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Brian's
Introduction
By
Brian Walsh (Founder & CEO of
Entrepreneur.co.za)
Having discussed the importance of prospecting
and networking, you still have to sell! Selling
is an art – it isn’t something you are
necessarily born with, but rather something you
can work on continuously. The more you sell, the
more you learn about selling, and the more you
practice selling, the better you will become at
it.
I have always loved developing products,
exploring needs in the market and finding the
best way to fulfill them. What I have learnt
over the years though, is that being able to
sell effectively is an integral part of success
as an entrepreneur.
In this introduction I cannot tell you
everything there is to know about selling, but I
will share two key factors in selling. They are
as follows:
Know what your product DOES for your clients
– many people sell a product, but what they
should much rather be doing is selling what the
product does. People want to know what a
product
will do for them, more importantly than what it
is. So remember, sell what your product does and
you will close more sales.
Sell with confidence
– you sell the product and if you don’t
come across with utmost confidence, the product
won’t sell. Confidence is an essential
ingredient in the art of selling.
Low confidence = no sale / High confidence =
sale.
Your sales approach is also very important.
There are many different ways of selling a
product - telesales, internet selling, direct
marketing, multi-level marketing, word of mouth,
low budget advertising, client introduction
workshops, etc. Not all of them work for all
products though, and we don't always have
budgets to implement most, or all, of these
approaches. You have to continuously explore
different sales approaches and conduct effective
research into the market to determine which
approaches would best support your product and
your budget.
Lastly, let’s talk about closing sales.
At the end of the day, you can talk until you
are blue in the face about how many prospects
you contacted, qualified and presented to, but
all that will ever count is how many of these
you closed. This is an area where many
sales people stumble. We often oversell,
undersell or give up too early. The point is
that to be a great sales person, you need to be
a great closer.
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