How to get it wrong

Traditional, and hence flawed, sales is often about…

• How great you are
• How fabulous your company is
• How wonderful your products are
• How much better you are than your competitors

In other words…

• ‘Me, me, me and me’

Ordinarily each statement in isolation is not particularly harmful, however when such statements are presented as a whole it tends to suggest that the sale has completely the wrong focus.

The focus needs to be on the customer not the seller

To quote the lyrics of a song from British group, The Jam, which is it…

“The public wants what the public gets”

or

“The public gets what the public wants”

It is not what you can say to a potential customer that necessarily matters, it is what they can tell you and how you can in turn make them feel. In other words you need to think in reverse, for when you change your focus a whole new world opens up to you.

So…

Forget the sales patter and standard descriptions of your products, instead discover what makes your customer tick and get inside their mind.

Your mission is to help them buy from you, not sell them something – this is a subtle yet profound difference …and is at that heart of successful small business marketing strategy and thinking.