If you want to start selling, stop talking...

Sales: we need to have a healthy perspective on what ‘selling’ is. ‘Hard’ sell, ‘soft’ sell – we all have an opinion on what we love or loath about having to make the sale. And it’s not, as some would have you believe, the beginning of a relationship with our customer, it should be a milestone within an already developing relationship.

“If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.” Bob Hooey

Selling is not about being the cheapest or the most flexible or the fastest. All of these may form part of what we are offering but at its heart sales is really about how we can help our customers to be more profitable and build a good relationship based on reliability, trust, support, honesty, consistency, credibility and speed. Adopting this attitude puts a whole new perspective on how we should approach prospects.

… Start listening

Before we can even begin to sell to a prospective customer we need to be listening. Listening to find out exactly what their needs are. Where their ‘pain’ is. Only when we know this can we hope to offer answers to benefit them and their business. If we’ve been listening properly we’ll know how to time, package and deliver our solution and honestly respond to their needs. Not over promising, not claiming we can do something we cannot.

Do you talk too much? Stops talking, start listening and build the best kind of customer relationships – the ones that will last.

Image courtesy of: Thiago Felipe Festa