For many of us, our first exposure to learning to sell was for your school, another organization, or their family’s business. However, you unknowingly got your start learning how to sell goods and services is important. It’s especially important if you want to run a business. After years of running my own business and talking to small business owners from every walk of life, I am convinced of one thing: Sales is a life skill and everything is sales.
Here’s why I say that
Sales is the art and science of presenting an offer to a chosen audience and persuading them to opt into what you want. This isn’t just something for business, it’s how children “sell” their parents at a later bedtime or getting a pet. It’s the same skill used to guide a committee towards using a certain theme for their fundraiser or to hang streamers at the dance and not balloons.
Being good at sales comes down to two main things: listening and asking questions
If you can ask questions to learn as much as you can about your customers and listen to what they are saying you’ll go far.
A lot of the time people think sales is all about persuasion. They buy into the idea of the hard sell and really convince the other person to do what you want. The way I see sales is that it is much more about helping someone make a decision. That’s why sales are all around us because we are constantly coaching and being coached by others through the decision-making process. From small decisions like what meal to order for the office party to bigger ones like who should be hired to do the graphics and marketing for the business.
Most of us have some sort of sales skill especially if you’ve worked in a customer service or customer-facing role in your career. You’ve likely had to get shoppers to opt into a promotion or choose a specific item (this is especially true of those in commission sales). Even those of us who never held those types of jobs have probably had some time when they felt compelled to have someone agree with their idea and advocated for it. That is sales too!
The next time you tell yourself “I’m bad at sales” remember these three things: you’ve probably done something like this already and my guess is that you did pretty good at it, you’re not convincing anyone of anything just helping them make a decision about your offer and lastly, put some time into practicing those listening and asking questions skills!
Bottom line is that you can do this and all you need to do is practice. Yes, you might be bad at it at first, that’s how you learn. After a while, you’ll get really good at it.
By the way, if you’re ready to take your business to the next level through clear and unified branding book a 15-minute no pitch consultation call today by clicking here