If you are not selling to the right people, then you won’t be effective.
Recently a friend of mine was telling me how much he hates selling.
He hates because every time he talks to people they ask him stupid questions.
They make demands of him that he doesn’t want to give in to.
What my friend hates selling is what we really call business development.
He hates calling up potential partners and recruiting them to sell for him.
He hates this because many of the people he has asked to sell for him ask for a reciprocal arrangement.
Yeah, they say “I think I can promote your stuff… sure. When can you promote my stuff?”
This puts my friend in an awkward position.
He’s now gotta agree to promote the other guys stuff in order to get this person to promote his stuff.
Uggh.
When my friend was talking to me about this asking for advice, I recognized the problem.
He was trying to recruit people who aren’t sales professionals, and aren’t real experienced in his type of business.
And so what these people were focusing on was not how much money they would make by promoting my friends stuff.
No. They were focusing on how much it was going to *cost* them to promote his stuff.
So they saw his pitch to promote as something that would cost them, not something they would make money from.
And they figured “Well if this is going to cost me, I want to get something out of this, I want this guy to promote my stuff too”.
Crazy.
Now mostly this was caused by selling to the wrong people. That is my friend was trying to recruit inexperienced people who couldn’t see the value of what he was pitching.
But also it was caused by my friend not sufficiently showing these partners how much money they would make by selling for him.
To sell effectively, you have to sell to the right people.
Sell to the wrong people, and you are wasting your time.
And you also can’t be a chickenshit.
You got to SELL your stuff.
That is, once you are selling to the right people, you got to show them very clearly how they will gain.
Sell to the right people.
Find people with pain.
And show them how they will gain.
That will make you effective in sales.
Sell with Pride!
-Shameless Shamus Brown
