I’ve had a dream of speaking about love in sales for a couple of years now, but frankly the topic scares me a little. I mean we’ve seen Presidents of the United States and U.S. Congressmen brought to task for love in the workplace. Most recently the golf icon, Tiger Woods felt compelled to apologize for love outside his home. So while I whole heartedly believe in the importance of love in sales, it’s not that kind of love.
The problem with English is that many words like love had radically different meanings. In Latin, amor relates to a more physical or sexual love while caritas is the root for our English word charity and so ties in to spiritual love or an unselfish love for others. So when I talk about love in sales, I mean that heart-centered, soft sell sales and marketing requires a base of caring for others enough to put their interests ahead of your personal gain long enough to find out what they need and want, what their problems and desires are, what they expect the outcome to be. Provided you can help them, then you do so. This kind of love is related to the expression often associated with the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm.” [...]
It seems with Internet marketing there is always something to learn. The past two days brought me another of those lessons. I was feeling really good about finishing my 8th lesson of the 9 lessons I’m giving people who join my community by opting onto mailing list. Then I noticed that not everyone on my list had received all of the lessons. And some lessons seemed to be missing – bummer.
So I started to make up the missing lessons. In the course of trying to create an autoresponder campaign to ensure this wouldn’t happen again, I discovered my error. So what was the lesson here? It was a reminder of the problem with communications that all salespeople and marketers experience with customers: terminology. We often use terms, expressions, and words to mean slightly different things. This is why it’s so important to ask how people mean what they just said and to periodically during the conversation repeat back in your own words what you heard or [...]
In the early years of attending sales training seminars, one of the dramatic effects sales trainers, especially with a large audience would try for would be to tell us, “When you ask a question,” then they would pause for a moment and follow that by yelling, “SHUT UP!” They would continue with this cliché, “He who speaks first loses.”
If you’ve read any of my blog posts about heart-centered, soft sell sales, by now you should recognize that as a hard sell attitude. It’s all about control and a win-lose philosophy of sales. Nevertheless, today, I’m going to tell you something similar but from a different perspective. When you ask a question, be quiet until your prospect or customer answers. It shows respect. And respect can make the difference in your [...]
This habit of speech is one of the hardest I can think of to break. It’s natural when we feel attacked to defend ourselves. The problem is that we can harm a relationship we’ve worked hard to build. There’s something about saying “yes, but …” that undermines trust and liking someone.
Years ago I learned to never give a compliment then follow it with “but ….” In the mind of the person receiving the compliment, the “but” cancels out everything positive you said before it. In sales and marketing, whether heart-centered, soft sell sales or hard sell, you can do the same thing, particularly when handling objections.
It’s common to take them personally, to become defensive. As a result, we try a little empathy. We get in trouble when we follow our statement of understanding with a ”but …” to show our prospects or customers that while they made a good point, they are still wrong.
This is when you can win the battle but lose the war. So what’s the answer? Train yourself not to react. Avoid the battle. Develop your natural curiosity about what is really being said. Use heart-centered, soft sell sales by focusing on them. Start a dialogue. Ask [...]
Reading my friend Bob Poole’s book, Listen First – Sell Later, he reminded me about the value of getting to know your customers’ industries. This is important to all salespeople and marketers, not just to soft sell sales and marketing people. To really help yourself get established in your sales and marketing efforts, study up on your ideal customers’ market or industry. Once you choose where you want to initially focus, start reading up as much as you can about it. There are several approaches to successful research. Likewise, there are at least three purposes to your doing this research and getting involved in a low key way. [...]
This past week, I watched a video of our youngest granddaughter that Ian posted on Facebook. He captured her as she made her first efforts to stand. What a treat! She was so proud of herself and excited as she wobbled trying to learn balance. She had a good grip on the pole she’d used to pull herself up. She’d let go with only one hand just pleased as could be. Naturally, daddy heaped praise on her too.
I often think about the parallel in sales and marketing to infants learning to stand, walk and talk. It fascinates me that infants are risk takers. Survival demands it. When we learn to stand and then to walk, we spend more time falling than we do standing or walking. Yet somewhere along the line we forget that all life’s activity takes failure to succeed at new skills. This is true especially true in sales and marketing. The more complex something is, the more failure we’ll have to deal with. Good sales ability involves numerous skills, each of which we must master. [...]
After our recent switch from DSL to cable service for Internet, I feel a kinship with Charles H. Green’s comments in “Killing Trust with Measurements and Rewards,” in Trust-Based Selling. Green describes how the pharmaceutical industry has been increasing sales representatives while their effectiveness keeps dropping.
Among the problems they have is that as their sales force gets younger and younger, the expertise of their representatives declines. Doctors are seeing these representatives as “pill pushers” rather than as knowledgeable advisors and consultants. Why should they bother wasting precious time they could spend with patients to see salespeople who only care about their own metrics, i.e. how many scripts are written for their products. This is definitely a hard sell approach to sales.
Before you attempt to measure your customer service effectiveness, put yourself in the place of your customers. You build trust by demonstrating understanding of their problems and acting to solve them, not having the computer call for a customer service survey.Take the soft sell sales and marketing approach of listening and then guiding them to the right solution for their wants and needs. Make sure it works. A partial solution only serves to generate hostility towards you and your products and services. Done right, selling – and customer service – can be fun, fulfilling and mutually [...]
This article is about famous marketing lines often called taglines or slogans. This week I finished the 6th lesson that’s part of my opt-in bonus, an ecourse, 9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who Want What You Provide. This lesson, “How to Stand Out in a Cast of Thousands,” describes how to Identify Your Unique Selling Proposition.
Writing that article inspired this blog post. Here are some of my favorite taglines for you to match up in a little quiz. To keep it interesting, I researched a few movie taglines too. These slogans become brief statements of the company’s or movie’s unique selling proposition. Notice that some describe very minor differences between the company whose slogan it is and its competitors. The key point is that they are establishing their position in the minds of the public. Not all of these statements are taglines. Some will be identifiers I think you’ll recognize because the company’s branding is so [...]
American English has lots of interesting expressions and clichés. I like them because they tend to convey concepts or morals, as in “the moral of the story” is, like in melodramas. Good writers try to avoid them because they become so overused they lose their punch. Nevertheless, the moral of “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks” seems to be that as people age, they get so stuck in their ways that they refuse to learn.
However valid that once was, in Internet marketing the leaders I like to follow are within five to ten years of my age. In some cases, like Judith & Jim, I know how old they are because they’ve told us. I turned 62 in June, by the way. I don’t recall how old Cathy Perkins, the WordPress Wizard, is; but I know from things she’s said she’s done that she’s around my age, maybe a little younger. Alex Mandossian, from what I know of him, fits in this group as do Jeff Herring, the Article Guy, and Tom Justin. One of the women in Soft Sell Marketers Association has told us she’s 74 and just getting a handle on Internet marketing. The important factors are, therefore, not chronological age, i.e. how many birthdays you’ve had, but rather how curious you are and how strong your motivation to learn is. [...]
There’s more to life than money alone. I know that sounds shocking from someone who trains people to sell and who considers himself a businessman. Nevertheless, for most of us, it’s true. And from my experience working with small business owners, I find that most of them have a passion for what they do. Naturally, we all want to make lots of money and be able to have the freedom and possessions it brings.
In both my experience and reading, I find that most of us work to make a living to do the things that are important to us. The rare ones among us do the work out of love for the job itself. In my case, I sell for the love of it. I do sales training because it gives me even greater pleasure. So, sell for the love of it! Personally, I want the fullness of job satisfaction too. I love selling for the fun, fulfillment and mutual rewards I get from heart-centered, soft sell sales and [...]
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