7:10: Are you allergic to sales?
17:10: Selling doesn’t have to be manipulative.
19:00: It’s not just salesmen who are in sales—so are great leaders, networkers, and you!
28:50: Who are your perfect customers, the people you love to work with? Define them.
31:45: How are sales like an interview process?
38:40: People buy you for you.
45:30: If you visit the Amazon Rainforest, you may find a wild CEO there??
If you’ve ever cracked open a sales manual, perhaps it gave a whole ton of tips to generate leads, or exact techniques to come up with and deliver your value proposition…You could write an encyclopedia about it.
But you won’t need an encyclopedia for good sales. Jeff tells us that sense of empathy and connection with your clients is critically important for sales. It’s important to focus on your relationship with your client and how interact with them during the sales process.
Some people distrust the sales process, thinking of used car salesmen and being fooled into buyer’s remorse. “So sales is bad, evil, and manipulative,” they’ll tell themselves. Jeff suggests instead that it’s not that people hate sales—it’s that hate being sold to poorly. You hate the approach, not the actual product.
To get over a hatred of sales, Jeff recommends a quick exercise. Write down everything you think about sales which aren’t useful.
Slimy, manipulative, and shallow? No thanks, right? No one would want to go into sales if this is what it were. And if this is our negative relationship with sales, how well can we sell anything?
You may be in sales and not even know it! Not just products, but we could be selling ourselves! Jeff then asks us to consider how good sales could be and examples of it—think Gandhi and MLK, visionaries who successfully sold their views. Sales could be about finding matches between people, or leading people. Rethink your relationship with sales.
It’s not about manipulating people. It’s about finding matches, or sharing your vision. If that’s your new relationship with sales, that’s an entirely different cause. That’s something else.
Okay, so you’ve redefined your relationship with sale! But how to go about selling successfully? Jeff recommends taking time to identify your best customer, one with whom is a pleasure to work. And instead of focusing on customers with lesser returns, tailor the way you market your business to that exact person! Specialize and find your niche, and then see how you can properly package your product to that niche.
How exactly would you package your product? With a little bit of insight into the personality and traits of your ideal customer, Jeff recommends you to “speak your customer’s language.” Someone in the weight loss industry may know that being more healthy entails lifestyle changes from such as exercising more, cooking for oneself, and cutting down on sugar, but the actual customer will say it differently. The customer will just say that he wants to lose weight.
Sell them what they want (to “lose weight”), and give them what they actually need (“a change in lifestyle”).
People buy the experience along with the product, and selling should focus on this as well.
One CEO of Porsche mentioned that he’s not in the business of selling cars—he’s in the business of selling street-legal racecars and the membership to an exclusive club.
Your product isn’t just your product—it’s also an experience you sell to people.
Thanks to Jeff for coming onto the show—stay tuned, and stay awesome! Visit him at his website!
On Twitter: @JeffreySlayter
