I’m currently preparing a series of workshops to share my marketing ‘expertise’ on the last 7 years that I’ve gathered through working in marketing. I don’t see myself as a cocky person, nor am I one to gloat about my accomplishments, so when someone asks my company what my credibility is, my first reaction is embarrassment – not about my ability but about sharing my ability. I think that’s why I’m not super good at cold sales. But unfortunately in sales you have to sell yourself. And here I am trying to write a humble biography of all that I’ve done without sounding like a pompous ass.
Sales in general requires a lot of talking yourself up and talking about what it is that you do. For one that likes to keep it on the low, it can feel like sales sucks. But it’s necessary. I read somewhere that you have to spend up to 70% of your business’ time working on sales. I think that’s pretty ridiculous since when I started this business, I wanted to work on what I love to do. Sales is not what I love to do.
What I love to do is to walk into a room and speak to a client one on one and talk about what we care about – they talk about their product and I talk about ways to market their product – Don Draper style. Unfortunately, in order to get into that room, you have to push your way to the front, especially for those with deep pockets. It’s rarely like they depict it in Mad Men. The deeper the pocket the more effort it takes to walk in their door. It’s taken me up to 6 months to get a client in the door. Even the most recent grant application has taken me 8 months of hard work. The greatest things about those projects are that they pay off and they pay off really well. The only thing is, it takes a lot of hard work.
Sales nowadays is a full time job. The ones I see are best at sales are the ones that embody their work and their vision. The customer not only needs credibility to stand by your product, they also want a free sampling. With tight budgets and an oversaturated market, it’s more and more about who you know in that business that gets the job first.
So I’m thinking about hiring a sales representative to just get me in the door. But I know deep down inside, that’s my job. I’m suppose to get myself in that door and rip the place apart. But the reality is, I’m not good at doing sales and managing the 7 other projects on my plate because I end up wanting to do everything else but sales.
We’re currently undergoing rebranding for our site, which we really need. Everyone who visits it is confused as to what we do. It’s been something we’ve been pushing because we haven’t needed to look at it and we’ve been busy. But now we’re paying our friends at Linetest to put something together for us (even though they’re moving away from design onto video production, they’re still doing it for us). Hopefully that will be done by the end of this month if not, mid-September. I have a feeling that if we had fixed that a while ago, we would have seen some sales develop from that or maybe not lost some sales that we had fishing around on our site. That’s the thing with branding – the brand sells itself when you’re not infront of the client. Can you tell I’ve been working on my rebranding curriculum for the workshops?
10 things I’ve learned about sales:
- Don’t be embarrassed to push your brand or talk about yourself and the product, people will listen
- Believe in what you do and it will show
- Always make your customers feel like their first priority
- Always always always follow-up
- Share your expertise as much as possible
- Provide a opportunity to taste what you have to offer with no strings attached
- Think of what they need and what is best for them – never what you want
- Be the first to ask a question, assess the situation and then talk about what they want to hear
- Clients are people – we are all different so treat everyone differently
- Be open to new opportunities
Message me if you have any questions – I’ll be happy to answer as best as I can.
Selling is part of our lives as we all have to connect with others, understand the needs and wants of each other, exchange ideas, and decide if there is a desired outcome that can be achieved together. You mention in this blog that sales is not what you love to do. What you do love to do, according to this blog, is walk into a room and speak to a client one on one and discuss the services you can provide. This in itself is an act of selling. You are selling what you can do to help one another. You are representing a concept that you care about.
It might be uncomortable to do sales for those who don’t meet the typical salesperson stereotype. Confidence and delivery, while very important, can be developed later on through practice and experience. But as long as you can talk about something that you feel you have earned the right to talk about (through study, experience, etc.), that you know far more about the subject than any average person, and that you enjoy spreading the idea to others and, then you have a solid foundation in a selling proposition. Trust and rapport building are established when clients are able to pick up on your expertise along with your high level of interest in helping them.
Thanks for the reply Volataire! I completely agree with you. Sales and relationship building overlap greatly. What I should have clarified was I’m specifically adverse to getting the initial meeting. I personally don’t feel like the rest of the process is sales because I feel genuinely interested in improving the client’s business. I do recognize that it is all part of the sales process and that it’s indirectly pushing sales.
I think starting out with relationship building first is important, especially in the Vancouver community. Unfortunately, it’s hard to develop that relationship unless you meet them randomly or know them through a relative? And having developed most of my career in Toronto, I’m not a natural at it. Or at least that’s my experience with the Toronto market vs the Vancouver market.
I’m terrible at the initial cold contact/email because you have to provide something valuable for them to walk in the door and that requires some hard selling at times as most clients are too busy to consider or have tight budgets that they’ll allocate on a needs basis. I have to admit I don’t have a lot of experience with the cold contact as all our customers since inception since 2007 has been through WOM and supportive friends. But I think that’s changing and now we have to move onto that in order to grow our business.