Aqua Pebble

Sep

3

The secret of sell­ing to me

September 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Writ­ten by: Lee on Sep­tem­ber 3, 2009.

SoldNote: I posted a ques­tion in a few of the LinkedIn groups to which I sub­scribe. I stated that ‘I hate being sold to,’ and then asked ‘so what gets me to buy?’ and expressed my opin­ion in a post on Aqua Peb­ble.
I received a lot of com­ments in the groups and posted the links at the end of this arti­cle. This is the fol­low up arti­cle sum­maris­ing what I feel are the most rel­e­vant points that have been made.

A few months ago, I attended a sum­mer fair at my children’s school. A young boy eagerly came up to us as we were about to head out and asked if we would like to play his game. He was so enthu­si­as­tic and happy it was con­ta­gious. I couldn’t help but say ‘Yes, we would love to!’ I bought tick­ets and let my chil­dren play. Other than their classes own games, this was the only other game they played. Here was a young boy who prospected, made the sale and we all were happy. So what did he do right?

I found a num­ber of points Steve Clarke made inter­est­ing. At first, I wasn’t sure about his com­ment about cre­at­ing a want. Many peo­ple com­mented about there hav­ing to be a need or want and usu­ally linked to deeper emo­tions – which I agree with. I usu­ally only buy when I decide I need or want some­thing and have rarely bought because some­one con­vinced me to buy. How­ever, in this case, is that not what this boy did? We did not intend to play any other classes games due to a class com­pe­ti­tion to raise funds.

There were a num­ber of fun­da­men­tals in place on this occa­sion: we had gone to the fair to have fun: right place, right emo­tions. Did I feel trust? Yes! Was the boy hon­est? Again, the answer is yes, he told us where the stall was (con­ve­nient loca­tion), how much it was to play (right price range) and what you could win (hook/benefit/want), he never made exag­ger­ated claims or pro­vided us with false promises. It was so pure and I did not feel like I was sold to…but I had. This boy had pas­sion. It was only on my way home that I thought Wow! I now know this boy found the secret to sell­ing to me.

I have used this expe­ri­ence as an anal­ogy of some of the var­i­ous points I have seen con­sis­tently made in the dis­cus­sions. There are other impor­tant points that were not rel­e­vant to my anal­ogy above namely:

Build­ing rela­tion­ships are impor­tant. Now I would argue that this depends on your offer­ing. I have no idea what that boys name is, don’t remem­ber what he looks like, and may never speak to him again, but in busi­ness I cer­tainly have rela­tion­ships with sup­pli­ers. As Marc Rocha stated ‘peo­ple buy from people’.

First impres­sions count. Xavier Sotelo made this point say­ing most sales were lost on open­ing in the first few sec­onds. A num­ber of peo­ple agreed with this opinion.

Most peo­ple do not like to be sold to. Now this is an inter­est­ing point and after read­ing a num­ber of com­ments I think I change my stance to peo­ple don’t like to feel that they are being sold to. Like Steve said he likes a well pre­sented ‘pitch’ but loathes a hard sell. A num­ber of peo­ple echoed this view. We don’t always know about a prod­uct that could help us so are not aware of the need.
I thought Reno Lovi­son asked an inter­est­ing ques­tion that was sit­ting at the back of my mind when I read the answers. He asked “How do we ini­ti­ate a sale with­out cold call­ing or spamming?”

My first answer is that I go to them. When I want some­thing I get on the net and find a prod­uct or ser­vice, or I ask for a rec­om­men­da­tion. If I can’t find you, you don’t even get onto my radar. So how do I find out about new prod­ucts, usu­ally from read­ing peo­ples advice, com­ments and rec­om­men­da­tions on forums and social net­work­ing, the net, TV, mag­a­zines, radio, dur­ing social­is­ing or net­work­ing. I am sure though if some­one called me about a product/service I was inter­ested in I would lis­ten, how­ever con­sid­er­ing the amount of wrong tar­get­ing I pre­fer to find you myself than deal with the irri­ta­tion of ‘junk’ – but that’s just me.

From a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive the job is to get the feet through the door, phone ring­ing or your web­site vis­i­tors click­ing, how­ever you like to coin it. This means tar­get­ing the right cus­tomers, at the right time with rel­e­vant offers and then the sell­ing begins. Mar­keters analyse what brought in the high­est ROI, new cus­tomers, repeat cus­tomer and the list goes on. Sales peo­ple analyse what tech­niques worked, con­ver­sion to sales and their list goes on. At the end of the day sales and mar­ket­ing should be a team work­ing together as each could be the demise of the other.

Lastly, I was told a long time ago that all suc­cess­ful peo­ple are good sales peo­ple, as get­ting to the top takes more than being good at what you do.

Links to dis­cus­sions (PS: you need to be reg­is­tered with LinkedIn to see these)
SalesBlogcast.com
Mar­ket­ing Pro­fes­sion­als Net­work
Mar­ket­ing Oper­a­tions
Inno­v­a­tive Mar­ket­ing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators

Thank-you to every­one who contributed.

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For more infor­ma­tion to hire Lee-Ann as a mar­ket­ing coach, for work­shops, talks, writ­ing or any of her other ser­vices visit the ser­vices page.

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