My take on ‘sales’
Sales has many different meanings to many different people. One person may think ‘sales’ as a concept is an essential part of the economy. Another person may think sales is merely saying magic words to convince someone to buy something they may (but probably don’t) need.
If I had to sum it up in an elevator, I’d tell the average person that sales is the sparkplug for the engine that is the marketplace. 99% of the ‘doing’ happens in the engine, but the car will sit dormant without that spark of electricity. We can make arguments that sales is not needed in many industries, but we will save that for another day…
If I had to explain what sales is to a colleague or friend, I’d explain it a little differently. I’d tell that person the following:
Sales is a mental framework - A process.
What I mean by that is - sales is a process of How to think about solving problems for your end user/consumer. You can implement a ‘sales framework’ at any level of your life or your business. Below I will provide. a general example. We will develop this idea as we move along.
A general framework I use every day is one of QUESTIONS and EXPECTATIONS.
I’ll start with expectations. When you tell someone something, often times you create an expectation. All an expectation is, is a ‘mini-promise.’ For salespeople reading this - be very careful as everything you say is an expectation that needs to be delivered upon.
A real life example of expectations was during an unfortunate hospital visit of mine. I sustained a severe concussion in my youth and had to go to the emergency room. I was very clearly in need of attention and the nurse at the front said “the wait time is 30 minutes.” I was shocked and worried. Sure enough, 5 minutes later my name was called. A wave of gratitude and relief washed over me.
I went from resentful and worried, to excited and hopeful in an instant.
Imagine if every time you ordered food, they timer said 1 hour, but in reality it came in 15 minutes. 15 minutes would seem fast. Meanwhile, if the timer on your delivery set the initial expectation of 15 minutes, then the delivery in 15 minutes would be expected. There would be no positive emotion in the step. Positive/negative emotion is a concept we will talk about in depth in other content.
I began with explaining expectations to put QUESTIONS in the proper context. You’ll hear me talk about questions as a tool a lot.
Questions are the holy grail of co-operation as a whole. The right questions can change a persons life. The way we use them will make or break our success when co-operating with others.
By asking questions, we can understand every parties goal posts. Simply put, we can understand what everyone involved wants if we ASK them what they want.
Once we understand what everyone in the situations desires as well as other factors at play via good questions - we can then form a solutions with manageable expectations THAT WE CAN DELIVER ON.
Goodness that was a keyboard full. To summarize:
If we know what our customer wants, we can create a journey for them that we can deliver on consistently.
By putting these things on paper, we can PLAN to do business. Sales becomes less of a guessing game and more of a strategy.
This brings me back to my meta-point and my overall conclusion. Sales is the PROCESS of strategic co-operation.
If you’ve read this and are thinking “What the actual fuck is Taylor talking about?”
Here are some simple actionable steps you can take to implement what I just blabbed about.
Write down the 10 most important questions you need to ask your customer EVERY SINGLE TIME before they work with you.
Write down the most common pain points you customer feels before, during, or after interacting with your business.
Break your sales approach into 2 parts. ASK and TELL. Ask good questions, tell good stories.
Soon I will put out some content about how we can turn our TELLING into SELLING by using good stories.
For now, think of the TELL part of your approach as your ‘pitch.’ Don’t pitch someone until you know the what’s going on and how you can help. You do that with the ASK part of your approach.
I hope it help, thanks for reading as always! - Taylor
