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Sell Your Services Even if You're not a "Salesperson"
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What do you think of when someone mentions "personal selling"? Used cars? A slick and charming person in a cheap suit peddling ice water to Eskimos? Personal selling is not a bad word, and your business will not thrive without it. Are you not a salesperson? Don't worry. This new series will help you to understand what personal selling is, what steps are involved, and teach you how you can sell your services - even if you're not a salesperson!
The Nature of Personal Selling
There is no mystery in it. Personal selling is an attempt to inform customers and to persuade them to purchase products. Think you can be in business without it? Not very likely in this industry! Don't be discouraged, however. With a little bit of understanding of the nature of personal sales, you will be able to find potential customers and close sales without having to resort to any of the tactics that can sometimes give sales a bad name.
There are seven basic steps in personal selling:
1. Prospecting
2. Preapproach
3. Approach
4. Making the Presentation
5. Overcoming Objections
6. Closing the Sale
7. Following Up
These steps take the salesperson through the process of finding and qualifying potential customers, selling them the product, and returning to provide customer satisfaction, request referrals and make additional sales.
Prospecting
Prospecting is the process of gathering a list of potential customers. But who are your potential customers? To use that old cliché again, if you sold ice water would Eskimos really be your potential customers or would you be better off selling to those in Arizona. If it is your goal to sell products without heavy-handed sales techniques (as I am assuming it is), you would do well to choose a target market that has an unmet need for your product. Then, in your prospecting, attempt to find those potential customers that fall in your target market. The closer your prospect is to fitting your target market, the more "qualified" he is. The more qualified he is, the more likely your prospect is to become a customer.
For RexburgOnline (our reseller in a fishbowl), they chose local area small businesses for their target market. When Carl began his marketing efforts, he visited the Rexburg Chamber of Commerce to get a list of the area's small businesses that was hopefully more accurate than the one he could get from the phone book. In this way he was able to come up with a very complete prospect list without excessive effort.
If Carl had chosen a more specific target market (for example, local area small manufacturers) he may have had a harder time finding qualified prospects but he may have found it easier to convert qualified prospects to customers. You will want to experiment with your target market and the level of qualifying that you do until you achieve a combination that yields the best results with the least effort.
Be Creative
The phonebook will only yield so many results. If you are creative in your prospecting, you may find yourself with more qualified prospects. For example, one reseller wanted to start a campaign to target stay-at-home moms. She went to a women's expo at her local shopping mall and paid $400 to setup a booth. At the expo, she offered a free web store, complete with 6 months of hosting, 10 hours of design, and a domain name (merchant account not included) in a drawing. After the expo, she gathered the cards that people had used to enter her contest, and she now had a very qualified list of prospects. These were women that had enough interest in getting a store online that they took the time to fill out her form. What could you do to reach your target?
Conclusion
Prospecting is not the most exciting activity, but it is imperative. Consistently adding names to your prospect list will ensure that you always have sales as you follow the steps of personal selling. Commit to consistent activity in this area, and you will soon find yourself with a steady and increasing income as a reward.
Next Issue: In preapproach, we will evaluate and rank your prospects and learn as much about each prospect's specific product needs as possible.
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