Whatever Happened to Selling People?
For me, selling is all about selling people.
Harvey Mackay has been a huge influence on my approach to selling because he’s a master of 2 concepts:
- selling people
- building customer relationships.
We sales people know that, no matter what process and software we’re using, we are the key to getting the sales task accomplished.
The best part?
We’re selling our products and services to people…and it’s people who make the buying decisions.
So …
- we want to sell people first, before selling our products and services.
- to sell people, we need to get to know them better so we can engage them personally.
Here are my 3 favorite tips to do just that. They’re quick reminders on sharpening our personal selling game.
TIP #1: People buy from people, especially people who make themselves “easy to buy from”.
- yes, as we talked about earlier, there’s a huge emphasis today on selling process … CRM, Data and Analytics. I’m not putting any of these down; they’re practical and required.
- BUT, in what we do as sales people, process and software alone don’t sell products and services, WE DO!
TIP #2: People want to do business with people who understand them and what they want.
- even when they’ve done their own research, people will want to use us as “sales advisers”.
- how can we become knowledgeable sales advisers?
- we work to learn and understand the personal profiles of our customers – their needs, requirements, attitudes, likes and dislikes .
- when we learn as much as we can about our customers and what they want, we’ll get their commitments a whole lot faster.
This next tip says it all…
TIP #3: People want to do business with people they like, respect and trust.
- these personal qualities are often hard to find today.
- our real challenge as sales people is to differentiate ourselves from all those lacking these qualities.
- we do it by being trusted and respected advisers in all our selling activity.
Next time, I’ll talk about the big payoff from putting these 3 people tips into action.
For more, check out a summary of Harvey Mackay’s The MacKay MBA of Selling in the Real World.
