Start by Understanding
If sales is craft, then how do you become good at your craft? It's understood how important selling can be to your work, your ideas, and your future. So, where do you start? What fundamentals do you practice? How do you learn to sell?
Start by thinking about when you are preparing to buy something significant or make an important life decision. What matters to you? What do you want?
If you’re like most people, you want:
- Good information
- Timely responses
- Knowledgeable advice and guidance
- Fair treatment
- A pleasant, easy process
Yes. but what you really want to understand. And you want to be understood. Because when those two things occur, you can be comfortable and confident. Ultimately, everyone wants to feel that. Especially when faced with a big decision.
THAT is the first rule of good sales craft. Understand your customer. Understand them deeply and clearly. What are their concerns, priorities, fears, goals, obstacles?
Only then can you begin to be heard, then that you have earned the trust necessary to truly garner their attention, and perhaps their genuine interest.
Maybe they like the product or solution or idea you’re selling. Maybe they want to buy it. Or maybe they don’t.
But now you know. More importantly, you know why. That’s selling. That is sales craft.
Future essays will dig more deeply into how to hone your ability to understand your customer. But tomorrow gets to the one critical mindset that separates the dilettantes and hucksters and scam artists that malign our craft from the serious, professional salespeople that matter.
Trust me. You’ll want to stick around for this one.
I write books and/or guide business owners and leaders using my POWER Process to tell their story POWERfully so it generates new business and makes them a thought leader
4 å¹´Nice piece, Brendan McAdams - B2B Sales. The biggest obstacle to sales I had to overcome was not knowing my customers enough. The more I get to know them, the less the sales effort. Instead, it becomes a discussion about their interests and mine and whether it makes sense for BOTH of us to work together.