ABC of sales is now closed! (Old school sales v New sales)

First off you got to be a sales person and one that loves the business deeply to get your head around the reason why people buy things, if you know why, then you are a made person so to speak.

Seems you can go to University just about anywhere and study Marketing and study Phycology, but I have yet to see a degree course in pure salesmanship.

Sales and Marketing academics to whom I subscribe to, are offering such postulations as we have been getting it badly wrong since the mid-nineties, and Dennys book ‘Selling towin , the bible of the 1990’salesman’ which was thrust into my hand on my first day as a capital equipment salesman in UK, was the start of it.

Since the nineties, Sales got quite regimented, and we all had a drill and we were taught how to lead prospects down ‘the alley full of rooms’ and we had an answer to shut all the doors to take them to the close. This resulted in’ Buyer’s remorse’ a term born of that period  to describe when a client feels cheated the next morning after your game of sales- tennis resulted in him losing.

Good sales people were often picked for their charm and ability to establish rapport, which helped the sales process, because it was harder to say no to a guy who liked your daughter’s pictures on your desk, and was in awe at your status and gave you credit for the years you had given to your position in your company.  But really it was all what I call:

Back-foot selling

Back-foot selling is where Sales people are trained to see the buyer as an adversary, ‘No one likes sales people so we will ‘show them who’s smarter’  as we were trained, we were taught to establish this fake rapport , build you up, make you feel good,  then have a series of text book answers to all the objections. Like my all-time favourite that was taught to me by my friends in Multi-Level Marketing:

“Is this MLM?” The potential asks

“Why do you like MLM?” was the trained standard reply If they said yes then you said

“Great because that’s exactly what this is” If they said No then you said “Great because this is not MLM”

We were taught ‘Buyers are liars too’ so don’t feel bad it’s a war out there son and make sure you don’t lose!  

I had it drilled into me to always stand in reception to greet the buyer, so as to have an air of authority!

Now as I have advanced into the marketing side I realise that the very top performers in Sales are top for one reason, they are not on the back foot, they are being called up and asked to present to a company regularly and they have created this environment where they get more leads than they know what to do with, and they Cherry pick, a term for leads that were easy to close, because the company already wanted your product.

Any old school salesman will tell you that a few times a month marketing did their job well, and you had these ‘leads’ and all you had to do is go and be respectful, and show them the product and come back with the order, these were as good as in the bag and every salesman dreamed of a lot more of those types of leads and not the ones we had to scrap for on a day to day basis.

So how do you get more of these easy leads?

In today’s market the opportunity to brand yourself is even easier and to pre –educate and get the people wanting your product so that all you do as the sales person is be polite and lead them to the correct choice of product and bide your daily time wisely between the top prospects all the time, and never be with hagglers and time wasters.

This opportunity is called the Internet and the ability to warm up potentials has created a gulf between the way sales is conducted now to how it was 20 years ago.

Online selling is still about rapport. Sales, when you have embraced the profession, should be about:

Creating an environment where people want to buy from you and all you have to do is give them the choices that are right for them.

By establishing a blog and a social media strategy you can have your company name branded in front of people on a regular basis for absolute peanuts in monetary terms.

This is called a Content marketing strategy and it is your ‘warm up guy’ you should blog at least once a week on a separate blog and tell people why you do what you do, what attracted you to your business, what’s your emotion and why people should trust you, without selling! But you should make it very easy for them to contact you.

Psychology says if they contacted you they are ready to buy, and become the dream type of lead any sales person wants.

By using social media you can get more people to read your content and then fall in love with you, do this often enough and grow your social media so that more people can see your deep personal content that is a winning content marketing strategy that will turn your sales job into an order takers job.

You have to love what you do, if you don’t people will see it in your work and then you will lose the trust and you will back on the ABC (Always be Closing) route of you V the customer and the war of sales! Which has proven so hard now even cold calling is not getting the results it was back then, so you are not even getting enough bouts to beat the buyers into submission anymore!

You have to come out of the board room and be open and honest about who you are and put your personality on the line, in front of millions of people on social media, they will find out if you sell a shoddy product or service through Facebook and Foursquare so you might as well get it over and done with now and arrive in the 21^st century kicking and screaming, well if you want to survive in business that is!

For a consultation about how to set up your content marketing strategy and how to grow your social media to start getting warmer leads for your business and stop getting put on the back burner contact Netmedia