selling | DT Business Strategies

One of my readers asked the other day how to “sell without selling”, which I think is a great way of describing the art of salesmanship. Obviously, you can’t sell without selling…if you don’t sell, then you don’t make sales! But the sentiment came through loud and clear. No one wants to come off as a schmuck. No one wants to be a sleazoid salesman, but the concern remains; we all have to make an actual living. So how do you get it done?

I’ve written before on Next Level Blogger that if you want to make money online, you need to learn how to sell. This is the art of asking for the order. You have to do it, but if you want to survive, you need to learn how to do it well. Do it poorly, and you’ll be a schmuck. Do it well, and well…the results are like magic.

Lessons from the Trenches

When I was doing sales training for door to door sales professionals, I would take trainees in a home with me to watch me do product demonstrations. Watching the real thing is the best way to learn. I would go into a home and put on a huge demo for the homeowners. I was Richard Simmons. I was Billy Mays. The homeowners and I connected; we were laughing together, shaking hands…we were best friends by the time I was done. And when we left the home with an order, I would ask the new salesperson what they thought, if they learned anything about how to sell. Seeing as how they just watched a sale made, it stands to reason that maybe they learned something, wouldn’t you say?

Often, the response from the person I was training would be something like “Well, I don’t feel like you really sold them anything. They just bought it. You showed it to them, and they bought it. I didn’t learn how to sell.” And therein lies the lesson. Good salesmanship is not forced or uncomfortable. It’s friendly, genuine and to be perfectly honest…a lot of damn fun.

Most people think selling is manipulative and underhanded. The fact is that the only time sales fits that description is when the salesperson is manipulative and underhanded. Unfortunately, it happens a lot, and the misconception of all salesman being sleazy is understandable, but it’s just not accurate.

Good selling is honest, transparent and helpful. No one has a problem solving one of their own problems for an affordable and reasonable price. What people don’t want is to be manipulated or duped. So if you don’t want to come off as sleazy…it’s easy; just don’t be a sleaze! And if you don’t want to come off as manipulative, don’t manipulate people.

Is it really as simple as that? Yes, actually.

So how do you make a sale without being manipulative?

Follow these steps:

Meet with qualified prospects
Discuss the prospect’s problems in detail
Have the prospect decide for themselves which of your solutions works best for them

Let me elaborate a bit…

Meet With Qualified Prospects

There is something about blogging that I find fundamentally beautiful. It is the fact that by it’s very design, it attracts qualified prospects. Think about how someone comes to visit your blog. Perhaps they found you in Google while searching for information they need. Maybe they follow a link that they believe will take them to information they want. Perhaps they received an email from a friend saying “hey check out this article”. In nearly all cases, a visitor is on the pages of your blog for one reason…because they’re actually interested in what you’re selling.

That does not mean that you don’t need to be good. You do. Your content needs to rock. And what you sell has to be top notch, because people can sniff out crap from a mile away these days. But if you’re the real deal, and you have something of actual value to offer your readers, blogging automatically attracts the right people to you. This takes care of step one automatically. By blogging, you’re already meeting with qualified prospects.

Discuss the Prospect’s Problems in Detail

If you’re trying to be helpful, what do you do? You meet people at their level. Discuss their problems. This is how people are going to find your blog to begin with. They have a problem. They are going to specifically look for someone talking about that problem in the hopes they can find a solution. This is simply how it works. So, talk about their problems.

This is where real expertise comes in. You have to actually know your business. If you’re just doing something to make some cash, it ALWAYS comes through in your content. However if you really know your subject, and if you really do have a valuable solution for people, you will have no problem writing at length about the problems that your product or service can solve.

Don’t talk about yourself or your product. Talk about your prospect and the problems they face.

Case in point: have you been reading this post this whole time thinking “man this guy is such a sleaze; he’s just trying to sell me on why I should hire him as a consultant, to help me take my business to the next level by improving my sales and marketing tactics online”?

