Day: October 13, 2018

Stop Selling and Start Helping

Stop Selling and Start Helping

Zig Ziglar frequently told his audiences and students to stop selling and start helping. This is great advice. This is one of the critical steps of becoming a Trapper as opposed to one of the traditional salespeople: a Farmer, a Hunter, or a Gatherer.

I spend a lot of time in my book talking about starting the sales process early in the sales cycle. You cannot just show up at the last minute, make your pitch, and then expect to win. Sure, that scenario happens but it also ends in defeat more times than not.

In my book, Eliminate Your Competition, I discuss the decision-making process. Since all buying is merely making a decision and all selling is just influencing a decision, it is critical that you understand how a typical organization makes decisions. It is even more critical that you understand how your prospect makes decisions.

You may purchase my book Eliminate Your Competition from your favorite book retailer. The ebook version is available at the most popular retailers such as Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. The paperback version is also widely available at such retailers as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million.

When you are spending time with a prospect early in their decision-making process, you aren’t asking them for an order. Your prospect is not ready to buy so asking for a rush to the decision is merely a waste of your time. If you conclude that they are not prepared and walk away until they are ready, they will learn about the capabilities of the products in your space from others and not from you.

So it is essential that you help the raw prospect learn about your product and your industry. It is much better to help the prospect through that process and be patient with the evolution of their thought processes. It would help if you created standard documents, reports, and white papers to help the buyer become more informed about your product. You want these to be readily available for the customer because you don’t want to work at the education too hard. Essentially, you need to map out the key elements that all of your customers and prospects need to know and send this information to them over time. Think of this plan as a weekly lesson on your marketplace – every week you send prospects that are interested, but not quite ready to buy, a new lesson.

You also want to teach prospects that don’t even know they are prospects yet. People that you think will eventually need your product, but today they just haven’t acknowledged that they have a problem that you can solve. To do this, you need to show up and see them on a regular basis, not to sell them but instead to offer your assistance. What can you do for them today? You also need to send them a regular newsletter on your industry that makes them more intelligent about what is going on. This newsletter isn’t to sell them, but instead, it is to help them become more intelligent. As Zig famously said, “Stop selling and start helping.”

Header Photo by madsmith33 (Pixabay)