31 Oct Time to SELL!
If you’re in business (or, for that matter, working pretty much anywhere), sooner or later you will need to sell something: a service, product, idea or yourself. While this is fundamentally one of the most important aspects of business and of people’s careers, it is also the area that, at least in most businesses, is one of the most cavalier – there are few formally recognised qualifications or compressive training, and many people learn about sales and influence from the likes of TV. And even though our business/career success relies on this skill, our kiwi psyche of being laid back often gets in the way.
But how to improve? One place to start is with ‘feelings’.
We all like to think that we are (usually) rational, in making purchasing decisions, we (usually) like to think we make sensible, logical choices. However, the evidence suggests we don’t. Indeed, far more often, we make irrational choices then look for grounds to justify them.
But surely this doesn’t apply in a business setting? Surely, businesses make purchasing decisions based solely on merits and economic outcomes, rather than on soft gooey things like ‘feelings’? Again, the evidence suggests not. One study found that ‘personal value’ had twice the importance as business value. Or put another way, how someone felt was twice as important as the logical reason to purchase. Sound crazy? Read about it here.
How do we translate this into when we sell our product/service/idea/self? For a complex decision, rather than focusing on ‘what it does’, focus instead on ‘how it will make you feel’. Back when IBM sold computers, they knew this well. They sold to procurement managers within large businesses, and their brand promise was “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. As a procurement manager, it would put your mind at ease to make a safe call on something as big as IT equipment. Have a read of this to understand more about the role emotion plays and how it works.
This is just one facet of lifting sales performance, there are many more. If you’re in business, now is a great time to focus on SELLING to get through the great Christmas shutdown. If you’re not sure what you need to do to lift your sales game, get in contact.