If you’ve read this far, I’d wager that’s not what’s on your mind! You’re most likely reading the post because it connects with an issue you’re having. Why in the world would you be reading this post if you weren’t interested in learning how to make more money online or market your business more effectively on the internet? And as luck would have it…if you happen to want a more personalized and one-on-one solution for your business, I can help you with that. Big coincidence, huh? 😉

Have the Prospect Decide for Themselves Which of Your Solutions Works Best for Them

Online, asking for the order is simple. All you have to do is make your solutions easily available. By focusing on the prospect’s problems, you’ve drawn them in. You’ve attracted qualified and interested visitors. And now, consider why they’re there. To solve a problem, correct? And your entire page happens to be filled with links and additional resources that they can explore. All of which solve their problem, and all of which add to your bottom line.

Perhaps your article is all they needed for right now. Or perhaps they’re not quite ready to purchase anything just yet. That’s totally fine. That’s why you give them many opportunities to easily subscribe. And that’s why you offer enticements and invitations to revisit your blog regularly. And that’s why you keep your content coming regularly. And that’s why you keep the quality high. If you know your stuff, and if you continue to connect with them, at some point one of your solutions will connect with them as well.

I just wrote recently about how we’re all salespeople, whether we think so or not. This begs the question: if embracing the fact that we need to sell things in order to really make money online is necessary, why are so many of us wary of asking for money from our readers?

This is an essential issue to address, for the simple fact that if you DON’T ask for what you want, you will not likely get what you want. We all understand this concept, but many of us are still bashful about asking for people to buy things from us. Asking someone for money is tough, it feels to us as if we’re violating or somehow cheapening the relationship we have with our readers.

Are You Ashamed to Ask for Money?

Sometimes we feel ashamed of asking for money, because deep down we feel that salesmen are sleazy. Is selling on your blog sleazy? I hope to answer this in this post, but ultimately this is going to be a personal decision. But know this: if you don’t sell stuff, you’re not likely to ever make much money in anything you do. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing…money isn’t everything. Believe me, I understand this. I’ve turned down several high paying jobs that would have required way too much of my time.

Turning down a job that pays well over a hundred thousand a year is not something a young me would have done. But you learn eventually that money isn’t everything…so I get it.

But this doesn’t mean selling is sleazy! Being sleazy is sleazy. But to say that all salesmanship is sleazy is a blanket statement that we all know is not true. Not if we’re being honest. So, that’s the answer I have for you:

Is selling on your blog sleazy? Yes, if you’re a sleaze. For the rest of us, it’s an honest and absolutely essential business practice.

How to Get What You Want

What does this mean for those of us who really want to make money online? How do we take our business and really promote it effectively through internet marketing, social networking and blogging? Here’s how:

We have to know with absolute clarity what we want. Then we need to ask our readers to give it to us.

This is all there is. Blogging is simple! It’s just work. If we create a LOT of value for our readers, we have every right to ask for money. Not all will. It’s cool. You’ll never have a 100% closing ratio, but you don’t need one. Many internet marketers make good money from a closing ratio hovering around 5%. Personally, I think you should expect way better results than that. But I digress…the point is that you don’t need EVERYONE to give you money, you just need some people to give you money. But if you don’t ask you don’t get.

Lesson from the Trenches

How to create huge value for your readers? This is a great topic for future posts, but let me give you a quick story from my direct sales years for now. I used to sell Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. You learn a lot about building value by selling door to door. I’m asking people who haven’t met me 15 minutes ago to spend $1500 on a vacuum cleaner that didn’t think they needed before I walked in.

After my demonstration, I always asked people what they thought the price tag was, and most of them told me they were expecting a price tag of over $3000. So when I told them it was $1500, they were visibly relieved. You could actually seem them relax into their seat when I gave them the order form.

How do you do this? I will get into the fine details as I continue to develop this blog, but for now I just wanted to give you the basic concept…if you want to ask someone for $1500, you better give them $3000 in value. If you want to have someone buy your ebook for $47, you better be able to show them definitively, in terms they understand, why it’s worth a lot more…that’s the concept.

Give people a deal. It’s more work for you, but it’s a better deal for your customers, and that’s how you make money. You make money by creating value for others.