From the time I was old enough to grasp the concept of sales I knew I wanted to be involved. My dad was in sales, I wanted to be in sales. At the tender age of 17, I was still under the false impression that sales and marketing were the same thing. Eventually I went to school for a specialized degree in business/marketing, while working part-time selling home fire safety systems and found out a very distressing fact. I'm not a salesman. I enjoyed observing them in action but when it came right down to it, I found the act repulsive and still do today. I gave up on my dream of being another J. Paul Getty and discovered an even bigger love; "Computers". Big Mainframes, Cobol, Pascal, they were my true desire now. I was still fascinated by Sales and Marketing, but believed it was only a pipe dream, because I just didn't have what it takes to be a salesman. You see, even with a formal education, in the back of my mind I still believed sales and marketing were one and the same thing.
Eventually, I started doing programming on the side, but still had an extreme phobia about sales and selling people on my services. Then in 1991 I picked up a book on vacation called "Marketing Your Services". I rediscovered the fact that marketing and sales are not the same and I don't need to be a high-pressure salesman to market my talents. I found something called "relationship sales". Sales is sales, right? You have to convince the customer to buy what you have to sale. Wrong!
You know the high-pressure sale is hard on everyone involved. The "burnout" statistics are so high that only 5% of high-pressure sales people stay with it for life. But it's not only hard on the salesperson, it's hard on the customer too. Have you ever sat through a home vacuum cleaner demonstration? Most of these people are hardcore pros. They have to be to last even a year. I know, my father was one for most of my childhood, and he was good, I'll give him that. But, eventually even he burned out, and went into construction.
For the potential victim, and I say that with all sincerity, it's just like being lined up for the firing squad. You know it's coming and feel completely helpless to stop it. This is how I pictured marketing until I read the book. It's not like I didn't study the difference in school. I can't remember whether I just didn't believe it or I just didn't get it. No matter, it was what it was and I wanted no part of it anymore.
In 1997, I discovered the Internet. Some small part of me was still crying out for the dream. The "J. Paul Getty" dream. I saw an opportunity and I wanted to get in on it. With time constraints, two jobs and a family who demands my attention, I very slowly got into HTML, Perl and eventually Flash and SQL. But what good is it going to do me. I already had a great job that I wouldn't leave for another. So I decided I would set up a website and sell what I have learned. So I wrote attention getting headlines and hard selling copy. I figured Internet sales was a lot easier, because there was no face-to-face pressure. I could sell my services on my web page. Too bad it's not that easy. People are inquisitive, curious and skeptical. I found myself getting emails about this and that, getting telephone calls asking me why they should pick me. The problem was I couldn't back up my hardcore sales pitch in a more personal manner. I just couldn't figure it out, even with reading all about it. How can this be happening again? What is the answer? I went back and read that book that I had read years before, just one more time to refresh my memory. It clicked, "Relationship Sales".
Relationship Sales is actually a lot like "Personal Branding". But it gave me a new outlook on sales. Selling, in it's most basic sense is the one-on-one process of building a relationship between seller and prospect. The "good" sale comes after both parties involved discover that a relationship has been built. I figured it out. Selling and marketing are not one and the same, however they are a part of each other, meaning one cannot prosper without the other. They're quite synergistic you know, empowering each other to reach their final goal: The Sale.
I hope you can join me next week for Part II: Building A Relationship With Your Prospect
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I'll be e-Seeing you Soon
Wild Bill Montgomery
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