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Not everyone is a born salesman, but selling is crucial to staying in business.
It is true that some people possess the knack to sell. Others might watch from the sidelines in awe as a naturally talented salesman makes a perfectly ordinary product look indispensable to the potential buyer. Natural selling talent can produce deep reactions — sometimes even the envy button.
Selling
Selling is an art, but while it is something of an innate skill in certain people, it can be learned. In some cases, it must be learned!
Far too often, people do not have a favorable view of selling and marketing. Many of us feel an inherent disdain towards it.
This is understandable, but harmful for entrepreneurs. If you don’t get around this problem, you run the risk of underperforming. Or as Patrick Bet-David says, you’ll be knocked out of the ring.
Selling Must Be Done Differently These Days
We must learn to see “selling” in a new light—not as “pushing” a product simply to make money, but rather as realizing we have a product that can make a huge impact for people, then finding the people who will benefit from our product or service.
Master The Selling Skill
Here are some ways in which you can get over your distaste for selling and mastering a skill that can take you to the success you desire.
Think About It:
A quality product will not sell itself.
If people haven’t heard about you, how will they know what you have to offer?
It is not enough to create a kickass product. It is not enough to create a trendy website. It is also not enough to support this with mindblowing content either.
All of this has to reach the people you want it to reach. The people who will eventually buy your services.
How Will You Find Your Followers
And the only way you can do this is by promoting your business – through marketing.
Unless you aim to sell, you won’t be able to sell much. That product you worked so hard for? It deserves to reach the people it can help. Your responsibility does not end with setting up a company and creating impressive services–it extends to finding target buyers and convincing them you have something of value to offer. Without this a business cannot exist.
Rethink marketing
Marketing and selling (the same thing for the purpose of this article) are often mistakenly presumed as the preserve of the shameless. That may seem like strong wording, but it does get to the essence of people’s resistance towards it.
I’m not the type to loudmouth by my own greatness. I don’t like the idea of pushing my products in the face of everyone on my Facebook. I’m too busy to be selling all the time. I’m an artist, my job is to create, not sell. I feel cheap talking about my business, like all I want is their money (which actually you do, but never mind).
Those are unhelpful ways of looking at a process that is crucial to the survival as well as the success of a business.
Related Read: How To Apply Neuroscience To Marketing Strategy For Startups ?
One of the best ways to realign your approach would be to take the spotlight off of yourself and put it on the people whom your product or service is designed to help.
Using Sales Differently
If you are convinced you have produced great product and are able to back up your claims, then that is where you need to focus. You can help someone improve a certain area of their life. You can help them achieve tangible results. You know where they are faltering and how to help them get out of that vicious cycle and put them on the road to success.
When you turn the attention away from your own self and train it on a potential customer, you don’t feel fraudulent or boastful talking about your products.
You are convinced you have something that can help them. Your intention is actually to help and in the process you might (or might not) make a sale. It is from this conviction what we perceive as natural salesmanship proceeds.
Get rid of false beliefs
Selling is bad. It involves lying and hence is for unethical people.
Some salesmen and business owners do engage in dishonest practices, but because they do so, that in itself does not make selling bad.
Selling is actually quintessential to life itself, especially considering the way our economy is structured.
Think About It
How has Apple been able to sell its iPhones to you and your entire family? How did you end up voting for Obama (or whoever you did vote for)? How do you think you scored your last job? Why do you have the Nest thermostat in your house? Why do you prefer one brand of beer over another?
This all comes down to selling. You have been sold all the things that you use through the day. Sometimes the selling has been done by a company, other times, it is what we have been conditioned or taught as a culture.
Not all selling is done for money. Think about the times you have been in a business meeting, bouncing ideas around with your co-workers. Think about any time you have been in an argument and had to convince someone to see things from your perspective. There are elements of sales in these situations!
A sale is a transfer of energy and when you are able to win someone over or convince them of your idea, you have been engaging in the act of selling.
You need to bring this same thought process to your business: Everything is selling. If you don’t sell, you’ll be sold to.
Selling doesn’t have to make you cringe from inside. Next time you are proactively pushing your content, think of how it can help others.
Make it less about you and more about the people you want to help with your services. That is the way to deliver good performance, establish credibility, create relationships and ultimately run a successful business in the long term.
This post was originally written by Michael Georgiou on Startup Grind, the global entrepreneurship community.
Startup Grind is a Silicon Valley-based organization that educates and mentors entrepreneurs through monthly business events and speaking series in cities across the globe.