Most people are always striving to better themselves. It's the "American Way." For proof, check the sales figures on the number of self-improvement books sold each year. This is not a pitch for you to jump in and start selling these kinds of books, but it is an indication of people's awareness that in order to better themselves, they have to continue improving their personal selling abilities.
To excel in any selling situation, you must have confidence, and confidence comes from knowledge. You have to know and understand yourself and your goals. You have to recognize and accept your weaknesses as well as your special talents. This requires a kind of personal honesty that not everyone is capable of exercising.
In addition to knowing yourself, you must continue learning about people. Just as with yourself, you must be caring, forgiving and laudatory with others. In any sales effort, you must accept other people as they are, not as you would like for them to be.
One of the most common faults of sales people is impatience when the prospective customer is slow to understand or make a decision. The successful salesperson handles these situations the same as he would if he were asking a girl for a date, or even applying for a new job.
Learning your product, making a clear presentation to qualified prospects, and closing more sales will take a lot less time once you know your own capabilities and failings, and understand and care about your customers.
Our society is built on selling, and all of us are selling something all the time. We move up or stand still in direct relation to our sales efforts. Everyone is included, whether we're attempting to be a friend to a coworker, a neighbor, or selling multi-million dollar real estate projects. Accepting these facts will enable you to understand that there is no such thing as a born salesman. In selling, we all begin at the same starting line, and we all have the same finish line as the goal - a successful sale.
Most assuredly, anyone can sell anything to anybody. As a qualification to this statement, let us say that some things are easier to sell than others, and some people work harder at selling than others. Regardless of what you're selling, or even how you're attempting to sell it, the odds are in your favor. If you make your presentation to enough people, you'll find a buyer.
The problem with most people seems to be in making contact - getting their sales presentation seen by, read by, or heard by enough people. There is also a problem of impatience, but this too can be harnessed to work in the salesperson's favor.
We're all salespeople in one way or another. So whether we're attempting to move up from forklift driver to warehouse manager, waitress to hostess, salesman to sales manager or from mail order dealer to president of the largest sales organization in the world, it's vitally important that we continue learning.
Getting up out of bed in the morning; doing what has to be done in order to sell more units of your product; keeping records, updating your materials; planning the direction of further sales efforts; and all the while increasing your own knowledge - all this very definitely requires a great deal of personal motivation, discipline, and energy. But then the rewards can be beyond your wildest dreams, for make no mistake about it, the selling profession is the highest paid occupation in the world!
Selling is challenging. It demands the utmost of your creativity and innovative thinking. The more success you want, and the more dedicated you are to achieving your goals, the more you'll sell. Hundreds of people the world over become millionaires each month through selling. Many of them were flat broke and unable to find a "regular" job when they began their selling careers. Yet they've done it, and you can do it too!
Kim Haas is a WAHM and Founder of Womans-Net.com, a popular online networking community focusing on working from home and women in business and owner of http://Article-Host.com To learn more about Kim, visit http://kimberlyhaas.com
Copyright 2005 Kim Haas