off.
- Closing: After you presented to the prospects all relevant information and helped them to imagine how much better off they were with your solution, you ask them to make a decision. If they cannot make a decision immediately, you set a deadline.
Selling does not involve pushing people, or telling them what they should do. Instead you give them all the information and tools (like samples) to come to an informed decision and ask them to decide. You gear the prospecting process in a way that you get those leads who might be interested in your solution, and you use a sharp qualifying process to weed those leads out of the sales process who would not buy anyway, or who would create a lot of headache for you after the purchase, because your solution would be not very helpful for them.
Careful targeting of the prospecting process, and a sharp qualifying process are as essential as a professional presentation and a strong call for action. Without the first two steps you will waste your money and energy with people who will never buy, or worse, with those who will have no real use for your solution and then spread everywhere that your product is not worth the price.
Selling to the wrong prospects leads to low sales conversion rates and small profits. Such lack of earnings lets some sales people conclude that they have to deceive people and try to trick and bully them into purchasing their product or service.
But deceiving and bullying prospects sets them on a slippery slope. Over a short time conversion rates will further erode. Trust and respect for such a salesman in his audience will suffer badly. If he does not reverse his behavior quickly, he will end up pushing cheap but useless merchandise onto stupid people, living a life of scarcity, but with an abundance of hassles.
Trust and Relationships Are a Salesman’s Main Asset
This approach will grow trust and relationships even with those people who do not buy this time, because you provided through the sales process itself a very valuable service to them: You showed them a problem possibly from a fresh perspective, presented a possible way to tackle that problem and left them either with a potential solution, or the knowledge why that solution is not for them and for what they have to watch out if they want to solve the problem at hand.
Related books:
