One of the strongest tools I’ve had in sales is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm sells more than any other skill that I’ve seen. The point is, as the salesperson, “If you don’t care, who else will?”
This doesn’t require you to be really outgoing and dynamic in expression. If it’s a natural part of your personality to be energetically expressive, then that’s how you authentically show your enthusiasm. But if you have a more restrained personality, don’t try to act expressively enthusiastic. People will recognize it as fake, which will undermine your credibility. Just be yourself. Show your belief and excitement about your products and services as you would normally and naturally. Subdued enthusiasm is still enthusiasm. When you speak with conviction and confidence, you will be believable. [...]
Selling is one of the toughest jobs I know, especially for heart-centered, soft sell salespeople and marketers. Selling can also be one of the one most exciting, rewarding, and fulfilling jobs I know, especially for heart-centered, soft sell salespeople and marketers. For me, it depended on what I was selling and how much I believed in the value my products and services delivered to my customers. When I was excited about the benefits of my products and services, I could be passionate and really enthusiastic about sharing with my potential buyers. But for me to have passion in my sales, I had to believe what I sold would improve their lives. And passion was important to seeing me through the rejections and the dull and unpleasant activities required in sales.
Among the most rewarding sales calls were those when I took the time to find out what the clients felt their problems were and what they were looking for before I started selling. When I knew what they wanted, it was easy to share, explain and demonstrate how my solutions would help them achieve their dreams or solve their problems. In other words, I would feel passionate about what I was doing. To find the same passion for your sales career, ask yourself the five questions in this [...]
Strange as it sounds, soft sell sales and marketing are, in some ways, tougher to do than hard sell because they require the self-discipline to focus on the concerns of others, and they require caring enough about others to delay your gratification of “closing” the sale. You must wait to describe how wonderful your products and services are until the customers are satisfied that you know and understand what their problems and/or desires are. When you have earned their trust by listening and by asking meaningful questions showing you want to understand better, they will be open and receptive to your advice. This is natural because now they feel you care about them, not just their wallets. Then, when they are ready, you can help your customers buy. [...]
Dorothy and I just went to see Julie & Julia. It was a delightful movie about overcoming obstacles through persistence and creativity, about frustration and “meltdowns,” and about a passion for writing. I’m an average cook with no real desire to attend Le Cordon Bleu so that’s not where I connected with this story. My ability to relate comes from my passion for what I do and have done. I could relate to both Julie and Julia’s love of cooking and of writing as well as all that they went through, including Julia’s being rejected by her first publisher. Interestingly, in both cases their passion developed over time and had lots of points where they could have quit. Sales has been that way for me because, like Julie and Julia, I grew into both my commitment to and passion for a career in [...]
For hundreds of year or longer, there were merchants who traveled from town to town, country to country. You’ve doubtless seen movies and TV shows of the Old West when a peddler came through a remote rural area with his wagon loaded with as much merchandise as he could carry. If you wanted something then, like a skillet, you bought what he had or did without. This gave rise to an expression in retail that I was taught when I first went to work for Radio Shack Computer Centers in 1981: sell what’s on the wagon.
I’m telling you, don’t sell your customers what’s on the wagon just to get the sale regardless of whether it’ right or wrong for them. Soft sell sales and marketing are about aligning with your customers. Get to know and understand their problems and desires, wants and needs. Then advise them with all the honesty and integrity you would want if you were the [...]
About twenty years ago, I attended a sales training class that has ever since stood out as the classic example of hard sell. This former vacuum cleaner salesman taught us how he sold 90% of the homes in this small town in Nevada or Arizona. He told us to just develop a series of questions that everybody would answer yes to. Each yes was like a degree on a thermometer. Eventually you had so many yeses that the temperature reached a point where — that’s right — where they couldn’t say no. Degree by degree he built his closing momentum.
I left that training really disappointed that I’d wasted my money. Talk about manipulation. Long before I heard Judith & Jim talk about soft sell marketing and their Soft Sell Marketers Association, I was a soft sell salesperson and soft sell marketer. The irony is that when you use the soft sell approach and ask questions to better understand your prospects’ situation, you don’t need to memorize checklists of questions or drill yourself on clever, irresistible closes. You gain freedom to be yourself, to actually have fun relating with your prospects as people. Soft sell sales and marketing build relationships and make connections. [...]
I love it when someone can help me appreciate my profession in a new way. The fascinating part of it is that after over 30 years in sales and marketing, it took a couple psychologists to give me a major insight into how to make my marketing activities more effective. I found their tweak to the definition of marketing in The Heart of Marketing by Judith Sherven & Jim Sniechowski, known as Judith & Jim.
This significant change is so subtle yet simple. I was always taught that marketing is about making yourself known in the marketplace. To quote them, “The essence of selling is converting your prospective customer into an actual customer. And the essence of marketing is — preparing your prospective customer to buy.” [...]
No matter how noble your efforts and how much you want to help people, each of us only has 24 hours in a day. For most business purposes, the time to work with prospects and customers tends to be significantly less. After too many hours, I lose enthusiasm and energy so eight to ten hours is my practical limit normally. I find too that as much as I love my work, I need downtime to refresh and recharge. Still there is time enough but no more, if I manage my time well, to reach the prospects and customers I need to.
The point here is that none of us has an unlimited supply of time. So how do we grow our businesses then? We do it by identifying our Ideal Customer Profile, narrow down the suspects to only those who are likely to benefit from your products and services. This approach is soft sell sales and [...]
Stop wasting your time, effort, and money trying to sell to the whole world. It takes discipline to train yourself to narrow your efforts to your best effect. I too have to discipline myself: soft sell sales and soft sell marketing appeal mostly to small business owners and people who care about developing long term relationships. Yet we find it tempting to be available to anyone and everyone who might want to buy our products. We don’t want to miss out on any sale. The whole world is our oyster. Not so.
The people who thrive are those who identify their niche and tightly focus on what they do that appeals to that specific group. That’s why I strongly encourage everyone in soft sell sales and soft sell marketing to determine your ideal customer profile. Prospects who match that have the greatest likelihood of wanting and feeling they need your products and services because such problems are common to people and companies like your best customers. Help customers buy because it works for them. You’ll find your sales more fun and the results mutually [...]
I’ve had numerous clients who wonder why their websites fail to produce sales. The answer is simply the lack of marketing. Traffic doesn’t just happen because you have a URL or website address and a presence on the Internet any more than it does if you have an office in an office building or an industrial park. Having had a small business in a commercial park, I can assure you, we did not have walk-in traffic. The Internet with millions of websites is worse than any neighborhood in the world for trying to be seen just by having a “presence” on the web.
No matter how gorgeous your website, it’s only an address on an overcrowded virtual marketplace. The fifteen proactive marketing ideas I list here will enable you to expand your reach beyond what you ever could with a storefront. You can attract people looking for what you offer. Soft sell sales & marketing activities enable you to develop trust by showing that you care about your prospects’ challenges and dreams. You are giving them a taste for what you can do to help them. And when they are ready, you help customers buy through guiding them and by describing the benefits instead of manipulating and [...]
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