Most people have a pretty clear image when they think of sales and, let’s be honest, it’s usually not flattering. The first thing that jumps to mind is lying used car salesmen or door to door people who somehow talk you into buying 3 vacuums for your 1500 sq ft home. The reality though, is all of us are in sales. It looks different sure, but most of us make money by providing something for someone else. This means that we have to first, find and convince people that they need the thing. Next we have to determine exactly what they expect and what we expect. And finally, deliver as promised. All three of these things are essentially sales and for the next few weeks we’re going to dive into each one.
Finding people for our products is probably the biggest hurdle. People who are much smarter than I am have written copious books about it and it’s so specific to your product or service it’s hard to touch on in a blog post. The two key considerations are: what are you selling and who is buying it? When you’re new, this can be tricky. Maybe you want to sell dog walking but you think adding a nail trim option would help your profit margins. It might. Or it might mean you spend half an hr chasing a dog around the house to only clip one nail and not end up charging for it anyway. Your offerings may change and that’s OK but when you’re selling, you need to know what you can do and what you can’t. This is true on a larger scale too. Let’s say you build tiny homes and you have sales people to talk people through options. You have a couple easy options like, color of siding, color of roof, and a couple different floor plans. Someone asks you to change the color of counter tops. Can you do that? Your salesperson needs to know if it’s even possible. Even more importantly, how long will that take and how much will it cost. Not just in material but in time. Maybe you’re company does everything custom so no big deal. But if your company has a couple different modules it puts together that’s a different story. Getting the sale at all costs is usually not the right answer. It’s important to know if you can provide what the customer needs first.
Once you know your product, you have to find the people. So whose buying this product? If we go back to our tiny homes example, how do we figure it out? Well, probably the first step would be to join a couple social media groups for people who love tiny homes. Listen to what they like and don’t like. Take note of roughly what age they are, what do they do for a living? Why do they like tiny homes? Once you have that you can start generating a profile for the kinds of people who like tiny homes. Everything from basic demographics like age and income all the way down to, what kind of pets do they have? Do they have children? What’s really important to them? You can of course start talking up your tiny homes in those groups but to be successful you probably need to go further. Are there tiny home conventions? Where do these people shop? Could you park a tiny home there and talk to people? Could you go to a farmers market and let people come in and out? Does your tiny home model have an instagram page where people can see where you’re at? Maybe you hand out some goodies to people who take a tour. You have to start somewhere. It’s always daunting but the worst thing you can do when you’re looking for buyers, is nothing.
Come back next week for our second installment on selling: Here’s Why You Should Buy My Stuff