Have you noticed how people resist change? Change involves risks. We never know when we make a change if we’re going to be better off or worse off. So what can a heart centered salesperson or marketer do to encourage prospects to change to his or her products and services? The answer is to find ways to reduce the risk. One of those ways is to use social networking to develop relationships. This social networking tip describes how to comment on other sites.
With the emphasis today on attraction marketing, you need a way to draw people to your blog and website. Show people how much you know by engaging in conversations on forums, group discussions and commenting on other people’s articles or blog posts. Then, it’s totally acceptable to put a link to an article that you have on your blog or on your website when it actually contributes additional information and insight to the topic being discussed. [...]
Social networking can be a blessing or just another annoyance. Used properly, it’s a wonderful tool for heart-centered, soft sell salespeople and marketers because it shows you as a person. Prospects and customers want to come to know, like and trust you. When they discover you’re a person too, it can help you to connect with them. Done wrong it merely shows you’re a twit and will hurt your chances. Remember, social networking is about being social and interacting with people. Which brings us to today’s social networking tip: If you’re writing me to become my friend or connection, then write to me.
LinkedIn and Facebook as well as most other social networking sites have marvelous tools for inviting everyone in your different mailing lists to join you on their sites. If we’ve never met, then I would appreciate knowing why you want to be friends. What do we have in common? If creating a new friendship isn’t important enough to jot a very short note as to why you would like to be friends on Facebook or connect on LinkedIn or any of the other social networking sites, then you don’t really want my friendship. You are just trying to attract numbers. That’s all right. It’s just not what I want in a friend or a [...]
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 [...]
If you really care about building relationships with your customers and prospects, then you will frequently find yourself doing research to confirm your facts. Because trust is a fragile thing, I often look information up to double check things. I want my clients and potential clients to be able to count on me. Trust is core to heart-centered, soft sell sales and marketing.
Recently, my favorite reference site put out a request for support. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, is asking for our help. You probably already use Wikipedia. If not, I can’t encourage you strongly enough to support this nonprofit organization that seeks to become the largest encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia is already the “fifth most-read site in the world.” “More than 340 million people use Wikipedia every month – almost a third of the Internet-connected [...]
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s filled with abundance including feelings of love and family plus food including my favorite turkey and Dorothy’s favorite, pumpkin pie which she bakes. There are family recipes we enjoy year to year, like the cranberry relish Mother always made with fresh cranberries. It’s thrilling to see the next generation active in helping prepare the family meal for 20 to 21 members of our extended family.
Most of all, I love that Thanksgiving is a day of gratitude for all of the blessings of the prior year, even those that don’t look initially like blessing. I wish I’d learned earlier the value of focusing on gratitude. I know that as well as I have done in sales, I could have succeeded to an even higher had I filled my heart with appreciation instead of complaint. Thanksgiving provides a golden opportunity to review the blessings in your life. I think you’ll find giving thanks fills your heart with attractive energy. Heart-centered, soft sell sales and marketing thrives on a spirit of gratitude. [...]
You’re wasting energy trying to get past the gatekeeper. For as long as I have been in sales and marketing, I’ve heard sales trainers teach techniques to get past the gatekeeper. Frankly, that’s a waste of energy and bound to tick someone off. Anyone who leans towards soft sell sales and marketing should instinctively appreciate this fact.
Believing that you must get past the gatekeeper is a sales myth. If you change your attitude and approach, the gatekeeper can actually be your ally. Business owners and executives would be overwhelmed if everyone wanting a slice of their time got it. So I prefer to think of the gatekeeper as a screen.
Soft sell sales and marketing are about building relationships and making connections with prospects. They are about creating trust. So, forget the sales myth about needing to get past the gatekeeper. Invest a little time building your relationship with that person first. When they recognize the value of what I have to offer, they point me to the right person and help me get in. Selling becomes fun, fulfilling and mutually rewarding this [...]
I was listening today to a download of the Cathy Perkins interviewing Kelly Rudolph, Your Personal Safety Trainer on Cathy’s April 30, 2009 The Wizard Teleseminar. Kelly gave one of the best explanations of how and why negatives fail to work — and of the power of reframing negative expressions. When I heard her explain, I had one of those “Ah ha” moments.
I’ve long known that the subconscious mind works in images, not words. As a spiritual student all of my adult life, I’ve studied intensively in the area of personal growth. I’ve corrected expressions I was raised with, like “I fear that ….” When you are working to develop self-confidence, especially important to any soft sell salesperson or soft sell marketer, the messages you program into your subconscious have major impact on your self-image. After some 40 years of study, Kelly kicked up my understanding a notch when she pointed out that the subconscious has no images for negative terms, like “not,” “don’t,” “never,” and “no.” So what does this have to do with soft sell sales and marketing? Everything. There’s something about human nature that seems to like negative statements. [...]
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. [...]
When I’m consulting with clients on soft sell sales and marketing, I come alive. I absolutely love training people on how to improve their sales and marketing effectiveness. I really think that a career in sales is fun, fulfilling, and mutually rewarding when you help customers buy.
At the same time, it is work, lots of work. Nor is it a get-rich-quick scheme. A career in soft sell sales offers a lifestyle of hard work rewarding success with much more than money. [...]
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Social Networking Tip – How to Comment on Other Sites
Have you noticed how people resist change? Change involves risks. We never know when we make a change if we’re going to be better off or worse off. So what can a heart centered salesperson or marketer do to encourage prospects to change to his or her products and services? The answer is to find ways to reduce the risk. One of those ways is to use social networking to develop relationships. This social networking tip describes how to comment on other sites.
With the emphasis today on attraction marketing, you need a way to draw people to your blog and website. Show people how much you know by engaging in conversations on forums, group discussions and commenting on other people’s articles or blog posts. Then, it’s totally acceptable to put a link to an article that you have on your blog or on your website when it actually contributes additional information and insight to the topic being discussed. [...]