Selling in business is what keeps people in business. Whether we are selling a service or a product we need the business through the door to pay the bills and to grow. That is the obvious part.

The difficult part for most small businesses is knowing the best techniques to achieve this…. And to understand why your selling approach is either a success or a failure.

You may have outstanding sales and marketing abilities but have not recognized that your product is not understood or not in demand (this can be fixed unless your product is poor) or you may have a fantastic product but you are weak on your marketing strategy and as such the market just does not know how to use it, the benefits, or that it even exists (this too can be solved).

We have all heard the phrase – I felt like I was being “Sold to” or “He is a typical Salesman”… and it has negative connotations. Why?… because that generally has a pushy feel to it and it generally involves information coming from one direction… the seller. In fact you don’t even need to be a great sales person to make your product fly.

The ultimate goal for Selling in Business is NOT to sell… but to create the WANT…. Then customers come knocking on YOUR door and not the other way round. This takes a different approach, a more multi pronged approach than hard selling and cold calling or trying to push your product sale by sale.

Now that doesn’t mean that you can put your feet up and agree that NOT selling is the best plan of attack, and hope to see those customers flocking to your feet… quite the opposite.

It requires you to assess your offering, assess your intended target audience and pro-actively market the features and the benefits of your product within the market to the extent that your target audience, suddenly sees that your product solves a problem or quenches a desire that they have. If you can create the WANT… you can almost name your price within reason. People will in fact buy things that they WANT over things that they NEED sometimes. And, although this can see people get into trouble financially, and we certainly don’t advocate that, you can see the strength of that emotion in the consumer buying behavior.

Furthermore once you have created a successful WANT within the market you need to service that market with outstanding customer service, excellent business relations and continue to innovate your product so that you stay ahead in the market, encouraging return customers and referrals. That requires ongoing strategy and analysis of performance of staff and products and further investment into polishing that WANT factor. We will go into more detail with advice and tips in this regard on the blog… keep an eye out for “10 tips for NOT selling in business”