Off the top of your head, what three things come to mind when I say “salesperson”? *
And, on a scale of 0-10, how good are you at selling your product or service, where 0 = abysmal and 10 = world class brilliant?
You’ll probably see a connection between your two answers.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that many business people I speak with – unless they have “sales” in their job titles – think of a salesperson in negative terms. They use words like “pushy”, “snake oil”, “sleezy” – and then wonder why they find it difficult to sell their product or service.
But if we’re in business, regardless of our job title, if we can’t sell our wares, we won’t have a business for long.
I can help people change their mindset about selling. After all, it’s just teaching your target market to buy from you. And this involves having a really deep understanding of and empathy with your target market. Do you even know who your target market is?
Solution selling
What is the problem that your product or service provides the solution for? What is the “pain”, if you like, suffered by your target market that your product will resolve? And what is the impact on the target market of that pain?
For example, a great plumbing business might try selling itself by boasting about how many combined years of experience it has, or that it’s able to take calls 24 hours a day, or no job too small. We need to flip that round to think about how that helps the target market? What’s their pain that the plumbing business can resolve?
Ask great questions
You need to ask great questions and listen to your target market. What the plumbing business probably does for the target market (I’m not a plumber so I’m just guessing) is along the lines of making sure the family is able to heat the house in a controlled way, save money with heating bills, that they’re able to wash in hot water and, if there’s gas involved, be confident that they won’t be poisoned by carbon monoxide. The target market probably also wants to know that you’ll turn up when you said you would and clean up before you leave.
Your target market needs to know about you – and especially what makes you different (better) than other plumbing businesses. How are you doing that?
Pain / Impact / Vision
As a business coach, for my business target market, a problem (pain) could be disengaged employees – staff not turning up for work, or underperforming, upsetting customers, bitching and moaning. The impact on the manager or business owner could be that they spend too much of their time dealing with customer complaints, correcting faults, appeasing disgruntled staff, sleepless nights worrying, no time with their family, dropping sales.
So the job of your business – your duty! – is to reach out to your target market to let them know how your product or service could resolve their problem. I say “duty” because if you’re really passionate about what you do and the benefits it can have on your target market, then it is your duty to make sure they know it’s available. In fact, if you really care about your target market, you shouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that they’re continuing with the pain of their problem.
So, with the disengaged employees scenario, it’s my duty to ensure businesses know that I have proven tools and skills to help transform disengaged employees into highly engaged employees, and I can show them how I do it and share case studies and testimonials of successful outcomes. By doing this, I provide a vision of how different things would be for the business. How good do you think that makes them feel? Relieved! Excited!
What are you doing to make sure that your target market knows how your product or service can help them? And how effective is it?
Help at hand!
Need some help with this? Just get in touch and I’ll see if I can help you. I’m always happy to share my stuff!
You might also be interested in the Sales Enriched course I deliver to businesses. It’s a 2 day course with a structured approach that will give your team all the confidence, skills and tools they’ll need to overcome their fear of selling, focusing on understanding your target market and developing outstanding communication skills – listening and asking great questions – and making every employee a profit centre for your business.
Just click here to get in touch. Till then …
Best, from
Ros
*Hooray for you if the three words that came into your head were along the lines of “increased sales”, “profit”, “business growth”. Let’s have a coffee – you sound like my target market!
