The Art of Selling: Part II
I want to continue this piece on the art of selling by looking at examples of sales techniques that I’ve seen people I know use. As I was thinking about this piece, it just became clear to me that you have to craft a sales technique that fits in with your basic personality.
The examples follow:
Cold Calling/cold walking:
I know somebody who runs a courier service. They basically delivery packages and goods around the city to different businesses. The technique this person uses is all cold calling. He makes a list of potential businesses that might need his services and he sits down and calls people from that list (one by one by one). The rejection rate is like 98%, but that doesn’t bother him. He just gets up the next day and starts all over again. He’s gotten his 12 clients this way.
Online Advertising:
I know someone else (a lawyer) who set up his own firm. He prefers to use online search engines to find his clients. He set up an account with google adwords, he sets up his keywords under this account (basically telling google to show his website whenever anyone searches for those particular keywords). Anytime a potential client clicks on his website, he gets charged a fee by google, which means you have to set aside money for your advertising expenses. He too is sticking exclusively to this method and has gotten clients this way.
Networking:
I know another person (a lawyer as well) who uses his networking links to get clients. He worked as an entertainment lawyer for a few years and developed contacts while he was employed. When he decided to set up his own gig, a few of those contacts were willing to move with him. He was lucky in that one of those contacts happened to be the movie producer, Spike Lee who is very pro-black. This lawyer is black and Lee was happy to swing some business his way and introduce him to more black entertainers who’ve also swung some business his way.
I myself have settled on online advertising. I just started using it and I’m beginning to see the clicks. I’m just waiting for those clicks to translate into payable actions!
I absolutely cannot cold call and I detest it when I get cold calls. It’s just not for me.
Networking is also not for me because I don’t like to schmooze.
I suppose if you own a store or restaurant in a high traffic area, you can just hope for walk-ins, but I don’t know how people rely on that exclusively.
Or if you just detest the idea of selling altogether, you can just save up some money and get into something like trading where your success is totally dependent on your own pure analysis of the markets.
Its not the product… its the sell…
Betamax was far superior to VHS but VHS won out…
We know of many such products/ideas that fail…
Look at Mac vs Windows… Mac (IMHO) is a far superior product but until recently it was not on the radar of most users. Many of Windows “new” features are copied off the Mac OS.
That said… it was only after Steve Jobs started “selling” Macs that they burst onto the market in good numbers. Of course, the iPod drove people to view Apple as a Microsoft rival.
Apple introduced the iMacs (the candy/fruit coloured computers) to great acclaim! Then other manufacturers copied them but it put Apple back in the market…
The selling point was NOT the iMac or Apple or the OS but the “colours”…
I guess it’s the same concept with the IPod — The technology was not new and steve jobs did not invent it. He just took that technology and packaged into a sleek looking musical device and as you said, the colors (all white, all pink)…that’s the first thing I noticed when I first started seeing people with ipods – What cool looking device is that?
I suppose this brings us back to the issue of artistic creativity (at least as it applies to consumer goods)
Look at the iPhone… nothing new (software?) but a media frenzy…
Nevertheless OSX is far better than windows… waiting for leopard…