Marketing Online

“Everyone lives by selling something,” noted the novelist Robert
Louis Stevenson. People are selling either a product, a service, a
place, an idea, information, or themselves. Cynics view selling is a form of civilized warfare fought with
words, ideas, and disciplined thinking. And they view marketing as
an effort to add an element of dignity to what is otherwise a vulgar
brawl.
There are many images of selling. The YTS school says that selling
consists of “yell, tell, and sell.” The S&P school says selling is
“spray and pray,” The LGD school says that selling is “lunch, golf,
and dinner.” And the salesperson is described as a “talking brochure.”
There is the well-known story of the Stanley Works in which a consultant told the tool company, “You are not in the business of
selling drills. You are in the business of selling holes.” Don’t sell features.
Sell benefits, outcomes, and value.
Some individuals are gifted salespeople. They can sell refrigerators
to Eskimos, fur coats to Hawaiians, sand to Arabs, all at a profit,
and then repurchase them at a discount.
Good salespeople remember that they are born with two ears
and one mouth. This reminds them that they should be doing twice
as much listening as talking. If you want to lose the sale, make a pitch
to the customer.
Some salespeople can be painful bores. Woody Allen lamented:
“There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent
an evening with an insurance salesman?”
Salespeople must get used to being rejected. Dennis Tamcsin of
Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance observed: “We have something
in this industry called the 10-3-1 ratio. This means that
for every 10 calls a salesperson makes, he will only get to make a
presentation to three, and if he’s got a good success rate, he’ll
make one sale. We need people who won’t shrink from that kind
of rejection.”
IBM trains its salespeople to act as if they are always on the
verge of losing every customer.
What makes a successful salesperson? To succeed, a salesperson
must recognize that the first person he or she has to sell to is himself
or herself. His job is to get in touch with the buyer within himself.
And his motto should be: “I develop clients, not sales.”
The comedian George Burns had his own opinion about what
makes a successful salesperson: “The most important thing in relationship
selling is honesty and integrity. If you can fake them,
you’ve got it made.”
Here is a story that illustrates the difference between great salespeople
and average salespeople.