Today I will start with an extraordinary story of a Canadian gentleman by the name of Kyle MacDonald, who wanted to test whether bartering was still able to be used to trade an item of lesser value for an item of greater value. He started with one rather ordinary red colored paperclip and a year later, and several trades later, had a house. Whilst this is quite an impressive achievement, it is also against the norm nowadays. Long gone are the days of the agricultural age where it was possible to swap a few eggs for a small loaf of bread or to swap a gallon of milk for a side of beef.
Money is the currency we use and a couple of eggs get exchanged for about $1 rather than a small loaf of bread.
In order to make money you must have something of value to exchange for it. Those are the simple mechanics of life – to live you need to buy and sell items of value and making money comes from the selling part of the equation…. simply put you need to be in the business of exchanging products and services for money
Whether you like it or not, you need to be a salesperson. You may shudder at the thought of that term, proclaiming a lack of ability or confidence in making sales, but there are reasons why this fear has mounted.
When I say “salesperson” you probably conjure up an image of the worst salesperson you ever dealt with: loud, pushy, obnoxious, self indulgent… and the list of adjectives goes on. Perhaps you have encountered a salesperson who did not listen to you say you wanted the $10 Casio watch just as a means to know the time and insisted that you needed the $10000 Rolex watch which was foremost an exquisite piece of jewellery which also happened to let you know the time; or perhaps the rude salesperson who kept you waiting for 10 minutes whilst they were on the phone to a friend, and then upon finishing the call blurted out “I was busy, what did you want?”
Let me point out that there are salespeople who simply have the title, and there are salespeople who live up to their title. What I am suggesting you become is the latter. A good salesperson will:
- Always hear what the customer has to say before making suggestions
- Not make assumptions about the customer’s knowledge of a product or service.
- Realize that the reason the customer is there is because they have a problem and they need a solution.
- Always be of the greatest service to the customer.
- Understand the buying signals of a customer. After all, not all customers are there to buy, some are there to browse.
- Understand that buyers often take time to choose and then purchase.
- Understand that a customer will only buy from someone they can trust.
A good sale will involve a conversation, not a lecture on a product or a forceful push of a product down the customer’s throat.
In fact smart salespeople will leverage multiple resources to get the sales process in place long before an interaction with a customer. Now, with the Internet this becomes easy because you have low cost access to web sites, mailing lists and social media… all of which help establish a level of trust before a customer actually makes an advance to buy.
To be a good salesperson, keep those images of nasty dealings with bad salespeople far from your mind and just follow the simple steps here and, with practice, you will master the art of exchanging products and services for well-deserved money.
