Susana,
Personally I focus more on learning marketing and PR. I’ve found it more valuable than memorising closing scripts and way to overcome objections. With that ‘I’ve achieved pretty good incoming gravity.
Just imagine this: If you want to eat roasted elephant stake, you can either start chasing elephants all over hell’s half acre or become a watering hole and attract them. The smart elephant hunter baits and waits. He knows the beasts will come, and all he has to do is to prepare the fire, the frying pan and buy the appropriate wine.
In warfare, good warriors often make the enemy come to them. Who comes to you has a force of emptiness, and you have a force of fullness. Attacking emptiness with fullness is always a great idea and results in fairly effortless implementation.
I keep putting out valuable information, so I attract very specific buyers into my sales funnel. In time they come to the conclusion that I’m not only expensive but worth the investment too.
There is no closing and typical selling to do. We jointly decide whether or not we have a mutually beneficial basis for working together.
The whole idea is that I give them a way out if they choose to. This is missing from traditional selling.
Together my formal and informal education, I’ve got some $340,000 in the game, and only a tiny part is sales-related. On sales I only have Jeff Thull’s books because he presents a breakthrough in selling and I like it.
While the Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins approaches may be valid, I don’t like them for their manipulative nature. But, it’s manipulative to me. Not for everyone. For instance, I don’t over come objections because I respect people’s decision. I don’t have to argue with them because I have enough incoming “buyer’s traffic” who are ready to hire me.
Also, unlike Zig or Tom, I don’t indent to turn each enquiry into clients.
But it also depends what we sell. I’m a one-man show, charge pretty steep and work with only a very few clients. Selling commodities is a different approach but I couldn’t comment on that because it’s outside my realm.
Toughts?
