Con­fused about selling?

Judging by the num­ber of books there are about “how to sell”, the busi­ness world must be full of salespeople and their man­agers who all believe that they could and should be selling more… if they only knew how.

If only they knew the right sales tech­niques… or had the right sales staff… or the right train­ing… or any “if only” excuse you can think of…

But ask yourself:

• How can a book you dip into dur­ing the train jour­ney into work or read for a few minutes at lunch­time or turn to in the even­ing while you’ve got one eye on the telly… how can that teach you how to “do” selling?
• How can some­thing writ­ten by a com­plete stranger… who knows noth­ing about you or your organ­isa­tion or your products/services or your cus­tom­ers … how can that teach you how to “do” selling?
• How can some­thing that’s writ­ten for a mass-market… one size fits all… how can that teach you how to “do” selling?

Then there are all the sem­inars, con­fer­ences, train­ing events, lec­tures, present­a­tions and exhib­i­tions that are about “how to sell”.

A lot of so-called selling experts are mak­ing a lot of money because they know that the busi­ness world is full of people who are search­ing for some kind of magic solu­tion that’ll put their sales into orbit. Every­one, appar­ently, is look­ing in the wrong place. Must be, or else why do so many of them keep buy­ing all those how to “do” selling books and attend­ing all those events?

The start­ing point to get­ting more people to buy more of what we’re selling is to under­stand that

SALES SUCCESS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH “SELLING” TO PEOPLE.

What Works and What Doesn’t

In a career as a mar­ket­ing and busi­ness growth spe­cial­ist, I have had the priv­ilege of work­ing along­side lots of sales people, (some good, some bad, some indif­fer­ent!) and their man­agers (ditto) and their employ­ers in all kinds of busi­nesses, big and small, and in all kinds of trades. In both the pub­lic sec­tor and private enter­prise. I’ve been able to observe at close quar­ters what “works”… and what doesn’t… in cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful and effect­ive sales environment.

What doesn’t work is try­ing to “sell” to people. What works is:

Repeatedly and delib­er­ately cre­at­ing the cir­cum­stances in which people act­ively want to buy what you’re offering.

Cre­ate the Circumstances

How much easier and more reward­ing would your life be if you didn’t need to put so much of your time, effort, energy and resources every day into “selling” because instead you have cre­ated the cir­cum­stances where your cus­tom­ers and poten­tial cus­tom­ers come to you. Act­ively, will­ingly and hap­pily. Time and again. And, just for good meas­ure, recruit their fam­ily, friends, neigh­bours and col­leagues as addi­tional cus­tom­ers on your behalf.

Too good to be true? Back in the real world you have to slog every day in order to make that sale and earn that wage?

If that’s so, maybe it’s because “SELLING” DOESN’T WORK!” And that’s no reflec­tion on your abil­it­ies as a salesperson.

Just about every­one of us is nat­ur­ally cap­able of repeatedly cre­at­ing the cir­cum­stances in which people act­ively want what we’re offering.

The key is to under­stand how to recog­nize and har­ness that nat­ural abil­ity and chan­nel it into sus­tain­ing and grow­ing our business.

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