Heart centered sales and marketing

By John Aberle / August 11, 2010

This post is actually my first video, a welcome to this blog. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4enI6MNHO3E[/youtube]

The following content is close to what I cover in my video:

Do you hate selling even though it’s to promote your own business? On the other hand, do you enjoy helping people solve their problems with your products or services?

One solution is to stop trying to sell. Focus instead on developing a conversation centered on finding out what their challenges are that relate to what your products and services. What do they want and feel they need? If it’s not a problem, is there some dream or desire they want to fulfill?

Keep asking questions about this until you thoroughly understand what they want, why they want it, and what it will mean for them when they solve the problem or obtain their desire. Go five levels deep when asking people about what fixing this will mean to them.

When you listen first and seek to understand your prospect, you show you care about them and their wants and needs. You show you respect them and want to help instead of control. You connect person to person.

Help Customers Buy – with this approach, you won’t need to hate selling anymore. Instead you will find selling fun, fulfilling, and mutually rewarding. You will feel good about what you do because you are helping your customers and at the same time making a fair profit.

Heart centered sales and marketing

By John Aberle / August 6, 2010

Have you noticed that your percentage of repeat customer purchases is lower than you want? Maybe your sales approach is is destroying your hopes for repeat sales. Are you teaching your sales team to use control, manipulate or pressure? Stop!

Ask yourself, “How do I feel when some salesperson tries to control, manipulate or pressure me into signing the contract?”  If you don’t like it, why do you want your salespeople to use those very techniques? Would you like a better way, one that keeps integrity with your care and concern about your customers? Not only is it possible to do sales and marketing that respects your prospects and customers, but by using the heart centered, soft sell sales and marketing attitude, you and your sales team will find selling fun, fulfilling and mutually rewarding.

On anything but the most basic sale, like groceries or household cleaning supplies, prospects want to know, like and trust you. Even in these cases, they need to trust. However, the trust now goes to the product rather than the salesperson. The higher the price, the more important the relationship is. The strongest approach I can think of to build the necessary trust is to show that you sincerely care by asking probing questions to understand their concerns, interests, wants and desires.

By the way, asking questions isn’t a magic wand, though I’ve attended a sales training class years ago in which the trainer actual taught us that if you get enough yeses then the customer reaches a point where they can’t say no. Obviously his sales style was hard sell. Ask instead to understand and to connect.

In heart centered, soft sell sales and marketing, you use questions to identify and understand how you can serve your prospects and customers best. Your products and services are there to provide solutions. Your goal is to make connections that enable you to become partners with your prospects and customers.

If your sales approach is destroying your hopes for repeat sales, I can help. When you are ready for someone to teach your sales team how to connect better with your prospects, please email john@johnaberle.com or call me at 626-393-9741 (Southern California) to discuss what you want to accomplish. Remember, it really is possible to find selling for fun, fulfilling, and mutually rewarding.

Please check out my Help Customers Buy blog posts, such as “How to Avoid Looking Stupid When Asking Questions,”  and my Aberle Enterprises article, “Hate Selling? Let’s Make Selling Fun” .