How Hard (or Softly) Should You Sell?

Do you love selling or feel dirty and embarrassed about it? Do you see it as a service or an intrusion? Either way, this article should help you strive the right balance between over-selling, selling too hard, and not selling enough. Whether you embrace selling or not, you can always refine your selling skills to make more money, grow your brand and reach while providing great products and services that matter.

No one will sell you for you!

The cold reality is that no one will just walk into your office or home and buy all your stuff without you first getting your message out to the world. The most famous bands who sell out entire tours in mounts had to gig in empty pubs for years. Only you will put your work out to the world, certainly at first, with the same heart and soul as you. Everyone sells well something they really believe in, so find something you really believe in and get it out to the world unapologetically. Or someone else will fill your space

If you’re not getting any feedback that you’re sales-y, you’re not selling enough

If no one criticises what you are doing, you aren’t doing anywhere near enough. As you grow you will attract fans and critics in equal measure. It can be no other way. What you stand for, someone on the planet stands directly against. What you want to build, they want to destroy. So if you mute and dilute your message and mission to avoid the critics, you will never have any fans or customers. As you are going to get them anyway, you will get them doing nothing. So you might as well do something.

Selling is caring

Selling doesn’t have to be hard. Good selling is caring. Good selling is taking the time to find and understand the values, needs, desires and pains of your prospect, and solving it through (the packaging of) your product or service. That takes time upfront, but it pays off later. Sales is never sales-y when people really want it. No ones loves to be sold to, but everyone loves to choose to buy. Hard selling is selling something to someone they don’t want or need persistently.

Create latent goodwill, then collect and cash in, goodwill. The repeat.

Give value first. Care. Take time to serve and solve. Make things faster, easier, better & more convenient for people. Then make your offer. Package it to make it compelling. Get it out to the world. Collect the money. Over deliver on the service. Then repeat. Balance the giving with the receiving. Don’t over-do either one.

Variety according to platform

You might offer value to sales ratio and 3 to 1 or 10 to 1 or 50 to 1, deepening on the media, market & platform. Some platforms are a colder medium for selling, and do you might sell more frequently, perhaps like email or direct marketing letters. Others are more interactive, community based platforms, like Facebook or Podcasts, where you might sell much less frequently after building up vast latent goodwill that is ready to burst, that all you have to do is ask gently.

More value & content now, upfront, means a likelihood of greater incoming pull of sales, BUT later down the line. More selling up front might mean more money NOW, but may have attrition down the line. balance this trade off wisely.

Get yourself uncomfortable – own what you don’t like about selling

If you hate selling, it’s plausible that you hate a version of you. Selling makes the world go around; it is a vital component of exchange of necessary products and services key to our survival. If your hunger & thirst depended on it, you would push your products out there more. You wouldn’t fear rejection if you were starving. So get yourself a little uncomfortable if you are a but soft, and sell more. Work out what it is about other sales people that you don’t like and own, fix or forgive that in you.

ADMIRE great salespeople and learn from them

Anyone who sells well has skills you can learn from. You don’t have to like them or want to be them, but you can take the great bits about them and own them in your own pitch. You can be yourself and develop your own style. Wisdom is to understand that everyone has unique talents, don’t look down or u to people too much, but learn from everyone.

So the key to selling is to sell something you believe in, in a way that people want to receive it, respecting what is most important to them. It is to unapologetically share your message to the world, knowing that your product or service will make a difference to many people, and to charge highly but fairly for it.

Rob