How To Sell Without Selling – Follow These 6 Steps
The best sales professionals know that selling isn’t the end goal! Instead, the heart of selling is providing other humans with assistance in solving their problems, big or small. Keep it in mind and you’re likely to sell more of your products and services because you’re treating every customer interaction with empathy, particularly in providing solutions for their problems.
6 Tips To Selling Without Selling
Here are more ways of increasing your sales without appearing like you’re pushing for a sale at the end of every customer interaction. Remember that you’re looking at long-term results instead of short-term satisfaction.
1. Push Your Brand
Basically, your brand distinguishes your products and services from others. With this in mind, you have to shift your thinking from selling your products and services to pushing your brand including establishing its uniqueness, trustworthiness, and credibility.
Why? When your target customers believe that your brand delivers on these three traits, then your products and services are worthy of their patronage! There’s also the proven fact that when one of your products or services is of high quality, then the rest of your products and services are also likely to be so.
In other words, effective branding means higher sales not just for the product being sold under it but for the other associated products, too. Before selling your products and services, you should first establish that indeed your brand can be trusted.
2. Choose Well for Your Customers
Let’s say that you have 100 products in your catalog but you know for a fact that only 50 of them are of the highest quality. Should you promote all 100 or just push 50 to your customers?
You may answer that you will promote all 100 because then you will have a higher chance of selling more. But if you think about it more, you will agree that it isn’t exactly the best strategy because then you’re risking your brand’s reputation. You may be getting more initial sales but you’re less likely to get repeat sales because your customers were disappointed with the products.
The best strategy then is to choose the 50 best products and promote them to your customers. You’re building your brand on excellent products and, in so doing, getting repeat sales.
3. Offer Fewer Choices
As an alternative, you can offer your customers fewer choices so that they can decide easier and faster. Think about it: When your customers have more choices than they can shake a stick at, so to speak, they will either take too much time to decide or have more difficulty making a decision. Either way, you may well end up with fewer sales than you intended or worse no sales at all!
You must then consider making it easier for your customers to make a buying decision by limiting their choices. Well, of course, you want to sell more products and/or services even with a more limited catalog. You can do it by, again, focusing more on your brand, presenting your products as solutions, and creating a valued relationship.
4. Be Conscious of Your Delivery
While it may sound like a no-brainer, many salespeople botch the delivery of their sales pitch. Keep in mind that you want to sound confident, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable without being a know-it-all, as well as compassionate about your customers’ issues. You want to offer them solutions through your products and/or services, and the best way to do so with such an attitude.
You must then be conscious – but don’t let it slip that you’re being so – about your voice including its volume, pitch, and tone. You have to use both your words as well as your gestures, facial expressions, and body language in being engaged in your one-on-one conversations with your customer.
If you’re thinking about your next customer instead of focusing on the one before you, then you’re in big trouble! You’re not only missing out on a potential sale but, more importantly, you’re missing out on a valued customer’s repeat business.
5. Make Friends in High Places
While there’s merit in making friends with the rank and file, you will agree that you’re likely to make a sea change in your sales when you make friends with the higher-ups. We’re not talking about actually making personal friends out of executives, managers, and supervisors of the company you’re targeting as a customer. We’re talking instead about establishing a closer professional relationship with the people who make buying decisions.
You can, for example, host a niche podcast and invite an executive to be your guest of honor. You and your guest can discuss matters where the latter is a known expert and, in the process, share his knowledge. Think of it as boosting his ego while also establishing your brand as a figure of authority in your sector.
When you have established a good relationship with the said executive, you have the opportunity to push your brand and its associated products and/or services with less effort and cost.
6. Use the Internet
If you’re not using the Internet to its fullest, then you aren’t putting your brand and products out there where target customers can actually patronize them! You may think that you already have a website with e-commerce capability, social media accounts (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) with 5,000 followers, and dozens of referrals, all of which are enough.
But if you’re market penetration isn’t where it’s supposed to be, say, just 10% when it should be at 50% for this year, then you’re not using the Internet as effectively as you should – you’re just coasting along. If you’re in the B2B business, you’re failing yourself, too.
What then shall you do? Place more effective ads on industry sites and social media. Hire influencers to promote your products and services to their millions of followers. Hire a social media manager who can create a stronger online presence for your brand. Participate in more industry events online.
In conclusion, you can only sell your products and services for a limited time in the sense that each customer interaction can only last for so long, perhaps just 15 minutes, if you’re lucky. You have to make the most of your time but not pushing your products and services aggressively but rather by establishing a relationship first.
Founder, Editor-In-Chief // A native Angeleno. John studied engineering at UCLA; founded Schmoozd, an offline social tech networking event in LA with 30,000 subs; ran a startup accelerator (StartEngine). Worked for several major brands like Toyota, DIRECTV, Hitachi, ICANN, and Raytheon. A mentor at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) Entrepreneur School, Dr. David Choi. And advises a dozen local LA startups building amazing tech in various industries; and invested in some. // Let's Connect: john@lastartups.com
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