The Desert of Arizona
Partly Sunny 73 Degrees
Make no mistake, you won’t be in business for long unless sales happen. The question to ask is how best to have those happen?
I like the approach which I guess you could call “strategic selling.” Think of the pavement pounding salesman who can “close anyone,” and then go to the opposite end of the spectrum and that’s what I’m talking about.
Instead of going out there and getting bruised and battered in a game of sales rugby, this approach is a little more like playing sales chess. You move the pieces around, you watch the game develop, but you don’t really have to get in there and beat anyone down to make things happen.
This approach is particularly effective when you’re selling you. Because the most effective way to sell you is to engineer it so you DON’T have to sell you.
You don’t have to “sell” you because they already want to “buy” you.
If this is going to work, your strategy has to be smart. But here’s the game in a nutshell:
Pick a group of people who have problems (that they are aware of!) that they want solved. Offer solutions.
Put the platform in front of those solutions to build trust, credibility and demonstrate that you are the expert.
The devil’s in the details though.
Pick the wrong group of people and they may have no interest in actually investing money for those solutions.
Pick the wrong problems and the people won’t be bothered enough to solve them.
Go into it without a platform and you’ll just be a salesperson. They’ll want their problems solved, they just won’t want the solutions from you.
You need all the parts to make the system work.
You need people with problems.
You need people who want the problems solved.
You need people who have the resources required to solve those problems.
You need people who trust that YOU are the person to provide the solutions.
Do you have all four?
If you want to be an advisor, I think the time has come to put the strong arm sales tactics to rest.
May they rest in peace…