Eight Ways to Ensure You Never Sell Anything
- Don’t have a competitive spirit: Don’t keep your eyes and ears open at all times to find out what your competitors are doing, or what’s going on in your marketplace. If you employ staff, don’t create a strong team mentality. Don’t set yourself challenging but achievable goals, or bust a gut trying to achieve them.
- Don’t prospect: Prospecting for sales is the first and most vital stage in the process of building your customer base. So, if cold calling isn’t your style, or you’ve got enough already, don’t bother doing any. After all, why do something you don’t like?
- Don’t listen: If you do get in front of a customer or a prospect, do all the talking and don’t let your customers them talk at all. After all, if you listen to them you might have to adapt and focus your service or product to a particular market need.
- Talk about the features of what you do: After all that’s all you care about, so that’s obviously what your customers and prospects will care about. They don’t need to know how your product or service will benefit them – they can work that out for themselves.
- Don’t take notes: Taking notes following discussions, negotiations and presentations to prospective clients is an essential part of the selling process. So don’t bother. You’ll be able to remember everything you need to, won’t you?
- Be distracted: You need to achieve the all-important knack of ignoring your customers and prospects by not giving them your undivided attention. Fortunately it’s easy to be distracted by either another customer or something else affecting your business.
- Never, ever, EVER, ask for the sale: After all, your customers will work that out for themselves and ask to buy. Just keep talking about your product or service until its time to leave for your next appointment or to go home.
- Don’t follow up: Following up with a phone call, e-mail or letter immediately after a sales meeting or discussion is one of the most valuable tactics you can use to gain credibility and trust from your prospects. So don’t bother. If you have the product or service they need, the customers will come anyway. Building relationships with customers and prospects is for wimps.
Posted on August 31, 2011, in Business Success and tagged business, customer, Entrepreneur, failure, marketing, Sales, success, time management. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
Very well put Rob I am making that a compulsory read for our salespeople.
On the issue of taking notes, I wrote a short piece on my blog entitled, “An Employee who Behaved Like a Business-Person” which tells of someone that I met who excels in that area.